T/ie Natural History of Selborne 195 



Your method of accounting for the periodical motions of 

 the British singing-birds, or birds of flight, is a very probable 

 one ; since the matter of food is a great regulator of the 

 actions and proceedings of the brute creation ; there is but 

 one that can be set in competition with it, and that is love. 

 But I cannot quite acquiesce with you in one circumstance 

 when you advance that " when they have thus feasted, they 

 again separate into small parties of five or six, and get the best 

 fare they can within a certain district, having no inducement 

 to go in quest of fresh-turned earth." Now if you mean that 

 the business of congregating is quite at an end from the con- 

 clusion of wheat sowing to the season of barley and oats, it is 

 not the case with us ; for larks and chaffinches, and particu- 

 larly linnets, flock and congregate as much in the very dead of 

 winter as when the husbandman is busy with his ploughs and 

 harrows. 



Sure there can be no doubt but that woodcocks and field- 

 fares leave us in the spring, in order to cross the seas, and to 

 retire to some districts more suitable to the purpose of breed- 

 ing. That the former pair before they retire, and that the 

 hens are forward with egg, I myself, when I was a sportsman, 

 have often experienced. It cannot indeed be denied but that 

 now and then we hear of a woodcock's nest, or young birds, 

 discovered in some part or other of this island ; but then they 

 are always mentioned as rarities, and somewhat out of the 

 common course of things ; but as to redwings and fieldfares, 

 no sportsman or naturalist has ever yet, that I could hear, 

 pretended to have found the nest or young of those species 

 in any part of these kingdoms. And I the more admire at 

 this instance as extraordinary, since, to all appearance, the 

 same food in summer as well as in winter might support them 

 here which maintains their congeners, the blackbirds and 

 thrushes, did they choose to stay the summer through. From 

 hence it appears that it is not food alone which determines 

 some species of birds with regard to their stay or departure. 

 Fieldfares and redwings disappear sooner or later according 

 as the warm weather comes on earlier or later. For I well 



