MIGRATION. 11 



with the failure of certain kinds of food. No sooner does 

 spring return and promise abundance of food, than all the 

 feathered tribes return northward, to dwell and to rear 

 their young in the very places where they themselves were 

 reared. The country of all species is not the same : thus 

 redwings and fieldfares bred in Scandinavia return to 

 Scandinavia; and because they feed on hips and haws, 

 they go just so far south as to procure a supply. The ring 

 ousel breeds in Caernarvonshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, 

 and Lancashire, but not finding sufficient food there, nor 

 yet in our southern counties, nor yet even in France or 

 Spain, all of which it crosses, it goes on into the warmer 

 regions of Africa. Well, then there is our dear darling 

 nightingale, that homes in Surrey, despising the inclement 

 regions of the north ; he, too, turns his face southward at 

 the same time and for the same cause as the redwing, the 

 fieldfare and the ring ousel; and he, too, passes onward 

 into Africa. The very birds of prey, if also birds of pas- 

 sage, perform their journeys in the same direction.* 



* There are passages in Mr. Yarrell's * History of British Birds ' that lead 

 ine to fear that even he entertains confused if not erroneous notions on the in- 

 teresting subject of migration. Among those passages I have marked, I select 

 the following, because it bears on the birds mentioned in the foregoing remarks, 

 enclosing between parentheses the part that seems erroneous. " The ring ousel 

 is a summer visiter to the British Islands : and, (although its migrations are 

 decidedly opposite as to season to those of the fieldfare and redwing), which 

 visit us in winter, all three pass the coldest weather in the warmer parts of 

 Europe, and the countries a little further to the south of it, and all three like- 

 wise pass the summer in the more central or northern parts." Birds, i. 207. 

 Instead of the migrations of these birds being ' decidedly opposite,' our infor- 

 mation shows us that they are closely approximate, not only as regards season, 

 but also as regards direction. Even Gilbert White, the great ornithologist of 

 his day, boggles at the movements of the ring ousel: at first he concludes, with- 

 out any other ground excepting that of analogy, that " its autumnal migration 

 is southward." Afterwards he says, in the 26th letter addressed to Pennant, 



