BULLFINCH STONE CURLEW. 59 



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 hemp seed. Such influence has food on the 

 colour of animals ! The pied and mottled colours of 

 domesticated animals are supposed to be owing to 

 high, various, and unusual food. 



I had remarked for years, that the root of the 

 cuckoo-pint (arum) was frequently scratched out of 

 the dry banks of hedges, and 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 root of the 

 arum is remarkably warm and pungent. 



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 

 salicaria kind, and, I think, was soft-billed. It was 

 no parus, and was too long and too big for the golden- 

 crowned wren, appearing most like the largest willow- 

 wren. It hung sometimes 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 oedic- 

 nemus, should be mentioned by the writers as a rare 

 bird ; it abounds in all the champaign parts of Hamp- 

 shire and Sussex, and breeds, I think all the sum- 

 mer, having young ones, I know, very late in the 

 autumn. Already they begin clamouring in the 

 evening. They cannot, I think, with any propriety, 



