Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 3 (1899).djvu/227

Rh native village, and thither I generally betake myself in quest of the earliest arrival of this species. There is an old saying that spring has come when you can place your foot on five full-blown daisies in a cluster, but our feathered visitors, to my thinking, are the best harbingers of the glad time of the year; and whether it be sight of Wheatear or song of Chiffchaff, there is no doubting the eloquence of the reminder that the frosts and snows of winter are virtually a thing of the past.

Wheatears only stay a few days on their first arrival in these parts, moving forward to their breeding quarters as soon as they have recuperated their exhausted strength. Yet they afford us more than a passing glimpse of them in September, and it is not at all uncommon when out Partridge-shooting to notice them on the fallows, or in fields where stones have been gathered together into little heaps. Where, however, in the spring time only a single bird had been noticed, in the autumn there would frequently be two of them together.

I have only met with one instance of this species breeding in Leicestershire, and consider the fact of its having nested where it did most unusual. That Wheatears should repair to the rocky heights round about Bardon and Bradgate to rear their young does not surprise me in the least, for in such wild tracts they are quite in their element; but that a pair of these birds should have had recourse to a drain-pipe on the turnpike road in Skeffington parish, in which situation they built a nest in May, in the year 1875, and laid five eggs of a pale greenish blue speckled very distinctly with brown, was quite a novel experience. The eggs were slightly incubated when I found them, and the birds must have employed a vast amount of cunning to have escaped detection so long, as the drain-pipe was within but a short distance of the village school, and there are few boys who are not indefatigable nest-hunters during their play-hours. This nest was constructed of pretty much the same materials as are to be found in the general run of Wheatears' nests, the lining being of cowhair, rabbits' fur, and a large quantity of feathers; but the exterior was composed of fibrous roots, dried bents, moss, and hay, and it was bits of the latter protruding from the drain-pipe that first gave me the clue to the nest. Of course my suspicions had been previously aroused by seeing the birds in the locality.