66 The Natural History of Selborne 



barn, and was surprised to find that their bills, legs, feet, and claws 

 were milk-white. 



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

 my house this winter : were not these the Emberiza ntvalis, the snow- 

 flake 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 some- 

 times with its back downwards, 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 cham- 

 paign 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 



