LETTER XI 



TO THE SAME 



SELBORNE, September ^tk, 1767. 



[I HAD the favour of your letter ; and am much obliged to 

 you for the candour with which you received my trifling 

 observations.] 



It will not be without impatience that I shall wait for 

 your thoughts with regard to the falco ; as to its weight, 

 breadth, &c., I wish I had set them down at the time : 

 but, to the best of my remembrance, it weighed two 

 pounds and eight ounces, and measured, from wing to 

 wing, thirty-eight inches. Its cere and feet were yellow, 

 and the circle of its eyelids a bright yellow. As it had 

 been killed some days, and the eyes were sunk, I could 

 make no good observation on the colour of the pupils and 

 the irides} 



The most unusual birds I ever observed in these parts 

 were a pair of hoopoes (upupa), which came several years 

 ago in the summer, and frequented an ornamented piece 

 of ground, which joins to my garden, for some weeks. 

 They used to march about in a stately manner, feeding in 



1 Pennant apparently determined that the specimen sent by Gilbert White 

 was a Peregrine falcon, and the latter acquiesced in this identification. (See his 

 Letter LVII to Daines Barrington.) It was probably a young Peregrine in 

 striped plumage, and if the iris had been yellow, the colour would not have 

 escaped White's observation, even if ' the eyes were sunk.' The note by the 

 author that the ' circle of its eyelids ' was ' a bright yellow ' seems not unnaturally 

 to have puzzled some of the naturalists who have edited his letters, as it is not 

 a correct description of the Peregrine's eyelid, and was probably due to the stale 

 condition of the specimen when Gilbert White first examined it. [R. B. S.] 



