184 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 



adds, which I was not aware of, that often there were 

 among them little parties of small blue doves, which he 

 calls rockiers. The food of these numberless emigrants 

 was beech-mast and some acorns ; and particularly barley, 

 which they collected in the stubbles. But of late years, 

 since the vast increase of turnips, that vegetable has fur- 

 nished a great part of their support in hard weather ; and 

 the holes they pick in these roots greatly damage the crop. 

 From this food their flesh has contracted a rancidness 

 which occasions them to be rejected by nicer judges of 

 eating, who thought them before a delicate dish. They 

 were shot not only as they were feeding in the fields, and 

 especially in snowy weather, but also at the close of the 

 evening, by men who lay in ambush among the woods and 

 groves to kill them as they came in to roost. 1 These are 

 the principal circumstances relating to this wonderful 

 internal migration, which with us takes place towards the 

 end of November, and ceases early in the spring. Last 

 winter we had in Selborne high wood about an hundred 

 of these doves ; but in former times the flocks were so vast, 

 not only with us but all the district round, that on mornings 

 and evenings they traversed the air, like rooks, in strings, 

 reaching for a mile together. When they thus rendezvoused 

 here by thousands, if they happened to be suddenly roused 

 from their roost-trees on an evening, 



" Their rising all at once was like the sound 

 Of thunder heard remote." 



It will by no means be foreign to the present purpose 

 to add, that I had a relation in this neighbourhood who 

 made it a practice, for a time, whenever he could procure 

 the eggs of a ring-dove, to place them under a pair of 

 doves that were sitting in his own pigeon-house ; hoping 

 thereby, if he could bring about a coalition, to enlarge 

 his breed, and teach his own doves to beat out into the 



1 Some old sportsmen say that the main part of these flocks used to with- 

 draw as soon as the heavy Christmas frosts were over. [G. W.] 



