OF SELBORNE 35 



it was the thrush kind that searched it out. The root of the arum 

 is remarkably warm and pungent. 



Our flocks of female chaffinches have not yet forsaken us. 

 The blackbirds and thrushes are very much thinned down by 

 that fierce weather in January. 



In the middle of February I discovered, in my tall hedges, a 

 little bird that raised my curiosity : it was of that yellow-green 

 colour that belongs to the salicana kind, and, I think, was soft- 

 billed. It was no panis ; and was too long and too big for the 

 golden-crowned wren, appearing most like the largest willow- 

 wren. It hung sometimes with it's back downwards, but never 

 continuing one moment in the same place. I shot at it, but it 

 was so desultory that I missed my aim. 1 



I wonder that the stone curlew, charadrius oedicnemus, should 

 be mentioned by the writers as a rare bird : it abounds in all the 

 campaign parts of Hampshire and Sussex, and breeds, I think, 

 all the summer, having young ones, I know, very late in the 

 autumn. Already they begin clamouring in the evening. They 

 cannot, I think, with any propriety, be called, as they are by Mr. 

 Ray, "circa aquas versantes" ; for with us, by day at least, they 

 haunt only the most dry, open, upland fields and sheep walks, 

 far removed from water : what they may do in the night I 

 cannot say. Worms are their usual food, but they also eat toads 

 and frogs. 



I can show you some good specimens of my new mice. Linnaeus 

 perhaps, would call the species mus minimus. 



LETTER XVI. 



TO THE SAME. 



Selborne, April 18, 1768. 

 DEAR SIR, 



THE history of the stone curlew, charadrius oedicnemus, is as follows. 

 It lays it's eggs, usually two, never more than three, on the bare 

 ground, without any nest, in the field ; so that the countryman, 

 in stirring his fallows, often destroys them. The young run 



] [This may have been the chiffchaff (Phylloscopus rufus, Bechst.), as Mr. 

 Harting has suggested in his edition ; this bird occasionally winters in England. 

 Or it may have been a stray siskin (Chrysomitris spinus^ L. ), a bird more apt to hang 

 with its back downwards than the chiffchaff, and one which White does not seem 

 to have known well. See note on Letter VIII. to Barrington. By desultory White 

 means to describe the restless and apparently capricious movements of the bird.] 



