BIRDS. 443 



stuffed with the most nice and tender tops of turnips. 

 These she washed and boiled, and so sat down to a 



gizzard, confirms my opinion, that it frequents corn fields, seed clover, 

 and brakes or fern, more for the sake of snails, slugs*, and other insects 



appearance of a prodigy with a degree of force that would have staggered 

 the strongest understanding, if the possibility of fraud could have been 

 clearly disproved ; and that many grave occurrences which have been 

 rejected as fictions on account of their improbability, may rest upon the 

 same foundation of truth with this singular but unimportant accident in 

 the concatenation of events, which I am well aware that nothing but its 

 entire want of importance will induce the reader to believe. W. H. 



* I have not been able to discover the bird that will eat slugs, and I 

 do not believe that a land-rail would touch one. The ruffs and reeves 

 which I have kept in confinement eat earth worms, as the lapwings also 

 do, but they will not touch a slug. I have in vain flattered myself that 

 ducks would deliver the garden from this nuisance, and have never found 

 that they would touch them. The godwit in confinement also refuses 

 them, and it is curious to observe that this very long-billed bird, which, 

 as well as the snipe and woodcock, has been said by naturalists to live 

 by suction, cannot suck at all, and will die of thirst unless it has a vessel 

 of water deep enough to enable it to immerse its bill quite to the base, or 

 broad enough to enable it to shovel up the water by placing its bill in a 

 horizontal position. It feeds freely upon barley, which it seizes with 

 the tip of the bill and by a sudden jerk it throws the grain into its throat. 

 It will fatten on barley, and bits of bread or of boiled potatoes, and will 

 scarcely eat a worm. The long bill is probably provided to enable it to 

 pick up rice and other grains or seeds of aquatic plants in flooded tracts 

 of land. Ruffs will live well in confinement on dry bread, crust and 

 crumb, cut into square bits of such size as they can swallow, and boiled 

 potatoes crumbled, and they will become marvellously fat on that food. 

 I have kept a stint for two years on bread and milk, when it died from 

 excessive fatness. The redshank in confinement is more carnivorous, and 

 eats raw beef voraciously ; and is so greedy after worms, that an old bird 

 which I winged in March, and turned loose in the room, after a very few 

 hours came across the room to take a worm from my hand. They will 

 eat bread and potatoes, but cannot be preserved without meat or worms, 

 and they consume a great quantity of food. Ruffs will eat barley when 

 hungry, but not when they can get bread or potatoes. They are however 

 so foolish, that, turned into a garden, I have known them poison them- 

 selves by eating currants, which occasioned convulsions. Copious doses 

 of sweet oil is the remedy for birds in all such cases. W. H. 



Having, since the publication of the first edition of these notes, kept 

 some ruffs, redshanks, and godwits in confinement, some observations 

 concerning them may be thought interesting. 



The birds, having been imported from Holland, were kept about two 

 months in London on a large leaded platform which was fortunately not 



