NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 59 



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 salicaria kind, 

 and, I think, was soft-billed. It was no parus; and was 

 too long and too big for the golden-crowned wren, ap- 

 pearing most like the largest willow wren. It hung some- 

 times with its 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 cedicnemus? 

 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, 3 

 "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. 4 



1 I agree with Mr. Harting (ed. Selbome, p-54 note) that this bird must have 

 been a Chiffchaff (Phylloscopus minor), a species which must occasionally winter 

 with us in mild seasons. Mr. Robert Read recently presented to the British 

 Museum a specimen obtained by him near Taunton on the I2th of December 

 i89i.-[R. B. S.] 



2 CEdicnemus cedicnemus (Linnaeus), called also CEdicnemus scolopax (Scop.), 

 and CEdicnemus crepitans (Temm.) by modem authors. [R. B. S.] 



3 During the autumn migration they are sometimes shot on the sea-shore. 

 [R. B. S.] 



4 Mr. Harting says (ed. p. 55 note) that the stomachs of specimens examined 

 by him were filled chiefly with the remains of beetles, but in one the remains 

 of a long-tailed Field-Mouse were found. Some living birds which Dr. Gunther 

 and I kept alive in our gardens, were principally fed on raw meat and the 

 bodies of Sparrows. Gilbert White, though duly noting the perfect assimila- 

 tion of their plumage to their surroundings, does not allude to the curious method 



