Suggesting Spring Two sorts of Christmas present seem to have
been the vogue this year : one was the nesting box, the other the lily bulb. Both carried the expectant mind forward to the spring. We were solaced in the frost, though Shakespeare denied the possibility, by concentrating on " fantastic summer heat." The well and truly made bird-box is a proper adornment for every garden and in general birds know a good one when they see it. The tit especially is aware that if the hole is bigger than a halfpenny in circumference it is likely to be seized upon by sparrows whoever may have first claimed possession. Birch trees have increased their value (and are being much more freely used by official afforesters) because of the popularity of their trunks both for bird-boxes and pergola poles. These standard bird-boxes are a valuable possession ; but there is room for more widely varied and more amateur furniture. Some people fix a circle of wood into the mouth of a flower-pot, boring a hole to suit the bird they wish to encourage. In one very popular bird-garden, bits of drain pipe are laid on any solid stand between branches that can be found; and they prove irresistible to robins if the height from the ground does not much exceed three feet. In my experience sparrows do not like a lordly site. Indeed many birds are oddly nice about altitude. There is an ascend-. ing scale, say, from willow-warbler to chill-chaff to thrush to bullfinch to shrike to turtle-dove to hawfinch to carrion crow. If you have ivy to overgrow it or surround it, a broken saucepan or kettle or any old crock is appreciated, especially by robins. Not long since I had occasion to investigate in a neighbour's garden a tod of ivy grown over an old tree stump. It was full of old nests of the dunnock. If we had not pulled out the ruins there would have been scarcely an available site left within the clump.
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