108 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



The song of the redstart is superior, though somewhat like 

 that of the white-throat : some birds have a few more notes than 

 others. Sitting very placidly on the top of a tall tree in a village, 

 the cock sings from morning to night: he affects neighbour- 

 hoods, and avoids solitude, and loves to build in orchards and 

 about houses ; with us he perches on the vane of a tall maypole.* 



The fly-catcher is of all our summer birds the most mute and 

 the most familiar ; it also appears the last of any. It builds in a 

 vine, or a sweetbriar, against the wall of a house, or in the hole 

 of a wall, or on the end of a beam or plate, and often close to the 

 post of a door where people are going in and out all day long. 

 This bird does not make the least pretension to song, but uses a 

 little inward wailing note when it thinks its young in danger 

 from cats or other annoyances : it breeds but once, and retires 

 early, f 



Selborne parish alone can and has exhibited at times more 

 than half the birds that are ever seen in all Sweden ; the former 

 has produced more than one hundred and twenty species, the 

 latter only two hundred and twenty-one. Let me add also that 



* This is a habit very characteristic of the group to which the redstart naturally belongs, being 

 observable also, in a greater or less degree, in the robins, the chats, and wheatears, the Ameri- 

 can bluebacks (sialia), the ousels (petrocmcla) , and several other allied genera which might be 

 named, being most conspicuous in the saxicolce, and others that inhabit open places. Redstarts 

 are expert fly-catchers, and may often be seen to fallow their insect prey upon the wing. ED. 



t The grey fly-catcher breeds more than once in the season, and is remarkable for the perti- 

 nacity with which it returns, year after year, to the same spot, a fact which was noticed by 

 U'ilson in an analogous species, the pewit tyrannule (tyrannula fusea) of North America, but 

 which is only perhaps the more noticed, in these particular species, from their familiarity, as it 

 is a general rule for all migratory birds to return, both in summer and winter, to the locality they 

 had previously occupied, impelled probably by the same inexplicable instinct whicb guides a bee 

 to its hive, which draws a common pigeon homeward from one extremity of Europe to another, 

 and by means of which various quadrupeds have been known to return straight to their accus- 

 tomed haunts, over pastures and across streams they never could have traversed before, and by 

 a nearer and very different route from that by which they had been removed. All birds indeed 

 appear to have a regular summer home, which they return to every breeding season, this appa- 

 rently being the principal law which regulates their geographical distribution : and that numerous 

 species return also to their former winter habitation can likewise be proved by various recorded 

 facts, such as are mentioned by Bewick in his account of the European woodsnipe; while other 

 species, on the contrary, probably always remain unsettled through the winter, of which the wax- 

 wing and crossbills, and apparently most of thefringillidai, may be cited as characteristic ex- 

 amples, these, however, being mostly, if not entirely, birds that winter in more changeable 

 climates, as,they even are comparatively stationary when the weather is settled. The observa- 

 tions of Messrs. Herbert and Sweet show that young migratory birds of the year return to the 

 place of their nativity ; nay, in one instance, would even have returned to confinement after a 

 winter's absence, which extraordinary fact was noticed in the song pettychaps. 1 have been 

 credibly informed of a lame redstart that for sixteen years was noticed to take up its abode in the 

 same garden; and, to remove any shadow of doubt that may yet remain on the subject, may be 

 adduced the following anecdote, which I lately met with in a little original work on migration, 

 and which refers to the species by which these remarks were suggested : " Fly-catchers,'' ob- 

 serves the writer, " I have known to build eight, nine, and even ten years, successively, in a little 

 crevice of an old wall, not far from my dwelling. Apprehending that it was the same bird which 



