190 The Natural History of Selborne 



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 conclusion of wheat sowing to the season of barley and 

 oats, it is not the case with us ; for larks and chaffinches, and 

 particularly 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 fieldfares 

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

 some districts more suitable to the purpose of breeding. 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 wood- 

 cock'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 dis- 

 appear sooner or later according as the warm weather comes on 

 earlier or later. For I well remember, after that dreadful winter 

 1739-40, that cold north-east winds continued to blow on through 



