116 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



slashed and chequered with orange buff, chestnut and 

 white being easily the first and boldest in beauty. 1 

 Bramblings are an uncommon sight anywhere in 

 England during the winter (they nest overseas) ; in 

 London I doubt whether they have been observed 

 anywhere for the last twenty or thirty years. Passer 

 montanus is a much prettier bird than Passer domesticus, 

 and easily distinguishable from it by its sleeker 

 plumage, comelier shape, chestnut head, white collar 

 round the neck, and conspicuous double wing-stripes. 

 Unlike the house-sparrow, too, he does not " affect 

 neighbourhoods." Ralph Hodgson told me he found 

 a lesser redpole's nest within a dozen miles of the 

 centre of London, and Mr. G. A. B. Dewar relates 

 in Wild Life in the Hampshire Highlands that 

 the butcher-bird and tree-sparrow nested the same 

 distance away in '98. I found my bramblings and 

 tree-sparrows less than six miles from Charing Cross, 

 and they stayed for the rest of the winter except 

 to make a migratory movement in March (si magna 

 licet) over to my side of the river within two hundred 

 yards of my house. But they failed to return in 1919-20. 

 Lastly, to write " Finis " to the winter with a 

 flourish, I have seen both the common snipe and 

 the wheatear, the one within one hundred and fifty, 

 the other two hundred, yards of my house. I 

 flushed the snipe on November 18th of last year 

 from (of all places) a cabbage field, and, giving its 

 strident cry, the bird zigzagged off in its Chinese 

 puzzle flight high up over the houses and the road 

 where the buses run. Snipe, then, are not exclusively 

 confined to marshy ground ; even the Charadriidce, 

 so specialized for particular localities, are capable of 

 changing ground. This bird was probably an immi- 

 grant from abroad, strayed from its course. The 

 wheatear I saw on ploughed land on March 13th, and 

 it was gone the next day. The wheatear has been 

 recorded two or three times, I believe, in London, but 



1 The winter plumage, of course, is more obscure than the 

 spring, the brilliant contrasts being edged over with minute 

 wavelets of brown feathers. 



