Q2 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
bushes and covert; but in July and August they bring their 
broods into gardens and orchards, and make great havoc 
among the summer fruits. 
The black-cap has in common a full, sweet, deep, loud, and - 
wild pipe; yet that strain is of short continuance, and his 
motions are desultory; but when that bird sits calmly and 
engages in song in earnest, he pours forth very sweet, but 
inward melody, and expresses great variety of soft and gentle 
modulations, superior perhaps to those of any of our warblers, 
the nightingale excepted. 
Black-caps mostly haunt orchards and gardens; while they 
warble their throats are wonderfully distended. 
The song of the redstart is superior, though somewhat like 
that of the white-throat; some birds have a few more notes than 
others. Sitting very placidly on the top of a tall tree in a village, 
the male sings from morning to night ; he affects neighborhoods, 
and avoids solitude, and loves to build in orchards and about 
houses; with us he perches on the vane of a tall maypole. 
The fly-catcher is, of all our summer birds, the most mute 
and the most familiar; it also appears the last of any. It builds 
in a vine, or a sweetbriar, against the wall of a house, or in the 
hole of a wall, or on the end of a beam or plate, and often 
close to the post of a door where people are going in and out 
all day long. ‘This bird does not make the least pretension to 
song, but uses a little inward wailing note when it thinks its 
young in danger from cats or other annoyances; it breeds but 
once, and retires early. 
Selborne parish alone can and has exhibited at times more 
than half the birds that are ever seen in all Sweden; the former 
has produced more than one hundred and twenty species, the 
latter only two hundred and twenty-one. Let me add also that 
it has shown near half the species that were ever known in 
Great Britain.? 
1 Sweden 221, Great Britain 252 species. — W. 
