OF SELBORNE 63 



the ring-ousels did the same, as well as their congeners the 

 fieldfares ; and especially as ring-ousels 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 T hear, from very good authority, that they breed 

 on Dartmore ; and that they forsake that wild district 

 about the time that our visitors appear, and do not return 

 till late in the spring. 



I have taken a great deal of pains about your salicaria 

 and mine, with a white stroke over its eye, and a tawny 

 rump. I have surveyed it alive and dead, and have pro- 

 cured several specimens; and am perfectly persuaded 

 myself (and trust you will soon be convinced 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 picis affines. It ought no doubt to 

 have gone among his aviculae caudd unicolore, and among 

 your slender-billed small birds of the same division. Lin- 

 naeus 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 sedge-bird. It sings incessantly 

 night and day during the breeding-time, imitating the note 

 of a sparrow, a swallow, a sky-lark ; and has a strange 

 hurrying manner in its song. My specimens correspond 

 most minutely to the description of your fen salicaria shot 

 near Revesby. Mr. Ray has given an excellent character- 

 istic of it when he says, " Rostrum ^ pedes in hdc avicula 

 multb majores sunt quam pro corporis rationed See letter 

 May 29, 1769. 



I have got you the egg of an oedicnemus, or stone-curlew, 

 which was picked up in a fallow on the naked ground : 

 there were two ; but the finder inadvertently crushed one 

 with his foot before he saw them. 



When I wrote to you last year on reptiles, I wish I had 



