Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 3 (1899).djvu/30

6 passed were busily engaged picking the wayside flowers. There is more in this than meets the eye, I thought; so we stopped and asked an intelligent-looking boy of apparently some eight or nine years of age if he or his companions ever meddled with the birds' nests. Quick as possible came back the answer, "Oh, no; we're not allowed to." And on further investigation I rejoiced to find that such was absolutely the case, the children in the village schools thereabouts being very rightly taught the cruelty of an indiscriminate and irrational destruction of birds' nests and eggs.

This species is an indefatigable songster, and probably if it were less frequently heard in our gardens and orchards, we should set greater store by its music—regard its varied and stirring notes with greater favour. I have heard it sing every month in the year at such times as the weather has been mild and open. I heard one give forth a few sweet notes at a quarter to eight on two consecutive mornings in the first week in January in the year 1888, and another bird sang almost every day in my garden throughout the November of 1893. As is the case with most of our feathered songsters, however, the weather plays an all-important part in the "to be or not to be" question of an open-air vernal concert; nevertheless, the Mistle-Thrush must be quoted as a notable exception to this rule, and as one not to be deterred by storms and gales from chanting its pleasing lay. Alike in fair weather and foul, and at its appointed season, the "Stormcock" raises its voice, perched aloft amidst the topmost branches—rather preferring, I have observed, to station itself in an isolated tree either by the roadside or in a hedgerow a field away for the purpose.

The Song-Thrush is a more or less migratory species; it pairs early in the spring, and the nest, which is quite unique, is placed in a variety of situations; but because I once discovered one on the ground in the Rectory plantation at Skeffington is not conceived an adequate reason for suggesting that that is one of its normal situations. We talk glibly enough about the absurdity of drawing conclusions from single instances, and yet I can never get out of my head reading in some book or other intended for the instruction of simple tyros like myself that Nuthatches' nests were to be looked for in haystacks! I can only