OBSERVATIONS ON BIRDS. 305 



incongruous animals can avail themselves of each other! 

 Interest makes strange friendships. * 



WRYNECKS. These birds appear on the grass-plots and 

 walks ; they walk a little as well as hop, and thrust their bills 

 into the turf, in quest, I conclude, of ants, which are their food. 

 While they hold their bills in the grass, they draw out their 

 prey with their tongues, which are so long as to be coiled round 

 their heads. 



GROSBEAK. Mr B. shot a cock grosbeak, which he had 

 observed to haunt his garden for more than a fortnight. I 

 began to accuse this bird of making sad havock among the 

 buds of the cherries, gooseberries, and wall-fruit of all the 

 neighbouring orchards. Upon opening its crop, or craw, no 

 buds were to be seen ; but a mass of kernels of the stones of 

 fruits. Mr B. observed, that this bird frequented the spot 

 where plum trees grow ; and that he had seen it with some- 

 what hard in its mouth, which it broke with difficulty : these 

 were the stones of damsons. The Latin ornithologists call 

 this bird coccothraustes, i.e. berry-breaker, because, with its 

 large horny beak, it cracks and breaks the shells of stone 

 fruits for the sake of the seed or kernel. Birds of this sort 

 are rarely seen in England, and only in winter. { 



* Birds continually avail themselves of particular and unusual circum- 

 stances to procure their food : thus wagtails keep playing about the noses 

 and legs of cattle as they feed, in quest of flies and other insects which 

 abound near those animals ; and great numbers of them will follow close 

 to the plough to devour the worms, &c. that are turned up by that 

 instrument. The red-breast attends the gardener when digging his 

 borders; and will, with great familiarity and tameness, pick out the 

 worms almost close to his spade, as I have frequently seen. Starlings 

 and magpies very often sit on the backs of sheep and deer to pick out their 

 ticks. MARKWICK. 



f I have never seen this rare bird but during the severest cold of the 

 hardest winters ; at which season of the year, I have had in my possession 

 two or three that were killed in this neighbourhood in different years. 

 MARKWICK. 



On the second week of September, 1832, Mr Greenhow, surgeon of 

 North Shields, mentions that a flock of Egyptian geese was seen beside 

 the Tweed, at Carham, two of which, while nibbling grass on the margin 

 of the river, were shot by Ralph Stephenson, gamekeeper. ED. 



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