Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 3 (1899).djvu/28

4 of my theory is absolutely proven, though it satisfies my own convictions.

With the advance of summer, and after the young are fledged, the Mistle-Thrush's utterance is chiefly limited to a harsh monosyllabic note sounding like wark, repeated at intervals. People have often asked me what it was, and not always believed me when I have told them. Some have fancied it to be the croak of a Frog.

Without undue presumption, I think I may claim to have found a Mistle-Thrush's nest so charmingly situated as to have been simply peerless in the natural beauty of its immediate surroundings. A huge bunch of mistletoe hung for many years from one of the middle branches of a lofty poplar at the four cross-roads between Lucton School and Mortimer's Cross, in Herefordshire, and in the centre of this bunch a pair of Mistle-Thrushes one spring built their nest and reared their young. Subsequently an enterprising boy climbed the tree just previously to the Christmas holidays, and possessed himself of the mistletoe in its entirety, which doubtless he put to much less profitable use when it adorned the interior of his own home than had been the case with the striking-looking birds that had once employed it as a nesting site during the month of sunshine and showers.

There is a prevailing notion that Mistle-Thrushes are silent after April has run its course. This may be true of the majority, but one of the species most certainly sang to me almost daily during the first three weeks of May in 1894. There are, I may perhaps observe, many hard-and-fast notions about the history and economy of birds which are wholly erroneous, but which are possibly to be condoned from the fact that they are so often repeated, and therefore fostered, by so-called popular writers on Natural History. Original observations are what we want nowadays; how seldom, comparatively speaking, do we get them where birds are concerned!

Of so generally abundant and well-known a species throughout the British Islands I have not very much to say that has not been said scores of times already, and therefore my remarks on this delightful songster will be discreetly and advantageously