io8 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 



me to confess, not without some degree of shame, that I 

 only reasoned in that case from analogy. For as all other 

 autumnal birds migrate from the northward to us, to partake 

 of our milder winters, and return to the northward again 

 when the rigorous cold abates, so I concluded that the ring- 

 ousels did the same, as well as their congeners the fieldfares; 

 and especially as ring-ousels are known to haunt cold 

 mountainous countries : but I have good reason to suspect 

 since that they may come to us from the westward ; because 

 I hear, from very good authority, that they breed on 

 Dartmore ; and that they forsake that wild district about 

 the time that our visitors appear, and do not return till late 

 in the spring. 1 



I have taken a great deal of pains about your salicaria 

 and mine, with a white stroke over it's eye and a tawny 

 rump. 2 I have surveyed it alive and dead, and have pro- 

 cured several specimens ; and am perfectly persuaded my- 

 self (and trust you will soon be convinced of the same) 

 that it is no more nor less than the passer arundinaceus 

 minor of Ray. This bird, by some means or other, seems 

 to be entirely omitted in the British Zoology ; and one 

 reason probably was because it is so strangely classed in 

 Ray, who ranges it among his picis affines. It ought no 

 doubt to have gone among his aviculce caudd unicolore, and 

 among your slender-billed small birds of the same division. 

 Linn&us might with great propriety have put it into his 

 genus of motadlla ; and motacilla salicaria of his fauna 

 suecica seems to come the nearest to it. It is no uncommon 

 bird, haunting the sides of ponds and rivers where there 

 is covert, and the reeds and sedges of moors. The country 



1 The Ring-ousel is a north-to-south migrant in autumn, and vice versd in 

 spring. I have seen no trace of a west-to-east migration in the autumn on our 

 southern coasts, and the influx of the species has always seemed to me to be from 

 the northward. So it was in Heligoland in 1876, and there were no arrivals from 

 the east, as was the case with the Hooded Crow (Corone comix), Great Grey 

 Shrike (Lanius excubitor), and other species. [R. B. S.] 



2 The Sedge Warbler (Ac rocephalus phragntitis), a widely-distributed species 

 in Britain during the summer, migrating in autumn to Africa, where it extends 

 eren to the southernmost parts of that continent. [R. B. S.] 



