L.] 



OF SELBORNE. 



135 



of the hanging wood, and over my fields. Did these small weak 

 birds, some of which were nestlings twelve days ago, shift their 

 quarters at this late season of the year to the other side of the 

 northern tropic ? Or rather, is it not more probable that the 

 next church, ruin, chalk-cliff, steep covert, or perhaps sand- 

 bank, lake, or pool, may become their hybernaculum, and afford 

 them a ready and obvious retreat ? 



We now begin to expect our vernal migration of ring-ousels 

 every week. Persons worthy of credit assure me that ring- 

 ousels were seen at Christmas 1770 in the forest of Bere, on the 

 southern verge of this county. Hence we may conclude that 

 their migrations are only internal, and not extended to the con- 

 tinent southward, if they do at first come at all from the northern 

 parts of this island only, and not from the north of Europe. 

 Come from whence they will, it is plain, from the fearless dis- 

 regard that they show for men or guns, that they have been 

 little accustomed to places of much resort. Navigators mention 

 that in the Isle of Ascension, and other such desolate districts, 

 birds are so little acquainted with the human form that they 

 settle on men's shoulders ; and have no more dread of a sailor than 

 they would have of a goat that was grazing. A young man at 

 Lewes, in Sussex, assured me that about seven years ago ring- 

 ousels abounded so about that town in the autumn that he killed 

 sixteen himself in one afternoon : he added further, that some 

 had appeared since in every autumn ; but he could not find that 

 any had been observed before the season in which he shot so 

 many. I myself have found these birds in little parties in the 

 autumn cantoned all along the Sussex downs, wherever there 

 were shrubs and bushes, from Chichester to Lewes ; particularly 

 in the autumn of 1770. 



SELBORSE, March 15, 1773. 





