BIRDS OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE. 
99 
“Far and near 
In wood and thicket, over the wide grove 
They answer and provoke each other’s songs 
With skirmish and capricious passagings 
And murmurs musical, and swift • jug, jug,’ 
And one low piping sound more sweet than all 
Stirring the air with such an harmony 
That should you close your eyes you might, almost 
Forget it was not day.’’ 
Their rivalry is not confined to trying to out-sing one another 
for however heavenly their song may be they are by no means of 
a celestial disposition, but are, on the contrary, very jealous birds 
and one pair will not suffer another pair to be in their neighbour¬ 
hood, but the stronger couple will harass the weaker until they 
have driven the interlopers away. They will not suffer even their 
own young ones to be in the vicinity but drive them away from 
the neighbourhood of the nest as soon as they are fully fledged. 
All the eggs I have taken have been from deserted nests (for 
nightingales will abandon their homes on the smallest provoca¬ 
tion). There has not been much variation in their colour ; most 
have been olive biown with a greenish tint when fresh, but some 
have occurred with green mottlings and others tinged with grey¬ 
ish blue but I have not found these tints stable and mine have 
always turned olive brown after they have been some time in the 
drawer. 
The Wood Warbler (Phylloscopus sibilatrix) is occasionally 
seen in such places as Madingley Wood, Horningsee, and near 
Dullingham, but it is not so common as 
The Willow Warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus) which I find 
numerous everywhere where I go in the county. It is a summer 
migrant and I see it generally about the first week in April but 
this year I saw a pair in Stuntney Fen on the 29th of March. I 
have seen varieties in which the normal olive-green of the back 
is replaced by pale lemon, almost white. The nest is often made 
in a bank by the side of a stream where the grass and rushes are 
growing up tall and rank. The eggs vary very much in the num¬ 
ber of the red dots and the method of their arrangement and 
occasionally the spots are absent altogether and the eggs pure 
white. In some specimens the dots coalesce together, chiefly at 
the larger end, so as to form large dots. 
The chiff-chaff (Phylloscopus rufus) is likewise a summer visit¬ 
ant. I saw it this year in a wood near Dullingham on the 21st 
of March, but it generally comes a week later. The eggs are 
somewhat like those of the willow warbler but have purple-brown 
dots instead of red ones. Rarely they are found pure white and 
unspotted. 
(To he continued). 
