Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 3 (1899).djvu/31

Rh presume it was thought that to this grotesquely aberrant situation for a Nuthatch's nest—the original of which, by-the-by, is to be seen in the South Kensington Museum—the Latin adage ex uno disce omnes would most fitly apply. Let all young ornithologists be on their guard against the tendency to generalize from a single and perhaps exceptional experience. Surely I have some memory of a man who once alleged he had shot a Hare at ninety yards, and who wrote proclaiming the feat in a well-known journal devoted to records of sport, and who argued therefrom that he could always kill Hares at ninety yards! Unless I am dreaming, the gentleman with the long bow was somewhat roughly handled by subsequent critics of both his feat and logic in the same journal. The writer once dropped a Grouse dead at ninety yards—a cross shot—that had been previously "peppered"; it was a precious fluke, a stray corn just chancing to penetrate the brain; but many another has been missed at a third of the distance since. It was on the beautiful Kildonan moors, in Sutherlandshire, that the shot was made and measured.

However, the Song-Thrush is my theme. With regard to its eggs, the only abnormal-sized varieties I have met with have invariably been on the small scale. I have also found them on rare occasions unspotted, and in one instance, in Herefordshire, I took a beautiful clutch of five with blood-red markings upon them. The characteristic nest of this species is too well known to need my making any reference to it.

For a close inspection and prolonged study of the Redwing there is hardly a period more suitable than that of frost and snow, especially when a heavy fall of the latter has covered the ground to the depth of several inches, and the grass of the green fields has been hidden from our view for many days. Then it is that the poor birds, with their normal food supply cut short, and pinched with cold and hunger, draw to the roadside hedges for the purpose of feeding on the winter berries which, in mild open weather, they apparently set less store by, except on first arrival. During a severe spell of weather I have gone close up to as many as ten or a dozen in a low bush, their attitude crouching and despondent, and they have shown neither fear nor inclination to