txi.] 



OF SELBORNE. 



175 



and barns, where they find spiders and flies that have laid them- 

 selves up during the cold season. But the grand support of the 

 soft-billed birds in winter is that infinite profusion of anrelicc 

 of the Lepidoptera ordo, which is fastened to the twigs of trees 

 and their trunks, to the pales and walls of gardens and build- 

 ings, and is found in every cranny and cleft of rock or rubbish, 

 and even in the ground itself. 



THE WRYNECK. 



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 Linnaeaii genera of Fringilla and Motacilla. 

 One species alone spends its whole time in the woods and 

 fields, never retreating for succour, in the severest seasons, 

 to houses and neighbourhoods ; and that is the delicate long- 





