4X0 
PERCHING BIRDS. 
fields, where it utters its short mechanical song from a clod of earth, a clump of 
dockweed, or the coping of some stone wall or turf dyke. Although Mr. Dresser 
asserts that the corn-bunting, as this species is often termed, is seen only in pairs 
during the breeding-season, we have seen as many as a hundred of these birds 
flying together at the end of May, and can vouch for their associating together in 
numbers even in the nesting-time. Sometimes they roost upon the ground like 
skylarks, but we have known them roost habitually in a fir-plantation. They feed 
partially on insects, but in autumn and mid-winter they appear to subsist almost 
entirely on grain. The nest of the common bunting is a loose structure, built 
ORTOLAN BUNTING AND BLACK-HEADED BUNTING (f Hat. size). 
upon the ground in a tuft of rough herbage, and constructed of dry grass bents 
and pieces of moss, lined with finer stems of grass and sometimes a little hair. 
The eggs vary greatly in coloration, being either white or buff in ground-colour, 
blotched and streaked with purplish brown, grey, and pale brown. Not unfre- 
quently the common bunting assumes a white or cream-coloured plumage; one 
shot a few years ago being as yellow as a canary. The usual colour is dull brown 
above, streaked with darker brown; the under-parts being bufly white, and the 
breast and flanks streaked with black. 
Black-Headed South-Eastern Europe is the home of the handsome black-headed 
Bunting. bunting (E. melanocephala ), which but rarely strays into Western 
Europe, though it has been obtained repeatedly upon the island of Heligoland, and 
