62 



NOTES TO THE 



head and tail and pull them apart. He will find a string 

 stretches out between the head and tail ; this is the consoli- 

 dated silk or the silkworm gut. Place two pins in a board 

 and wind the two extremities on the pins, and leave the gut 

 to dry. The tangled and twisted ends on the gut-hanks one 

 buys are the ends which have been wound round these pins. 

 The gut of commerce is made principally in China, and, I 

 believe, also in Spain. 



ARRIVAL OF BIRDS, p. 80. In order to give a comparative 

 table of the arrival of birds at Selborne and in the neighbour- 

 hood of London, I give the following list. The London list is 

 given on the authority of Mr. Davy, the bird-catcher : 



USUALLY APPEAR ADOUT 



Wryneck 



Smallest Willow-wren 



Swallow 



Martin 



Sand Martin 



Blackcap 



Nightingale . 



Cuckoo 



Middle Willow-wren . 



Whitethroat 



Redstart 



Turtle-dove . 



Grasshopper-lark . 



Swift . 



Largest Willow- wren . 



Goatsucker . 



Flycatcher . 



Middle of March , 

 March 23 . 

 April 15 , 



April 13 

 Middle of April 



Middle of April . 

 April 27 

 End of April 

 Beginning of May 

 May 12 



April 7 or 8 

 March 10 

 Middle of April 



End of March 

 April 8 to 14 



April 'l2 

 Middle of April 

 Beginning of April 

 Middle of April 

 End of April 

 April 15 

 Middle of April 

 End of April 



When the flycatcher has arrived we anticipate that all the soft 

 meat tribe are here 



When the bird-catchers come home about the 15th or 16th of 

 April, they say that the swifts have arrived. 



The following birds stay to the end of August : the cuckoo, 

 the nightingale, the wryneck. This is a great migratory month. 

 The following birds stay to the end of October : house-swallow, 

 martin, sand-martin. Swallows have been seen in Tottenham 

 Court Eoad as late as the 5th of November. 



Swifts leave about the middle of August ; they have been 

 known to stay till the end of September. 1 



1 A correspondent, " J. ", thus writes in Land and Water : " The swift, wh ich 

 visits us generally on the 5th of May, retires the earliest, seldom later than 

 the 12th of August, although a few are occasionally later, and in one instance 

 a swift was seen on the 26th of August." 



