69 
A kingfisher’s hole can always be distinguished by its pungent 
odour of fish. Young kingfishers are positively hideous when their 
feathers first begin to grow, looking more like porcupines than birds, 
but by the time they emerge from their nest the repulsiveness has 
disappeared. 
Linnet (Pages 15 and 16). — The linnet, or brown linnet as it is 
usually called, makes the most popular cage-bird of all our British 
wild birds. During the autumn and winter countless thousands are 
netted and trapped to be retailed to fanciers, who prize them for 
crossing with canaries. This sweet little songster, in its brown dress 
pencilled with black, in the breeding-season has a faint pink che.st. 
It is resident with us and very common, and is to be found breeding 
throughout the country. Wherever gorse, whins or heather abound 
there too will be found the linnet, building its neat little nest with 
roots, hair, wool and down, to receive its four to six pale blue eggs, 
spotted and speckled with dull red. The favourite site for the nest 
is the centre of a large, solitary, dense gorse-bush, growing on 
moorland or waste ground. The bird is a close sitter, and will not 
leave the nest until the bush has been repeatedly struck. 
Magpie (Pages 20-22). — The magpie is resident and very common. 
Single pairs are to be found breeding throughout the country, 
except in the immediate vicinity of towns and game-preserves. 
It is a born thief and will steal for the sake of stealing, often 
hiding bits of food in crevices in trees or under stones. It is such 
a notorious poacher that its presence is never tolerated within the 
range of the gamekeeper's gun. The magpie has a black head and 
shoulders and glossy greenish-black tail and wings, the shoulders 
and chest being barred with white. 
Magpies, like all the crows, will eat almost anything, thus 
they need never go hungry. They have a peculiar habit of running 
about the ground when feeding in pairs with the head low down and 
the long tail sticking up in the air. They run a few steps then jerk 
their body up and down, at the same time flicking the tail and 
uttering their “laughing call.'* 
In flight the magpie always appears to be in difficulties ; its having 
comparatively small wings and a very long tail, gives one the impres- 
sion that the bird is utterly exhausted with having to pull such a 
long heavy tail behind it The magpie builds a large nest of sticks 
in the topmost branches of trees, either on the edge of plantations or 
in a solitary tree close to an isolated farm-house. 
In some districts where trees are scarce the nests are built in thick 
hawthorn hedges, but always well concealed. The nest itself is 
a well-made structure of stout sticks firmly woven together and lined 
with mud, and when the mud has had time to dry it is again lined 
with roots and fibres and in addition a dome or shield of thorns 
is built over the top for protection, only a small hole being left at one 
side for entrance, which makes it exceedingly difficult to rob this 
nest. Usually four eggs, although at times more, are laid, of a 
pale-green ground very closely spotted all over with olive-brown or 
dark-grey to almost hide the ground-colour. They vary' very much 
in colour and size. 
There is an old fable which says that the magpies undertook to 
teach other birds how to build their nests, but that they never took 
time to finish their lesson, hence the roof on the magpie’s nest only. 
