138 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORWNE. 
earth.”* Now if you mean that the business of congregating is 
quite at an end from the conclusion of wheat sowing to the season 
of barley and oats, it is not the case with us; for larks and 
chaffinches, and particularly linnets, flock and congregate as much 
in the very dead of winter as when the husbandman is busy with 
his ploughs and harrows. 
Sure there can be no doubt but that woodcocks and fieldfares 
leave us in the spring, in order to cross the seas, and to retire to 
some districts more suitable to the purpose of breeding. That the 
former pair before they retire, and that the hens are forward with 
ecg, I myself, when I was a sportsman, have often experienced. It 
cannot indeed be denied but that now and then we hear of a wood- 
cock’s nest, or young birds, discovered in some part or other of this 
island ; but then they are all always mentioned as rarities, and 
somewhat out of the common course of things; but as to redwings 
and fieldfares, no sportsman or naturalist has ever yet, that I could 
hear, pretended to have found the nest or young of those species 
in any part of these kingdoms. And I the more admire at this 
instance as extraordinary, since, to all appearance, the same food 
in summer as well as in winter might support them here which 
maintains their congeners, the blackbirds and thrushes, did they 
choose to stay the summer through. From hence it appears that 
it is not food alone which determines some species of birds with 
regard to their stay or departure. Fieldfares and redwings dis- 
appear sooner or later according as the warm weather comes on 
earlier or later. For I well remember, after that dreadful winter 
1739-40, that cold north-east winds continued to blow on through 
April and May, and that these kind of birds (what few remained 
of them) did not depart as usual, but were seen lingering about till 
the beginning of June. 
The best authority that we can have for the nidification of the 
birds above-mentioned in any district, is the testimony of faunists 
that have written professedly the natural history of particular 
countries. Now as to the fieldfare, Linnzeus, in his “ Fauna 
Suecica,” says of it, that “maxims in arboribus nidificat;” and 
of the redwing he says, in the same place, that “ wzdzficat in medits 
* Mr. Barrington wrote a long essay ‘‘On the periodical appearing and disappearing of 
certain birds at different times of the year.’’ It is addressed as a letter to William Walton, 
M.D., and is published in his ‘‘ Miscellanies,’’ p. 174. This letter argues against the 
periodical migration of birds, White’s instances are frequently quoted, and attempted to 
be disputed, and the above letter is evidently written in reply to many of the arguments 
which were advanced by Barrington. 
