WOODCOCKS, MIGRATORY. 137 



this kingdom that want to be better understood : witness those 

 vast flocks of hen chaffinches that appear with us in the winter 

 without hardly any cocks among them. Now was there a due 

 proportion of each sex, it should seem 

 very improbable that any one district 

 should produce such nunjbers of these 

 little birds; and much more when 

 only one half of the species appears : 

 therefore we may conclude that the 

 frinaillcs ccelebes, for some good pur- 

 poses, have a peculiar migration of 

 their own in which the sexes part. Nor 



should it seem so wonderful that the intercourse of sexes in this 

 species of birds should be interrupted in winter ; since in many 

 animals, and particularly in bucks and does, the sexes herd se- 

 parately, except at the season when commerce is necessary for 

 the continuance of the breed. For this matter of the chaffinches 

 see Fauna Suecica, p. 85, and Sy sterna Naturce, p. 318. I see 

 every winter vast flights of hen chaffinches, but none of cocks 



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 cer- 

 tain 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 sea- 

 son 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 expe- 

 rienced. It cannot indeed be denied but that now and then we 

 hear of a woodcock's nest, or young birds, discovered in some 



