60 WHITE BOOKS. BULLFINCH. 



A gentleman in this neighbourhood had two milk-white 

 rooks in one nest. A booby of a carter, finding them 

 before they were able to fly, threw them down and destroyed 

 them, to the regret of the owner, who would have been glad 

 to have preserved such a curiosity 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 

 emberiza 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 black- 

 ening 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 domesticated animals are supposed to be owing to high, 

 various, and unusual food.f 



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 scratched 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. 



* Mr. Yarrell informs us that white, pied, and cream-coloured varieties of 

 the rook occasionally occur. I have seen three white blackbirds from one nest, 

 at Blackheath. Also, a white sparrow and a cream-coloured woodcock killed 

 in Sussex. ED. 



f Mr. White has justly remarked, that food has great influence on the 

 colour of animals. The dark colour in wild birds is a great safeguard to them 

 against their enemies ; and this is the reason that, among birds of bright 

 plumage, the young do not assume their gay colours till the second or third 

 year, as the cygnet, the gold and silver pheasants, &c. The remarkable change 

 of plumage among the gull tribe, is a curious and intricate subject. Is the 

 circumstance mentioned by Mr. Pegge true, " that butterflies partake of the 

 colour of the flowers they feed on?" I think not. See Anonymiana, 

 p. 469. MJTFORU. 



