NESTS AND EGGS. 
with, leaves and mosses, and flattened patches of mud, between 
three and four inches thick, with a lining of grass and a 
few large feathers ; the month firmly constructed of interwoven 
panicles of hair or grass, mingled with twigs, root-fibres, and 
wool. In this nest the missel-thrush generally lays three to 
five eggs, of an oblong-ovate form, an inch and a quarter long, 
by a little over three-quarters thick (fig. 26), of a purplish-white 
or flesh colour, marked with blotches of light brown and ob- 
scure purplish red. 
The song-thrush and blackbird both abound in plantations 
of this description ; but neither of them confine themselves to 
the woods, — a hedgerow or rough bank with moss, or the roots 
of a hedge, even a hole in a wall or the crevices of a rock, being 
selected, occasionally, in localities where there are no plantations. 
The Thrush’s nest, which is bulky, is composed externally of 
various kinds of grasses and long tough roots of various plants, 
tufts of poa and stellaria, mosses, and other substances. Within 
this is a more elaborate structure of fibrous roots, tufts of 
straws, and beeeh leaves, interwoven with clay, or some other 
binding substance, the whole lined or plastered with a thin 
compact lining of some substance, supposed to be horse-dung, 
on the surface of which is a coating of chips of straw and 
slender grasses. The eggs (fig. 31) vary from four to six, of a 
broadly ovate shape, and of a bright bluish green, with scat- 
tered blackish-brown spots, more thickly placed towards the 
larger end, measuring about an inch and a sixth in length by 
ten and a half lines thick. 
The nest of the Blackbird is scarcely to be distinguished from 
that of the thrush, and the locality is nearly the same. The 
eggs (fig. 32) are also from four to six, of a bluish or grey green, 
freckled with pale umber -looking or reddish-brown markings, 
denser towards the thick extremity, where the spots some- 
times form a sort of ring, slightly longer than the eggs of the 
thrush, but of the same thickness. 
The Fieldfare is found in these plantations in great num- 
bers in the season ; but they do not breed with us. In a paper in 
the Magazine of Botany and Zoology, on “ Birds of Norway,” 
Mr. Hewitson describes them as breeding by hundreds in a 
very limited space, the nest being placed in the forks of spruce 
firs, some forty or fifty feet from the ground, the eggs (fig. 29) 
much resembling those of the blackbird, and being five and 
six in number. 
The Kedwing closely resembles the fieldfare in many of its 
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