80 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



history, I should pass over this query just as a sly commentator 

 does over a crabbed passage in a classic ; but common ingenu- 

 ousness obliges me to confess, not without some degree of shame, 

 that I only reasoned in that case from analogy. For as all other 

 autumnal birds migrate from the northward to us, to partake of 

 our milder winters, and return to the northward again when the 

 rigorous cold abates, so I concluded that the ring-ousels did the 

 same, as well as their congeners the fieldfares ; and especially as 

 ring-ousels are known to haunt cold mountainous countries : but 

 I have good reason to suspect since that they may come to us 

 from the westward ; because I hear, from very good authority, 

 that they breed on Dartmoor ; and that they forsake that wild 

 district about the time that our visitors appear, and do not return 

 till late in the spring. 



I have taken a great deal of pains about your salicaria and 

 mine, with a white stroke over its eye and a tawny rump. I 

 have surveyed it alive and dead, and have procured several spe- 

 cimens ; and am perfectly persuaded myself (and trust you will 

 soon be convinced of the same) that it is no more nor less than 

 the passer arundinaceus minor of Ray. This bird, by some means 

 or other, seems to be entirely omitted in the British Zoology ; 

 and one reason probably was because it is so strangely classed 

 in Ray, who ranges it among his picis qffines. It ought no doubt 

 to have gone among his aviculce caudd unicolore, and among your 

 slender-billed small birds of the same division. Linnaeus might 

 with great propriety have put it into his genus of motacilla j and 

 the motacilla salicaria of his fauna suecica seems to come the 

 nearest to it. It is no uncommon bird, haunting the sides of 

 ponds and rivers where there is covert, and the reeds and sedges 

 of moors. The country people in some places call it the sedge- 

 bird. It sings incessantly night and day during the breeding- 

 time, imitating the note of a sparrow, a swallow, a sky-lark ; and 

 has a strange hurrying manner in its song.* My specimens 

 correspond most minutely to the description of your fen salicaria 

 shot near Revesby. Mr. Ray has given an excellent character- 

 istic of it when he says, " Rostruril et pedes in hac avicula multo, 

 majores sunt quam pro corporis ratione." See letter May 29 

 1769- 



I have got you the egg of an otdicnemus, or stone-curlew, 

 which was picked up in a fallow on the naked ground : there 



* The sedge needling, described in a former note. ED. 



