226 NATURAL HISTORY OP SELBORNE. 



LETTER XLIX. To THE HON. DAINES BARRINGTON. 



Selborne, May 7, 1779. 



IT is now more than forty years that I have paid some attention 

 to the ornithology of this district, without being able to exhaust 

 the subject : new occurrences still arise as long as any enquiries 

 are kept alive. 



In the last week of last month five of those most rare birds, 

 too uncommon to have obtained an English name, but known to 

 naturalists by the terms of himantopus, or 

 loripes, and charadrius himantopus, were 

 shot upon the verge of Frinsham-pond, a 

 large lake belonging to the bishop of Win- 

 chester, and lying between Wolmer-forest, 

 and the town of Farnham, in the county of 

 Surrey. The pond keeper says there were 

 three brace in the flock ; but that, after he 

 had satisfied his curiosity, he suffered the 

 sixth to remain unmolested. One of these 

 specimens I procured, and found the length Black Win s ed stm. 

 of the legs to be so extraordinary, that, at first sight, one might 

 have supposed the shanks had been fastened on to impose on the 

 credulity of the beholder ; they were legs in caricatura ; and had 

 we seen such proportions on a Chinese or Japan screen we should 

 have made large allowances for the fancy of the draughtsman. 

 These birds are of the plover family, and might with propriety 

 be called the stilt plovers. Brisson, under that idea, gives them 

 the apposite name of Vechasse. My specimen, when drawn and 

 stuffed with pepper, weighed only four ounces and a quarter, 

 though the naked part of the thigh measured three inches and a 

 half, and the legs four inches and a half. Hence we may safely 

 assert that these birds exhibit, weight for inches, incomparably 

 the greatest length of legs of any known bird. The flamingo, 

 for instance, is one of the most long legged birds, and yet it 

 bears no manner of proportion to the himantopus ; for a cock 

 flamingo weighs, at an average, about four pounds avoirdupois; 

 and his legs and thighs measure usually about twenty inches. 

 But four pounds are fifteen times and a fraction more than four 



