The grasshopper-lark began his sibilous note in my fields last Saturday. Nothing can be more amusing

boughs, as the golden wren does. I have never been able to meet with it in Yorkshire. The last live specimen I saw, was on a large cedar tree on the lawn in the garden of Highclere House in Hampshire at Whitsuntide in 1828 or 1829. It did not seem disposed to quit the tree, but repeated frequently its remarkable and articulate notes. I sought in vain on the ground for its nest, and it did not then occur to me to search the cedar tree, which indeed would not have been easily accomplished. Mr. Sweet in his article Sylv. Hippolais, gives an account of a Sylv. loquax which he kept in confinement, confounding it with the former of the two species; and it does not appear whether the figure he gives was taken from an English or a foreign specimen: but it is incorrect at all events, and does not truly represent any one of the allied species. I examined carefully a dead specimen of Sylv. loquax, which Mr. Sweet had kept in a cage the previous autumn and winter. It was a male bird, and had been caught in a net, and frequently articulated its chiff chaff, chivvy chaffy, while in confinement. It measured at full stretch but four inches from the tip of the bill to the extremity of the tail, having much resemblance to the female of the Sylv. Trochilus, which is always smaller and browner than the cock. Sylv. loquax has no yellow about it; there is no line over the eye; the colour is a uniform greenish brown, paler on the breast and belly. The tail-feathers and quill-feathers of the wings are dusky, edged with greenish brown; the legs are dusky, by which it may at all times be distinguished from the small hen Sylv. Trochilus. The bill, measuring from the forehead, is only five-sixteenths of an inch long, the under mandible and edges yellow, the upper part of the upper mandible brown. Its shape is slender. The second (considering the small abortive feather to be the first) quill-feather is a quarter of an inch shorter than the third, but is longer than the seventh, the third, fourth, and fifth almost of equal length. Another specimen since communicated to me by Mr. Bennett, agrees in every respect with Mr. Sweet's bird, except that it has a little tinge of yellow, being probably a young bird.

QUILL-FEATHERS OF THE CHIFF CHAFF.

The outlines which I have made with minute exactness of the outer part of the wing of each of these species, as well as of the pouillot of M. Temminck (which not being Hippolais, I propose to call Sylv. Temmincki), will render it easy to distinguish them. The quill-feathers of Sylv. rufa are more pointed than those of loquax, and the whole bird longer. Sylv. Nattereri, a species observed in Spain and Italy, is closely

than the whisper of this little bird, which seems to be close by, though at a hundred yards distance; and, when close at your ear, is scarce any louder than when a great way off. Had I not been a little acquainted with insects, and known that the grasshopper kind is not yet hatched, I should have hardly believed but that it had been a Locusta whispering in the bushes. The country people laugh when you tell them that it is the note of a bird. It is a most artful creature, sculking in the thickest part of a bush; and will sing at a yard distance, provided it be concealed. I was obliged to get a person to go on the other side of the hedge where it haunted; and then it would run, creeping like a mouse, before us for a hundred yards together, through

allied to those which visit our island, but has never been found further north.

Nest of an unknown Warbler.-Two years ago I perceived in the fork of a young willow, by the side of the brook Crimple, very near my house at Spofforth, a nest with one egg in it. I did not touch it, expecting that the bird to which the nest belonged would continue laying, but it was deserted, and I could never discover the birds which constructed it. A nest of the sedge warbler, Sylvia Phragmitis, was placed in a situation exactly similar about twenty yards from it; but the deserted nest differed in being much deeper, and constructed with many feathers of the barndoor cock, and the egg was longer and more acute than those of the sedge warbler, and entirely free from spots, being of the same colour as the ground of the sedge birds without the markings. The purselike depth of the nest would agree with the form of the nest of Sylv. arundinacea, the reed warbler, which I have not been able to discover in Yorkshire, but all the accounts of that bird represent its eggs to be spotted. It was certainly the nest of some aquatic warbler, but of all the species whose propagation has been ascertained the eggs appear to be spotted. I find no account of the eggs of Sylv. Cetti, the bouscarle of the French, of which Temminck states, without quoting his authority, that some individuals have been killed in England, and that it is apt to be confounded with the reed warbler. The bouscarle is however said to

the bottom of the thorns; yet it would not come into fair sight: but in a morning early, and when undisturbed, it sings on the top of a twig, gaping and shivering with its wings. Mr. Ray himself had no knowledge of this bird, but received his account from Mr. Johnson, who apparently confounds it with the Reguli non cristati, from which it it is very distinct. See Ray's Philosophical Letters, p. 1082.

The flycatcher (Stoparola) has not yet appeared: it usually breeds in my vine.

frequent thorn bushes by the side of rivers, and Sylv. Turdoïdes, common in Holland, and Sylv. aquatica which is closely allied to Sylv. Phragmitis, have both spotted eggs. I know not therefore to what species I can refer the nest and egg which is in my possession.-W. H.

2 This bird is not uncommon in Scotland, where its singular note is popularly supposed to be caused by a species of rattlesnake, the concealed habits of the bird rendering it seldom seen. Although I have times innumerable listened to it, I have rarely seen it; and only once actually got within a very short distance of one which was perched on the top of a furze bush in Musselburgh Haugh, near Edinburgh, trilling its notes and shivering its wings, as White describes. In Ayrshire I have heard it long after sunset; though I should scarcely be disposed to apply to it the term whisper, for it may be heard at the distance of a quarter of a mile.-RENNIE.

The redstart begins to sing: its note is short and imperfect, but is continued till about the middle of June.

The willow wrens (the smaller sort) are horrid pests in a garden, destroying the pease, cherries, currants, &c. 3; and are so tame that a gun will not scare them.

3 This sentence has probably been the cause of the murder of numbers of these most innocent little birds, which are in truth peculiarly the gardener's friends. My garden men were in the habit of catching the hens on their nests in the strawberry beds, and killing them, under the impression that they made great ravage among the cherries; yet I can assert that they never taste the fruit, nor can those which are reared from the nest in confinement be induced to touch it. They peck the Aphides which are injurious to the fruit trees, and being very pugnacious little birds, I have sometimes seen them take post in a cherry tree and drive away every bird that attempted to enter it, though of greater size and strength.

The birds which are mistaken for them are the young of the garden warbler, Curruca hortensis, BECHST. with which Mr. White was not acquainted, as it is not mentioned by him, and does not appear in his list of summer birds: yet I am confident that they will be found plentifully at Selborne, when the Kentish cherries are ripe. They attacked my cherries in great numbers when I lived in the south of Berkshire, not much more than twenty miles from Selborne. These young birds have a strong tinge of yellow on the sides, which disappears after the moult, and gives them very much the appearance of the yellow wren when seen upon the tree, though they are larger and stouter, and in habits very much resemble the black caps, with whom they are associated in the plunder of cherry trees. I have never seen the petty chaps in Yorkshire until the cherries are ripe, when they immediately make their appearance and attack the Kentish cherry particularly, being so greedy that I have often taken them with a fishing rod tipped with birdlime while they were pulling at the fruit. The moment they have finished the last Kentish cherry they disappear for the season. If they finish the cherries in the morning, they are gone before noon. I am persuaded that they appear and disappear in the same manner at Selborne, and are probably to be found there only while the cherries are ripe, which accounts for Mr. White's having mistaken them for yellow wrens when he saw them in the fruit trees. They breed in the market gardens about London, and I imagine that as the cherries ripen they migrate from garden to garden in pursuit of them. I am told that near London they remain late enough to attack the elder berries, of which the fruit-eating warblers are very fond, but in Yorkshire they do not even wait for the later cherries. The number of these visitants depends upon the crop of early cherries. This year the crop having nearly failed, I saw but two of them, which appeared on the 15th of July and were not seen after the 17th. The blackcap remains eating the currants and honeysuckle berries; they are

A List of the Summer Birds of Passage discovered in this Neighbourhood, ranged somewhat in the Order in which they appear:

both very fond in confinement of ripe pears, and I believe, in the south of England, they peck some of them before their departure.

Vieillot states that the garden warbler is not found in the neighbourhood of Paris, though it occurs in Piedmont and Provence, where it frequents the vicinity of pine forests. I am persuaded that this is entirely erroneous. That bird is abundant in the gardens round London, where it breeds and where I have seen the nest and young birds. I have never known it breed in the northern counties of England, where its visits are of short duration while the supply of ripe cherries lasts. In confinement it appears much more tender of cold than the blackcap and whitethroat, and there is some difficulty in saving it through a severe winter. It is therefore evident that it prefers the more southern latitudes, and as it is a frequenter of fruit gardens and not of uncultivated wastes, and

Mr. White does not seem to have had any reason for putting the Latin name Motacilla Trochilus to three distinct birds. There is no cause for believing that Linnæus confounded them, though he only named one of them and overlooked the others. Indeed the wood wren could not be confounded with the yellow wren by any person of the least discrimination.-W. H.