HOUSE-MARTINS. Ill 



their quarters at this late season of the year, to 

 the other side of the northern tropic ? Or rather, 

 is it not more probable, that the next church, ruin, 

 chalk-cliff, steep covert, or perhaps sand-bank, lake, 

 or pool, (as a more northern naturalist would say,) 

 may become their hybernaculum, and afford them a 

 ready and obvious retreat ? 



We are beginning to expect our vernal migrations 

 of ringousels every week. Persons worthy of 

 credit assure me, that ringousels were seen at 

 Christmas, 1770, in the forest of Bere, on the 

 southern verge of this county. Hence we may 

 conclude, that their migrations are only internal, 

 and not extended to the continent southward, 

 if they do at first come at all from the northern 

 parts of this island only, and not from the north 

 of Europe. Come from whence they will, it is 

 plain, from the fearless disregard that they show 

 for men or guns, that they have been little 

 accustomed to places of much resort. Navigators 

 meation, that, in the Isle of Ascension, and other 

 such desolate districts, birds are so little acquainted 

 with the human form, that they settle on men's 

 shoulders, and have no more dread of a sailor 

 than they would have of a goat that was grazing. 

 A young man at Lewes, in Sussex, assured me, 

 that about seven years ago, ringousels abounded 

 so about that town in the autumn, that he killed 

 sixteen himself in one afternoon : he added farther, 

 that some had appeared since in every autumn ; 

 but he could not find that any had been observed 

 before the season in which he shot so many. I 

 myself have found these birds in little parties in 

 the autumn cantoned all along the Sussex downs, 

 wherever there were shrubs and bushes, from 

 Chichester to Lewes ; particularly in the autumn 

 of 1770. 



