112 THE NATURAL HISTORY 



kingdom that want to be better understood : witness those vast 

 flocks of hen chaffinches that appear with us in the winter 

 without hardly any cocks among them. Now was there a due 

 proportion of each sex, it should seem very improbable that any 

 one district should produce such numbers of these little birds ; and 

 much more when only one half of the species appears : therefore 

 we may conclude that the fringillce ccelebes, for some good pur- 

 poses, have a peculiar migration of their own in which the sexes 

 part. Nor should it seem so wonderful that the intercourse of 

 sexes in this species of birds should be interrupted in winter ; 

 since in many animals, and particularly in bucks and does, the 

 sexes herd separately, except at the season when commerce is 

 necessary for the continuance of the breed. For this matter of 

 the chaffinches see Fauna Suecica, p. 85, and Sy sterna Natures, p. 

 318. I see every winter vast flights of hen chaffinches, but none 

 of cocks. 



Your method of accounting for the periodical motions of the 

 British singing birds, or birds of flight, is a very probable one ; 

 since the matter of food is a great regulator of the actions and 

 proceedings of the brute creation : there is but one that can be 

 set in competition with it, and that is love. But I cannot quite 

 acquiesce with you in one circumstance when you advance that, 

 "when they have thus feasted, they again separate into small 

 " parties of five or six, and get the best fare they can within a 

 " certain district, having no inducement to go in quest of fresh- 

 " turned earth ". Now if you mean that the business of congre- 

 gating is quite at an end from the conclusion of wheat-sowing to 

 the season of barley and oats, it is not the case with us ; for larks 

 and chaffinches, and particularly linnets, flock and congregate as 

 much in the very dead of winter as when the husbandman is 

 busy with his ploughs and harrows. 



Sure there can be no doubt but that woodcocks and fieldfares 

 leave us in the spring, in order to cross the seas, and to retire to 

 some districts more suitable to the purpose of breeding. That 

 the former pair before they retire, and that the hens are forward 

 with egg, I myself, when I was a sportsman, have often experi- 

 enced. It cannot indeed be denied but that now and then we 

 hear of a woodcock's nest, or young birds, discovered in some 

 part or other of this island : but then they are always mentioned 

 as rarities, and somewhat out of the common course of things : 

 but as to redwings and fieldfares, no sportsman or naturalist has 

 ever yet, that I could hear, pretended to have found the nest or 



