Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 4 (1900).djvu/43

Rh A Song Thrush sang from my barn roof ridge this afternoon. Rather a wet day.

4th.—The Lesser Whitethroat sings nearly every day in a bird-cherry tree (Prunus padus), the branches of which come close to some of the windows. I can thus listen to the song at very close quarters. The bird sings at pretty regular intervals. His warbling notes, which precede the outburst, are sometimes really very good and rich, but low in tone and not very numerous—often hurried, so that at a distance they are often not heard. They vary a good deal, and occasionally, in style, remind one of the notes of the Orphean Warbler. In these cases they might be set down as therut therut therut; but this kind of prelude is rarely heard, and the notes are usually of a warbling nature.

7th.—On April 15th I set up in the shrubbery a nesting-box made out of a piece of an old pump—the fondness of Tits for a pump as a nesting site being well known. A pair of Greater Titmice had completed a nest in it by the 30th. On the morning (about 10.30 a.m.) of May 1st Mr. A.H. Macpherson and I looked into it and found it empty. On the 4th I saw the bird on the nest, and to-day the nest contained eight eggs. Even supposing an egg was laid on the 1st, after we looked into the nest, the bird must have laid two eggs in one day.

14th.—Found a Jay's nest with live eggs in a thorn bush in a small ash-pole spinney at South Newington. The Jay rarely breeds here. Turtle Dove.

15th.—Heard the resonant notes of the Wryneck, now a rare bird here, from this house. Several Spotted Flycatchers appeared in the garden for the first time this year. They were fighting and pairing. A pair of Wrens whose nest was torn by a Cat from an ivy-grown stem, are building again in the same spot. I imagine it is the same pair.

18th.—Starling feeding young.

27th.—Flycatchers have one egg in a nest built in half a cocoanut-shell fixed under the eaves of a wall. A Nightingale established at Bloxham Grove.

June 1st to 15th—In Belgium.

20th.—Mr. H.G. Thompson saw a white variety among a flock of Starlings near Headington.

23rd.—Cuckoo still sings. Examined at Mr. Bartlett's a