T gives me satisfaction to find that my account of the ousel migration pleases you. You put a very shrewd question when you ask me how I know that their autumnal migration is southward? Was not candour and openness the very life of natural history, I should pass over this query just as a sly commentator does over a crabbed passage in a classic; but common ingenuousness obliges me to confess, not without some degree of shame, that I only reasoned in that case from analogy. For as all other autumnal birds migrate from the northward to us, to partake of our milder winters, and return to the northward again when the rigorous cold abates, so I concluded that the ring-ousels did the same, as well as their congeners the fieldfares; and especially as ring-ousels are known to haunt cold mountainous countries: but I have good reason to suspect since that they may come to us from the westward; because I hear, from very good authority, that they breed on Dartmoor; and that they forsake that wild district about the time that our visitors appear, and do not return till late in the spring. I have taken a great deal of pains about your salicaria and mine, with a white stroke over its eye, and a tawny rump. I have surveyed it alive and dead, and have procured several specimens; and am perfectly persuaded myself (and trust you will soon be convinced of the same) that it is neither more nor less than the passer arundinaceus minor of Ray. This bird, by some means or other, seems to be entirely omitted in the "British Zoology;" and one reason probably was, because it is so strangely classed in Ray, who ranges it among his picis affines. It ought no doubt to have gone among his small birds with the tail of one-colour (aviculæ caudá unicolore), and among your slender-billed birds of the same division. Linnæus might with great propriety have put it into his genus of motacilla, and the motacilla salicaria of his fauna suecica seems to come the nearest to it. It is no uncommon bird, haunting the sides of ponds and rivers where there is covert, and the reeds and sedges of moors. The country people in some places call it the sedge-bird.* It sings incessantly night and day during the breeding time, imitating the note of a sparrow, a swallow, a skylark; and has a strange hurrying manner in its song. My specimens correspond most minutely to the description of your fen-salicaria shot near Revesby. Mr. Ray has given an excellent characteristic of it when * Salicaria phragmites, Selby, and Sylvia salicaria of Latham, here described, abounds in the midland counties, in moist hedge-rows, especially those choked up with reeds, hipparis, or horse-tails, and rushes. It reaches its summer quarters in April, and leaves in September. At first it is shy, and keeps close to the aquatic herbage which it affects. This shyness continues till May, when pairing takes place, and he becomes quite vociferous, a thorough mocking-bird, as described in the text.-ED. he says,-"Rostrum et pedes in hác avicula multò majores sunt quam pro corporis ratione." "The beak and feet of this little bird are much too large for its body." I have got you the egg of an oedicnemus, or stonecurlew, which was picked up in a fallow on the naked ground: there were two; but the finder inadvertently crushed one with his foot before he saw them. When I wrote to you last year on reptiles, I wish I had not forgot to mention the faculty that snakes have of stinking to defend themselves, se defendendo. I knew a gentleman who kept a tame snake, which was in its person as sweet as any animal while in good humour and unalarmed; but as soon as a stranger, or a dog or cat, came in, it fell to hissing, and filled the room with such nauseous effluvia as rendered it hardly supportable. Thus the skunck, or stonck, of Ray's Synop. Quadr. is an innocuous and sweet animal; but, when pressed' hard by dogs and men, it can eject such a most pestilent and fetid smell and excrement, than which nothing can be more horrible. A gentleman sent me lately a fine specimen of the lanius minor cinerascens cum macula in scapulis alba, Raii; which is a bird that, at the time of your publishing your two first volumes of British Zoology, I find you had not seen. You have described it well from Edwards's drawing. SELBORNE, Aug. 30, 1769. HEN I did myself the honour to write to you about the end of last June on the subject of natural history, I sent you a list of the summer-birds of passage which I have observed in this neighbourhood; and also a list of the winter-birds of passage: I mentioned besides those soft-billed birds that stay with us the winter through in the south of England, and those that are remarkable for singing in the night. According to my proposal, I shall now proceed to such birds (singing birds strictly so called) as continue in full song till after Midsummer; and shall range them somewhat in the order in which they first begin to open as the spring advances. |