. A history of British birds . Scotch-fir, while Mr. Gould statesthat he has found fresh petals of the buttercup adhering tothe inner walls. The eggs, from two to four in number, areof a dead white and measure from 1*08 to 92 by from•68 to 62 in. The young are ordinarily hatched about themiddle of June; but they do not take flight till the end ofJuly or sometimes still later. Though zealously fed bytheir parents, while they stay in the nest, they are but littleattended to afterwards, and usually the whole family leavetheir home so soon as the young are able to sustain them-selves firmly on the
. A history of British birds . Scotch-fir, while Mr. Gould statesthat he has found fresh petals of the buttercup adhering tothe inner walls. The eggs, from two to four in number, areof a dead white and measure from 1*08 to 92 by from•68 to 62 in. The young are ordinarily hatched about themiddle of June; but they do not take flight till the end ofJuly or sometimes still later. Though zealously fed bytheir parents, while they stay in the nest, they are but littleattended to afterwards, and usually the whole family leavetheir home so soon as the young are able to sustain them-selves firmly on the wing. Unless some accident happensto the first eggs, the Swift produces only one set in theseason, but should they meet with disaster, a second seemsto be invariably laid, and Salmon found young in a nest solate as October 1st—nearly seven weeks after all the asso- callecl Swallows, belong to the Cypselidce and form the edible nests so eagerlysought by Chinese epicures. These nests, one of which is here represented, are,. when first constructed, wholly composed of mucus, which dries and looks somethinglike isinglass. Their marketable value depends on their colour and purity, for theyare often intermixed with and other foreign substances. The CoUocalice,of which the number of species seems to be uncertain, inhabit chiefly the islandsof the Indian Ocean from Mauritius eastward, as well as most of the tropicalislands of the Pacific as far as the Marquesas—one species occurring in the hill-country of India. VOL. II. 3 B 368 CYPSELID/E. ciates of their parents had departed (Mag. Nat. Hist,ser. 2, i. p. 110). Year by year the Swift revisits its old haunts, generallyarriving in pairs, and, unless access to its accustomed lodg-ings has been made impossible, it will reoccupy them, asproved nearly a century since by Jenner (Phil. Trans. 1824,p. 16), who determined the identity of some of the birds soreturning by marking them indelibly*. New buildings itseldom affects, pa
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Keywords: ., bookauthorsaun, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, booksubjectbirds
