34 NATURAL HISTORY OT SELBORNE. 



Some birds, haunting with the missel-thrushes, and feeding 

 on the berries of the yew-tree, which 

 answered to the description of the 

 merula torquata, or ring-ouzel, were 

 lately seen in this neighbourhood. 

 I employed some people to procure 

 me a specimen, but without success. 

 See Letter VIII. 



Query Might not Canary birds be 

 naturalized to this climate, provided 



their eggs were put, in the spring, into the nests of some 

 of their congeners, as goldfinches, greenfinches, &c. ? Before 

 winter perhaps they might be hardened, and able to shift for 

 themselves.* 



About ten years ago I used to spend some weeks yearly at 

 Sunbury, which is one of those pleasant villages lying on the 

 Thames, near Hampton-court. In the autumn, I could not help 

 being much amused with those myriads of the swallow kind 

 which assemble in those parts. But what struck me most was, 

 that, from the time they began to congregate, forsaking the 

 chimneys and houses, they roosted every night in the osier-beds 

 of the aits of that river. Now this resorting towards that element, 

 at that season of the year, seems to give some countenance to the 

 northern opinion (strange as it is) of their retiring under water. 

 A Swedish naturalist is so much persuaded of that fact, that he 

 talks, in his calendar of Flora, as familiarly of the swallow's going 

 under water in the beginning of September, as he would of his 

 poultry going to roost a little before sunset.f 



An observing gentleman in London writes me word that he 

 saw an house-martin, on the twenty-third of last October, flying 

 in and out of its nest in the Borough. And I myself, on the 

 twenty-ninth of last October (as I was travelling through Oxford) 

 saw four or five swallows hovering round and settling on the roof 

 of the county hospital. 



* I have once or twice seen Canary finches flying about loose during the summer months, 

 which had of course made their escape from confinement ; but they are too unsuspicious, far 

 too easily entrapped, to stand any chance against the snares that are always laid for them. They 

 an; sure to comedown instantly to the call of a bird of their own species. A canary in the vicinity 

 of my residence was one evening observed to fly direct to a hole in a dry bank a warm, but rather 

 a singular roosting-place : it was there captured. ED. 



t The idea of a swallow being drowned seems never to have occurred to those persons who 

 imagine that this tribe of birds pass the winter, like frogs, at the bottom of pools. Independently of 

 all other considerations, their plumage would be in rather a strange condition at the time of their 

 emergence in the spring. They moult in winter. ED. 



