494 
PERCHING BIRDS. 
down or the flower of the cotton-grass. . . . The ground-colour of the eggs of the 
orphean warbler is white, sometimes faintly tinted with grey and sometimes tinted 
with brown. . . . The colour of the overlying spots varies from olive-brown to 
nearly black.” The orphean warbler is a large form of the blackcap, and decidedly 
more elegant in shape than that species. The adult male has the crown sooty 
black; the general colour of the upper-parts is dull slate-grey; the wings and tail 
are brown, and the under-parts white shading into grey upon the breast and flanks. 
RUFOUS AND ORPHEAN WARBLERS liat. size). 
Garden Warbler. 
A more skulking species than the last is the garden-warbler 
(S. salicaria), which arrives in its summer haunts in Europe about 
the same date as the blackcap. It is rather a retiring bird, and is consequently often 
overlooked. It has a sweet song, generally poured forth from the centre of some 
thick bush or other cover ; its nest is of dry stems and moss, lined with fibres and 
a few hairs; its eggs are greenish white blotched with grey and olive-brown. The 
garden-warbler is partial to fruit, but we have not seen it strip the berries from 
the elder-bushes in the same way as the blackcap. The adult male has the upper- 
parts olive-brown, darker and greyer on the wings and tail; and the under-parts 
greyish white. 
, Among the sweetest songsters that visit the gardens and shrub- 
Blackcap. . A 5 *=> . ® . . 
benes of Europe is this slim and attractive species (S. atricajnlla), 
which arrives in the British Isles in April, and at once takes up its abode in 
