VARIOUS SPECIES OF GEESE 189 



Cambridge, that there should be no shooting of any sort of 

 game in it till the first of October, wild game of all sorts have 

 decidedly increased ; yet not so many as before fly against the 

 electric wires. This could arise from no individual experience 

 in the younger birds, whether bred there or migrated from other 

 places ; but it must be on account of some intuition or newly 

 instilled inherent caution, and it is not to be accounted for in 

 any other way. The wild-geese killed at Berkeley Castle are in 

 fine condition and excellent eating, consisting of four different 

 species, the grey lag, the white-fronted goose, the bean-goose, 

 and the pink -toed goose. I doubt myself if the latter be a 

 different species, but am inclined to attribute the more delicate 

 hue of the foot to birds only of a younger age. The hue of a 

 leg in any bird is infinitely too slight a distinction by which to 

 pronounce it a different species ; but naturalists, like every other 

 class of cognoscenti, are always inclined to establish some new 

 fact, and very often in so doing find a mare's nest. The leg of 

 an old partridge is white, and the leg of the young birds in their 

 first year of a yellowish hue ; and if you carry out the inspection 

 to the innumerable variety in leg of the barn-door fowls, and by 

 their different hues attempt to establish a different species, the 

 English language would hardly find words enough by which to 

 distinguish the breeds. People talk of two different species of 

 the fox, the common fox and the greyhound fox, founding the 

 difference on the length of limb or different growth in one and 

 the same animal. This is nonsense ; and I believe it is much on 

 the same erroneous principle as that as to the pink-toed geese. 1 

 There are different sized puppies in every litter, and the same 

 fact applies to foxes. There is also a very extraordinary change 

 in the flocks of geese that haunt the new grounds at Berkeley 

 Castle ; it is, that at a period of the winter the species congre- 

 gating there change. For instance, up to a given period, though 

 at this moment I forget the month, the flocks, with little excep- 



1 The pink-footed goose (Anser brachyrhynchus) resembles the bean- 

 goose (A. fabalis) very closely. But the feet and band on the bill of the 

 bean-goose are orange, those of the pink-footed goose are pink. ED. 



