94 NATURAL HISTORY 
the fieldfares, especially as ringousels 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 good au- 
thority that they are found on Dartmoor, and that 
they forsake that wild district about the time that 
our visiters appear, and do not return til late in the 
spring. 
I have taken a great deal of pains about your 
salicaria and mine, with a white stroke over its 
eye. I have surveyed it alive and dead, and have 
procured several specimens, and am perfectly per- 
suaded myself (and trust you will soon be convin- 
ced of the same) that it is no 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 picz affines. It 
ought, no doubt, to have gone among his avicule 
cauda unicolore, and among your slender-billed 
small birds of the same division. Linnzeus 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 sedgebird. It sings incessantly 
night and day during the nesting time, imitating 
the note of a sparrow, a swallow, a skylark, and has 
a strange hurrying manner in its song. My speci- 
mens correspond most minutely to the description 
* See p. 78 
