of Selborne 41 



A few years ago I saw a cock bullfinch in a cage, 

 which had been caught in the fields after it had come 

 to its full colours. In about a year it began to look 

 dingy ; and, blackening every succeeding year, it became 

 coal-black at the end of four. Its chief food was hemp- 

 seed. Such influence has food on the colour of 

 animals ! The pied and mottled colours of domesticated 

 animals are supposed to be owing to high, various, and 

 unusual food. 



I had remarked, for years, that the root of the cuckoo- 

 pint {aruni) was frequently scratched out of the dry 

 banks of hedges, and eaten in severe snowy weather. 

 After observing, with some exactness, myself, and get- 

 ting others to do the same, we found it was the thrush 

 kind that 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 pants ; and was 

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

 ing most like the largest willow-wren. It hung sometimes 

 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. 



I wonder that the stone curlew, charadrtus oedicnemus^ 

 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, ^'^ 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. 



