ATTRACTIVE QUALITIES.--Its handsome plumage, its sprightliness, its quick and elegant motions, please one as much as its pretty song, which, without being striking, is varied, and continues the whole year, except during moulting. I always keep a wagtail amongst my birds, and when the blackcap, the blue-breast, the lark, and the linnet sing, it seems to form a counter-tenor.
Motacilla Boarula, LINNÆUS; La Bergeronette, BUFFON; Die graue Bachstelze, BECHSTEIN.
This beautiful species, like the preceding, is seven inches in length, of which the tail alone measures four. The beak is black; the iris brown; the legs, nine lines high, dark flesh-coloured; the upper part of the body, including the lesser wing-coverts, dark ash-grey; the head slightly tinted with olive, and the rump a fine yellow green; there is a white streak above the eyes, and another, beginning at the inferior base of the beak, descends the sides of the neck, whilst a black streak extends from the superior base as far as the eyes; the chin and throat are black, but the breast and under part of the body are of the finest yellow.
The throat of the female is not black, but pale orange; her colours are generally less bright.
Males a year or two old are without the fine black throat; it is clouded with white.
HABITATION.--In their wild state, these wagtails are found throughout Europe; but in the greatest number in mountainous and wooded parts, where the brooks flow over beds of pebbles. They are birds of passage, and return amongst us the end of February or beginning of March. A few have been observed to remain during mild winters, when they take up their abode near dunghills or warm springs.
In the house they should be kept in a nightingale's cage, and treated like one; they are so delicate, that with the greatest care they can rarely be preserved two years.
FOOD.--When wild they prefer aquatic insects, and are continually chasing them among the plants and stones by the water-side.
In the house they should be fed on the same food as the nightingale, to which they may be gradually accustomed, by throwing amongst it meal-worms and ants' eggs.
BREEDING.--Their nests, placed by the water-side, in mill-dikes, or heaps of stones, are formed with rather more art than those of the preceding species. They begin to lay as early as March, five or six white eggs, mottled with flesh-colour. The young ones must be reared on ants' eggs and the crumb of white bread, soaked in boiled milk.