GOLDFINCHES AT RYME INTRINSICA 221 



and still sticking to tlic roads and brakes I do believe 

 I had, at last, a (lock of 10,000 flying before me." 



Cobbett rightly says that the seed of the thistle is 

 the favourite food of the bird; and once upon a time 

 an ornithologist made the statement that the improved 

 methods of agriculture in England liad killed the thistle, 

 thus depriving the goldfmch of its natural food, the 

 result being that the bird had declined in numbers to 

 the verge of extinction. The statement has been copied 

 into pretty well every book on British birds since it 

 was made. O wise ornithologists, what docs the gold- 

 finch live on during nine months of the year? How 

 does he exist without his natural food? How does 

 he live even in the unnatural conditions of a cage with- 

 out thistle-seed? I know of one case in which the poor 

 prisoner lived shut up in his little wire bo.x for eighteen 

 years. Besides, the museum or closet naturalist is very 

 much out of it when he talks about the extirpation of 

 the thistle. The good old plant is doing very well. Long 

 before the Act of 1894-5 which empowers the local 

 authorities to protect their birds, I had been a frequent 

 visitor to, and a haunter of, many extensive thistle- 

 grown places in southern England — chalk downs that 

 were once wheatfields, gone out of cultivation for half 

 a century or longer, ruined sheep-walks, where in July 

 and August I could look over hundreds of acres of 

 rust-brown thistle, covered with their glistening down, 

 the seed "dead ripe," and never a goldfinch in sight ! 



And now I must go back to Ryme Intrinsica — the 

 pretty name of that village makes me reluctant to leave 



