INCIDENTS IN HAMPSHIRE BIRD-LIFE. 1 1 1 
the blues ; tlie parents then teach these young ones (five in eacli 
brood, the last two years) to feed themselves from some of the 
same sort of dainties they themselves enjoyed during the winter. 
The cole-tits, who seem to care only for fat, are here all through 
the winter, but come only occasionally in the summer. The 
marsh comes seldom in the summer, and then only one, the 
male bird, and this is the more curious to me, as during the 
winter he is the most tame of all our feathered friends, so tame, 
in fact, that he will allow us to fasten food on the same cane 
that he is perched on. One day last winter a nuthatch arrived 
and surveyed the feast of good things, and knowing his liking 
for nuts we placed some, uncracked, in one of the empty coco- 
nuts. Soon we were rewarded by the handsome fellow coming 
for them and carrying them away to fix into the rough bark of a 
neighbouring Scotch fir where he would soon crack it with his 
strong beak and get the kernel out. The male blue-tit seemed 
much exercised in his mind and watched with great curiosity 
the movements of the nuthatch ; then during the latter’s absence 
his antics highly amused us; he danced excitedly round the rim 
of the coco-nut, then down into the nuts — small hazel nuts — 
and finally seized one in his tiny beak and flew off with it. He 
took it safely for some yards across the lawn when he dropped 
it and returned for another, this he took to a laburnum tree 
opposite the window ; here his power of imitation ceased, and we 
supposed he considered he had achieved a sufficient success, for 
we never saw him attempt it again. 
1 was particularly struck this spring by the careless way in 
which the birds built in our garden ; they appeared to take no 
trouble to hide their nests, whether from the fact that the spring 
was early and fine, or because they had confidence in their 
human friends, I cannot say. One of greenfinches was so lightly 
fixed in a lignum vitae, that unless I had tied it into the branches 
before the young birds attained any size it must have over- 
balanced ; a. blackbird’s was so placed in a pine that we visited 
the hen daily whilst she was sitting and stroked the young ones 
when hatched ; a pair of spotted flycatchers brought out four 
young ones from a nest in a Gloire de Dijon rose tree over the 
porch of the front door. A curious thing about this w’as that 
when I first saw them bringing materials for building I mistook 
them for a pair of greenfinches whose nest close by had been 
rifled ; I took this nest and placed it in the rose tree, when 
without any demur the flycatchers took to it with the aforesaid 
results. 
We keep cats but they never molest our tame wild birds ; the 
birds on their part become a little anxious when pussy is about, 
but I have only to go out when I hear their unmistakable cry 
of fear and take the aggressor in my arms, when peace is restored 
and feeding resumed, although I may be only a few feet distant 
from the window'. 
This is a most interesting neighbourhood for birds, and here 
