YOUNG THRUSH.
This photograph shows the mud-lined nest.
Passing over a small group of comparatively uninteresting American birds known as "Greenlets," we come to the Warblers, a group which constitutes one of the largest families of birds of the Old World. The species included in this family vary greatly in their characters, so that it is by no means easy to give diagnostic characters, whereby they may be readily distinguished from the Fly-catchers on the one hand or the Thrushes on the other. The Thrushes, however, as a group, may be distinguished from the Warblers by the circumstance that in the former the young have a distinctive spotted plumage, differing from that of the adults, while the young of the Warblers are not so marked, their plumage differing but little from that of their parents.
More than twenty species of warblers are included amongst British birds. Although some of them are but rare and accidental visitors to Britain, others are amongst the commonest of the spring migrants, remaining to nest, and leaving again in the autumn. Some, as the Black-cap, White-throat, Chiff-chaff, Garden-, Willow-, and Wood-warblers, frequent woods, hedgerows, and gardens; whilst others, as the Sedge- and Reed-warblers, are found only near water affording sufficient shelter in the shape of reed-banks or osier-plantations.
Photo by J. T. Newman] [Berkhamsted.
BLACKBIRD.
The male and female are quite different one from another, and in this respect differ from the Thrushes, in which the sexes are alike.
The Black-cap and Garden-warbler rank as songsters of no mean talent, being held second only to the nightingale. As if by common consent, the two former never clash, so that where black-caps are common there are few garden-warblers, and vice versâ.
Most of these birds build a typical cup-shaped nest of dried grasses, lined with finer materials, and placed near the ground; but that of the Reed-warbler is a most beautiful structure, the dried grass of which it is made being woven around some three or four reed-stems, making it seem as if the latter had, in growing up, pierced the sides of the nest in their course. The cup-shaped hollow is very deep, so that when the supporting reeds are bowed low in the breeze the eggs rest perfectly safe.