OF SELBORNE. (37 



vant had shot one last January, in that severe weather, which 

 he believed would puzzle me. I called to see it this summer, 

 not knowing what to expect : but, the moment I took it in 

 hand, I pronounced it the male garrulus bohemicus, or Ger- 

 man silk-tail, from the five peculiar crimson tags or points 

 which it carries at the ends of five of the short remiges. It 

 cannot, I suppose, with any propriety, be called an English 

 bird : and yet I see, by Ray's Philosoph. Letters, that great 

 flocks of them, feeding upon haws, appeared in this kingdom 

 in the winter of 1685. 



The mention of haws puts me in mind that there is a total 

 failure of that wild fruit, so conducive to the support of many 

 of the winged nation. For the same severe weather, late in 

 the spring, which cut off all the produce of the more tender 

 and curious trees, destroyed also that of the more hardy and 

 common. 



Some birds, haunting with the missel-thrushes, and feeding 

 on the berries of the yew-tree, which answered to the descrip- 

 tion of the merula torquata, or ring-ouzel, were lately seen in 

 this neighbourhood. I employed some people to procure me 

 a specimen, but without success. See Letter VIII. 



Query Might not Canary birds be naturalized to this 

 climate, provided their eggs were put, in the spring, into the 

 nests of some of their congeners, as goldfinches, greenfinches, 

 &c. ? Before winter perhaps they might be hardened, and 

 able to shift for themselves. 



About ten years ago I used to spend some weeks yearly at 

 Sunbury, which is one of those pleasant villages lying on the 

 Thames, near Hampton-court. In the autumn, I could not 

 help being much amused with those myriads of the swallow 

 kind which assemble in those parts. But what struck me 

 most was, that, from the time they began to congregate, for- 

 saking the chimnies and houses, they roosted every night in 

 the osier-beds of the aits of that river *. Now this resorting 



* [I have often heard my father describe a scene which he "witnessed 

 on the banks of the Thames nearly a century ago, when residing at Chel- 

 sea. Always fond of observing facts in natural history, he and a friend 

 resolved on sitting up to watch for the moment of starting for migration 



