The ground color ranges from the palest cream (nearly white) through deeper cream to pale buff, yellow-buff, and the deepest brown buff (many of the eggs of this latter type having a distinct pink tone), speckled and spotted and blotched with yellow-brown, dark brown, and purplish gray. As a rule, the eggs in the same set are fairly uniform in the pattern of the markings, but occasionally you get a set with one egg much more marked than the other three, and in many cases you find two distinct shades of ground color in the same set. The measurements of 100 eggs, furnished by F. C. R. Jourdain, average 43.8 by 33.6 millimeters; the eggs showing the four extremes measure =49= by 34.8, 44.9 by =36.4=, =40.2= by 34, and 43.1 by =31.6= millimeters. _Young._--Incubation lasts for 20 or 21 days and is performed by the female only. The young remain in the nest but a short time, where they are brooded by their mother and carefully tended by both parents. Several good observers have seen the mother bird carry her young away between her legs. Dresser (1871) quotes John J. Dalgleish as follows: I have had on three occasions the good fortune to see the woodcock in the act of carrying her young. On the first occasion the bird rose from my feet one day in the month of June, in a thick coppice cover in Argyllshire, and flew with her strange burden carried between her thighs for about 30 yards, in the manner well described in a note in Mr. Gray's Birds of the West of Scotland. On following her she again rose, still carrying the young one, and flew into some thick cover. On this and the next occasion, which was in Perthshire, the birds uttered no cry; but the last time I witnessed this curious habit, which was on the 5th of May last, the bird made the peculiar cry alluded to in the note in Mr. Gray's work. On this occasion I could observe the bird more distinctly, as it was in an old oak cover, with very little underwood, where I discovered her. On rising she flew from 35 to 40 yards, calling as above mentioned, and then, alighting among some grass, seemed to flutter along, still retaining hold of the chick. On raising her again, the same maneuver was repeated, only that the distance flown each time was greater, but always in the segment of a circle, as if she were unwilling to leave the rest of the brood. On returning to the spot where she rose at first, I discovered one of these, which was more than half grown, the quill feathers being well formed, and must altogether have formed rather a heavy burden. On taking it up, it uttered a cry, which was at once responded to by the parent bird, although the latter did not again take to wing from the bushes into which it had ultimately flown. Abel Chapman (1924) writes: