160 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



them in the month of October all the way from Chichester to 

 Lewes wherever there were any shrubs and covert : but not one 

 bird of this sort came within my observation. I only saw a few 

 larks and whinchats, some rooks, and several kites and buzzards. 



About midsummer a flight of crossbills comes to the pine- 

 groves about this house, but never make any long stay.* 



The old tortoise, that I have mentioned in a former letter, 

 still continues in this garden ; and retired under ground about 

 the twentieth of November, and came out again for one day on 

 the thirtieth : it lies now buried in a wet swampy border under 

 a wall facing to the south, and is enveloped at present in mud 

 and mire ! 



* From the above passage it would seem that, at least in this instance, there was some regu- 

 larity in the appearance of this curious bird, though, generally speaking, it is decidedly a most 

 uncertain visitant. Great numbers of them were dispersed over the south of England last year 

 (1835), and I had then an opportunity of making myself personally acquainted with their habits. 

 1 obtained one, about the latter end of June, alive and in its nestling plumage, which consider- 

 ably resembles that of the hen siskin and redpole linnets, to which birds the crossbills are in 

 fact much more nearly allied than is generally supposed, though larger, and of a stouter make, 

 than either. It was of a greenish colour, longitudinally streaked with a darker tint, precisely as 

 in those birds, and exhibiting even the same paler line along the centre of the back, and a similar 

 black spot under the chin. This plumage is changed early in autumn, and is replaced, in the 

 male, by a garb of considerable beauty, bright glowing red upon the crown, rump, and tbe whole 

 under parts, and reddish dusky on the remainder, the former increasing in intensity as the 

 season advances ; the female is a good deal of the colour of a hen greenfinch. After breeding 

 (which takes place extremely early in the season), the tints of the male fade very considerably, 

 so that the old males, when they first appear in our latitudes early in summer, are of a dull 

 orange or saffron hue, which has commonly but erroneously been considered the fixed colour of 

 the mature cock bird ; it is exchanged when they moult for the same bright red that is assumed 

 by the young. In confinement, however, a dull orange colour, here and there stained a little 

 with dingy red, is all they assume, whence probably may have originated the mistake already 

 adverted to; this tends also, in some degree, to intimate their affinity with the redpole linnets. 

 The notes of the crossbill have much of the carduelis character, more particularly its call-note, 

 which is uttered with the same peculiar swing of the body ; its ordinary chirp is a loud and sharp 

 ehipp, sometimes repeated two or three times successively, and its proper song is unmusical and 

 squeaking, though it often warbles or records to itself in a more pleasing strain. There is some- 

 thing very sagacious in its aspect, and in captivity it is an extremely lively, active' species, fond of 

 picking every thing to pieces that comes in its way, and making all possible use of its powerful 

 bill, the structure of which, though considered by Buffon as a deformity, a " freak of nature," is 

 one of the most admirable contrivances, one of the most beautified adaptations of means to end, 

 to be found throughout the whole range of animated nature: the uses of this organ, however, 

 have in recent publications been so often well described as to render it quite necessary to repeat 

 them here. In a captive state, it is much in the habit of running over the wires of its cage, 

 employing the bill as a prehensile instrument, in the manner of a parrot; though it is true that 

 the siskins and redpoles do the same, notwithstanding that they are less able to hold. All these 

 birds, too, agree in making great use of the foot, whilst picking their food ; and there are a variety 

 of minor accordances among them, sufficiently obvious to those who have studied them alive, 

 which cannot be so well expressed on paper. Four species of crossbills exist, of which the Ame- 

 rican has usually been considered identical with our own, but it is much smaller, and differs in 

 the relative proportion of parts. Another North American species, the loxia leucoptera, with a 

 wing like that of a chaffinch, has onoe occurred in Ireland, and also in Germany ; and the fourth 

 species, the parrot crossbill (f.. psittacina], is numbered among the rarest occasional visitants to 

 this country ; it is remarkable for tne size and power of its strong bill, which has a very parrot- 

 like appearance. One was killed last autumn in the New Forest. ED. 



