158 The Natural History of Se I borne 



I have consulted a sportsman, now in his seventy-eighth year, who 

 tells me that fifty or sixty years back, when the beechen woods were 

 much more extensive than at present, the number of wood-pigeons 

 was astonishing ; that he has often killed near twenty in a day : and 

 that with a long wild-fowl piece he has shot seven or eight at a time 

 on the wing as they came wheeling over his head : he moreover adds, 

 which I was not aware of, that often there were among them little 

 parties of small blue doves, which he calls rockiers. The food of 

 these numberless emigrants was beech-mast and some acorns ; and 

 particularly barley, which they collected in the stubbles. But of late 

 years, since the vast increase of turnips, that vegetable has furnished 

 a great part of their support in hard weather ; and the holes they 

 pick in these roots greatly damage the crop. From this food their 

 flesh has contracted a rancidness which occasions them to be rejected 

 by nicer judges of eating, who thought them before a delicate dish. 

 They were shot not only as they were feeding in the fields, and 

 especially in snowy weather, but also at the close of the evening, by 

 men who lay in ambush among the woods and groves to kill 

 them as they came in to roost.* These are the principal circum- 

 stances relating to this wonderful internal migration, which with us 

 takes place towards the end of November, and ceases early in the 

 spring. Last winter we had in Selborne high wood about an hundred 

 of these doves ; but in former times the flocks were so vast, not 

 only with us but all the district round, that on mornings and 

 evenings they traversed the air, like rooks, in strings, reaching for a 

 mile together. When they thus rendezvoused here by thousands, if 

 they happened to be suddenly roused from their roost-trees on an 

 evening, 



" Their rising all at once was like the sound 

 Of thunder heard remote" 



It will by no means be foreign to the present purpose to add, that 

 I had a relation in this neighbourhood who made it a practice, for a 

 time, whenever he could procure the eggs of a ring-dove, to place 

 them under a pair of doves that were sitting in his own pigeon- 



* Some old sportsmen say that the main part of these flocks used to withdraw 

 as soon as the heavy Christmas frosts were over. 



