'The Natural History of Se I borne 67 



A shepherd saw, as he thought, some white larks on a 

 down above my house this winter : were not these the Em- 

 berisa nivalis, the snowflake 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, 

 blackening every succeeding year, it became coal black at the 

 end of four. Its chief food was hemp-seed. 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. 



I had remarked, for years, that the root of the cuckoo- 

 pint (arum) was frequently scratched out of the dry banks of 

 hedges, and eaten 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 searched 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. 



In the middle of February I discovered, in my tall hedges, 

 a little bird that raised my curiosity : it was of that yellow- 

 green colour that belongs to the salicaria kind, and, I think, 

 was soft-billed. It was no parus; and was too long and too 

 big for the golden-crowned wren, appearing most like the 

 largest willow-wren. It hung sometimes with its back down- 

 wards, but never continuing one moment in the same place. 

 I shot at it, but it was so desultory that I missed my aim. 



I wonder that the stone-curlew, Charadrius cedicnemus, 

 should be mentioned by the writers as a rare bird : it abounds 

 in all the champaign parts of Hampshire and Sussex, and 

 breeds, I think, all the summer, having young ones, I know, 

 very late in the autumn. Already they begin clamouring in 

 the evening. They cannot, I think, with any propriety, be 

 called, as they are by Mr. Ray, " circa aquas versantes; " for 

 with us, by day at least, they haunt only the most dry, open, 



