BIRDS. 441 



When we came to draw it, we found the entrails so 

 soft and tender, that in appearance they might have 

 been dressed like the ropes of a woodcock. The craw 

 or crop was small and lank, containing a mucus; the 

 gizzard thick and strong, and filled with small shell 

 snails, some whole, and many ground to pieces through 

 the attrition which is occasioned by the muscular force 

 and motion of that intestine. We saw no gravel among 

 the food: perhaps the shell snails might perform the 

 functions of gravels or pebbles, and might grind one 

 another. 



Land-rails used to abound formerly, I remember, 

 in the low wet bean fields of Christian Malford in 

 North Wilts, and in the meadows near Paradise Gar- 

 dens at Oxford, where I have often heard them cry 

 crex, crex. 



The bird mentioned above weighed seven ounces 

 and a half, was fat and tender, and in flavour like the 

 flesh of a woodcock. The liver was very large and 

 delicate 9 . 



have been answered in the negative even when such birds were less 

 familiar than they now are. They are now generally known to sports- 

 men, and no sportsman would recognise in the description given by White 

 the slightest approach to the female pheasant in that peculiar condition 

 in which she is known to him as a mule bird. 



But although the idea that White's bird was a hen changing into male 

 plumage is unquestionably to be rejected so far as the pheasant is assumed 

 to be concerned in it, I would by no means reject it altogether. The gray 

 hen is no doubt equally capable with other female birds of assuming the 

 male plumage ; and although, pursued as they are by the sportsman, few 

 probably live to attain advanced age, it may have happened in one in- 

 stance that a blotched and freckled female has been shot when she had 

 partially put on the black feathers of the cock. The supposition may not 

 deserve to have much weight attached to it : yet, as the change of feathers 

 would be analogous to that which takes place in the young male in the 

 first moult, all the arguments deduced from the colours of the plumage in 

 that case would be equally applicable to this : but certainly, the naked- 

 ness of the tarsus in the young bird would incline the balance in its di- 

 rection, and leave it more probable that it, rather than an old female, was 

 the individual undergoing the change. E. T. B. 



9 Land-rails are more plentiful with us than in the neighbourhood of 

 Selborne. I have found four brace in an afternoon, and a friend of mine 



