Page:The Zoologist, 1st series, vol 1 (1843).djvu/125

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merry, courageous, little birds are common within a few r miles of London. I have found them in abundance in the reed-beds on the banks of the Thames, between Erith and Greenwich.

In seeking them you must not be afraid of labour in pushing your way through reeds; you must likewise take care to get as firm a footing as possible, for many of these places are very treacherous, and I have more than once suddenly sunk with one leg into a deep hole, and have had some difficulty in extricating myself. When hunting in such places, I generally have a stout hedge-stake or clothes-prop to try the soundings with. From the time that the reeds are half grown until the latter end of July, these birds frequent them in abundance, and their nests with eggs or young may be readily found: I have taken the young as late as the 13th of August. They continue about the reeds until the middle or end of this month, when I believe they migrate, with the exception of an occasional late-hatched bird.

The food of the reed-warbler principally consists of small spiralshaped shell-snails, which occur in great plenty in reed-beds, often completely covering the lower part of the reed-stems; they also eat beetles, and a variety of small insects.

In ditches, where reeds grow thickly, and the sides have plenty of stunted thorn-bushes intermixed with brambles and rank grass, the reed and sedge-warblers are close and sociable neighbours, and I have frequently found the nests of both species within half-a-dozen yards of each other. The reed-warbler's nest is suspended from the stems of the reeds, although the outer branches of the thorn-bushes are often entangled with them. The sedge -warbler's nest is always fixed in the low thorn-bushes, and out of many dozens that I have found, I have never met with one fixed to the reeds, unless a stray stem, growing through the bushes, has now and then been as it were accidentally intertwined, from its being placed on an outer branch, but even this very rarely happens. In other places where reeds have been scarce and not sufficiently thick to hide the nest, by the side of ditches and near gardens, I have found the nest of the reed-bird placed in closely -branched elder-trees.

The nest of the reed-warbler is often elegantly built, and generally fixed to three or four reed-stems. It is composed of slender blades