Black-caps mostly haunt orchards and gardens; while they warble
their throats are wonderfully distended.
The song of the red-start is superior, though somewhat like that of
the white-throat: some birds have a few more notes than others.
Sitting very placidly on the top of a tree in a village, the cock sings
from morning to night: he affects neighbourhoods, and avoids
solitude, and loves to build in orchards and about houses; with us
he perches on the vane of a tall maypole.
The fly-catcher is of all our summer birds the most mute and the
most familiar: it also appears the last of any. It builds in a vine, or a
sweetbriar, against the wall of an house, or in the hole of a wall, or
on the end of a beam or plate, and often close to the post of a door
where people are going in and out all day long. This bird does not
make the least pretension to song, but uses a little inward wailing
note when it thinks its young in danger from cats or other
annoyances: it breeds but once, and retires early.
Selborne parish alone can and has exhibited at times more than
half the birds that are ever seen in all Sweden; the former has
produced more than one hundred and twenty species, the latter
only two hundred and twenty-one.
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