Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 2 (1898).djvu/389

Rh one in 1893, which is now in the Oxford Museum; and on the 21st I found another, containing one egg, in the identical spot almost to a square yard where I found one in 1895 (June 26th). This close adherence to the same site year after year has also been noticed by my friend Mr. Playne near Bristol. The same day a young friend from Oxford, whom I had invited to study the bird, discovered a third nest with four eggs in a new site. This was a little further from the edge of the osier-bed than has so far been the case; but my experience entirely confirms Mr. Seebohm's statement (or rather that of his German informant) that it is almost useless to look for the nest in the centre of any dense thicket. All the eggs were very characteristic, of a clear greenish or bluish white ground colour; but the spots and blotches were somewhat larger and more numerous in one clutch than in the others. On the 25th Mr. O.V. Aplin came to look at these three nests, and we had the pleasure of a leisurely inspection of the sitting bird in two cases out of the three. Looked at from a yard or so away, the colour of the back is a light uniform neutral brown, with a shade of olive, and the eye-stripe is only discernible when looked for closely; it passes not over the eye, as described in Mr. Howard Saunders's 'Manual,' but through it. By this time the nest which, when I originally observed it, had one egg only, contained three, but the previous day there had been four. This nest differed from the others in having more or less wool in its composition, and a large loose lump of wool in the lining. This attracted my attention, for I had never seen wool in a Marsh Warbler's nest before; there is sometimes a little moss, and this was the case also "with the nest of which I am speaking We saw a Cuckoo this day at the osier-bed, and I had seen one there once or twice before; but it did not occur to me as yet to associate the disappearance of an egg or the peculiar make of the nest with the presence of this mischief-maker. But on the 27th, when I next looked at the nest, there were only two eggs, and my suspicions began to be aroused, for there was no sign that any human being had been to the spot. On the morning of the 28th the bird was no longer sitting, and the eggs were all gone. There was no trace of them underneath the nest, among the roots of the meadow-sweet, in which this nest, like all the others this year, had been built. On examining the nest more closely I thought I saw something at the very bottom, underneath the lining, which as usual was of dry grass and horsehair, with the addition, as I have said, of some wool and a few minute fragments of moss, and, putting in my finger, I felt an egg. I then cut away the meadow-sweet, with the nest in it, and, getting it into a good light, could see a Cuckoo's egg, of the greenish-brown type often found in the nest of the Reed Warbler and other birds, almost hidden, and quite firmly fixed below the lining. The nest could be held upside down without displacing the egg, which occupied a small hole or chamber