NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 45 
in his rookery. I saw the birds myself nailed against the end of a 
barn, and was surprised to find that their bills, legs, feet, and claws 
were milk-white.* 
A shepherd saw, as he thought, some white larks on a down 
above my house this winter: were not these the Emeriza nivalis, 
the snow-flake of the Brit. Zool.? No doubt they were. 
A few years ago I saw a cock bullfinch in a cage which had been 
caught in the fields after it was come to its full 
colours. In about a year it began to look dingy; 
and, blackening every succeeding year, it became 
coal-black at the end of four. Its chief food was 
hempseed. Such influence has food on the colour of 
animals! The pied and mottled colours of domes- 
ticated animals are supposed to be owing to high, 
various, and unusual food. 
I had remarked, for years, that the root of the 
cuckoo-pint (a@vumz) was frequently scratched out of 
the dry banks of hedges, and eaten in severe snowy 
weather. After observing, with some exactness> 
myself, and getting others to do the same, we found 
it was the thrush kind that searched it out. The ARUM. 
root of the arumzis remarkably warm and pungent.t+ 
Our flocks of female chaffinches have not yet forsaken us. The 
blackbirds and thrushes are very much thinned down by that fierce 
weather in January. 
In the middle of February I discovered, in my tall hedges, a little 
bird that raised my curiosity: it was of that yellow-green colour 
that belongs to the sa/zcaréa kind, and, I think, was soft-billed. It 
was no farus ; and was too long and too big for the golden-crowned 
wren, appearing most like the largest willow wren. It hung some- 
times with its back downwards, but never continuing one moment in 
the same place. I shot at it, but it was so desultory that I missed 
my aim. 
I wonder that the stone-curlew, Charadrius wdicnemus, should be 
mentioned by the writers as a rare bird: it abounds in all the 
* We possess a large rookery, and although we have never had an entire white or cream- 
coloured variety, scarcely a year passes without some young being observed with more 
oa a white in the plumage, and in these the bill and feet, as well as the claws, are also 
white. 
+t We have not observed the roots of the arum scratched for as mentioned, but it is not 
generally avery common plant in Scotland. The circumstance mentioned above is worth 
attending to, and observers who may read this edition should now notice and corroborate, 
if they can, White’s remarks, 
