THE MISSEL-THRUSH. 
77 
pens to lie a colony near, is the jack -daw, which 
gains by perseverance what the others fail to ob- 
tain by force. We have seen four or five of these 
birds . assail the parent thrushes, and while some 
made the attack, the others deliberately plundered 
the nest. During the contest, the cries of the 
thrushes are loud and incessant, and at once tell 
that some depredator is near. The nest is placed 
almost always in the cleft of a tree, or close to the 
bole ; at times wc^Jiave seen it near the summit, 
at other times, placed so low that we could look 
into it from the ground, and it is very frequently 
built on the fruit trees of a garden or orchard. 
The foundation of the nest is laid with slender 
twigs, or stalks of grass, and when the fabric is 
reared, the outside is patched over with pieces of , 
lichen, apparently generally taken from the tree 
on which it is built, certainly never of a very 
opposite character from those which grow around, 
and thus they serve as an excellent blind against 
detection. The eggs are from four to six in num- 
ber, of a green or blueish white, spotted and 
blotched with reddish brown. When the duties 
of incubation are concluded, the broods with the 
old birds keep together, and towards the com- 
mencement of winter, sometimes collect in flocks 
of from twenty to thirty, feeding on the wild ber- 
ries which are at this time nearly ripe. They 
soon, however, seem to disperse again, and during 
the whole of the winter may be seen in parties of 
five or six, or in pairs, feeding sometimes on the 
wild fruits, and at others selecting the low mea- 
