OF SELBORNE. 259 



bitants of which seem to get their livelihood very easily ; 

 for they spend the greatest part of the day on their nest- 

 trees when the weather is mild. These rooks retire 

 every evening all the winter from this rookery, where 

 they only call by the way, as they are going to roost in 

 deep woods: at the dawn of day they always revisit 

 their nest-trees, and are preceded a few minutes by a 

 flight of daws, that act, as it were, as their harbingers. 



Pam, &c. 



LETTER XVIII. 



TO THE SAME. 

 DEAR SIR, SELBORNE, Jan. 29, 1774. 



THE house swallow, or chimney swallow, is, undoubt- 

 edly, the first comer of all the British Hirundines; and 

 appears in general on or about the 13th of April, as I 

 have remarked from many years observation. Not but 

 now and then a straggler is seen much earlier : and, in 

 particular, when I was a boy, I observed a swallow for 

 a whole day together on a sunny warm Shrove Tuesday; 

 which day could not fall out later than the middle of 

 March, and often happened early in February. 



It is worth remarking that these birds are seen first 

 about lakes and mill-ponds ; and it is also very parti- 

 cular, that if these early visiters happen to find frost 

 and snow, as was the case of the two dreadful springs 

 of 1770 and 1771, they immediately withdraw 1 for a 

 time. A circumstance this, much more in favour of 

 hiding than migration ; since it is much more probable 

 that a bird should retire to its hybernaculum just at 



1 It appears to me very doubtful whether the swallows which appear 

 unseasonably for a few days do not perish when they are said to with- 

 draw. I do not see how they are identified when they are supposed to 

 reappear in due time. W. H. 



s2 



