hich may be heard a mile. _OEdicnemus_ is a
most apt and expressive name for them, since their legs seem swollen like
those of a gouty man. After harvest I have shot them before the pointers
in turnip-fields.

I make no doubt but there are three species of the willow-wrens; two I
know perfectly, but have not been able yet to procure the third. No two
birds can differ more in their notes, and that constantly, than those two
that I am acquainted with; for the one has a joyous, easy, laughing note,
the other a harsh, loud chirp. The former is every way larger, and
three-quarters of an inch longer, and weighs two drams and a half, while
the latter weighs but two; so the songster is one-fifth heavier than the
chirper. The chirper (being the first summer-bird of passage that is
heard, the wryneck sometimes excepted) begins his two notes in the middle
of March, and continues them through the spring and summer till the end
of August, as appears by my journals. The legs of the larger of these
two are flesh-coloured; of the less black.

The grasshopper-lark began his sibilous note in my fields last Saturday.
Nothing can be more amusing than the whisper of this little bird, which
seems to be close by though at a hundred yards' distance; and when close
at your ear, is scarce any louder than when a great way off. Had I not
been a little acquainted with insects, and known that the grasshopper
kind is not yet hatched, I should have hardly believed but that it had
been a _locusta_ whispering in the bushes. The country people laugh when
you tell them that it is the note of a bird. It is a most artful
creature, skulking in the thickest part of a bush, and will sing at a
yard distance, provided it be concealed. I was obliged to get a person
to go on the other side of the hedge where it haunted, and then it would
run, creeping like a mouse, before us for a hundred yards together,
through the bottom of the thorns; yet it would not come into fair sight;
but in a morning early, and when undisturbed, it sings on the top of a
twig, gaping and shivering with its wings. Mr. Ray himself had no
knowledge of this bird, but received his account from Mr. Johnson, who
apparently confounds it with the _reguli non cristati_, from which it is
very distinct. See Ray's "Philos. Letters," p. 108.

The fly-catcher (_stoparola_) has not yet appeared; it usually breeds in
my vine. The redstart begins to sing, its note is short and imperfect,
but