SOFT-BILLED BIRDS. 213 



I have no reason to doubt but that the soft-billed 

 birds, which winter with us, subsist chiefly on in- 

 sects in their aurelia state. All the species of wag- 

 tails, in severe weather, haunt shallow streams, near 

 their spring-heads, where they never freeze ; and, by 

 wading, pick out the aurelias of the genus of phry- 

 gane& *, &c. 



Hedge-sparrows frequent sinks and gutters in hard 

 weather, where they pick up crumbs and other 

 sweepings ; and in mild weather, they procure 

 worms, which are stirring every month in the year, 

 as any one may see that will only be at the trouble of 

 taking a candle to a grass-plot on any mild winter's 

 night. Red-breasts and wrens, in the winter, haunt 

 outhouses, stables, and barns, where they find spiders 

 and flies that have laid themselves up during the 

 cold season. But the grand support of the soft- 

 billed birds in winter is that infinite profusion of 

 aurelise of the lepidoptera ordo, which is fastened to 

 the twigs of trees and their trunks ; to the pales and 

 walls of gardens and buildings ; and is found in 

 every cranny and cleft of rock or rubbish, and even 

 in the ground itself. 



Every species of titmouse winters with us ; they 

 have what I call a kind of intermediate bill, between 

 the hard and the soft, between the Linnsean genera 

 of fringilla and motacilla. One species alone spends 

 its whole time in the woods and fields, never retreat- 

 ing for succour, in the severest seasons, to houses 



sands of these birds were seen to arrive on the sea -shore and 

 sand-banks of the Northumbrian coast, many of them so fatigued 

 by the length of their flight, as to be unable to rise again from 

 the ground ; and great numbers were, in consequence, caught or 

 destroyed. This flight must have been immense in quantity, as 

 its extent was traced through the whole length of the coasts of 

 Northumberland and Durham. W. J. 



* See DERHAM'S Physico- Theology, p. 235. 



