54 NATURAL HISTORY 



was surprised to find that their bills, legs, feet, and claws 

 were milk-white. 



A shepherd saw, as he thought, some white larks on a 

 down above my house this winter : were not these the snow- 

 flake, the Emberiza nivalis of the British Zoology ? No doubt 

 they were. 



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

 had been caught in the fields after it was 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 hempseed. 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 (Arum) was frequently scratched out of the dry banks 

 of hedges, and eaten in severe snowy weather. After obser- 

 ving with some exactness, myself, and getting 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, 1 

 and, I think, was soft-billed. It was no Parus ; and was 

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

 ing most like the largest willow-wren. 2 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. 



1 By Salicaria, White evidently means the willow-wren group, and 

 not the reed warblers, to which the generic term Salicaria is often ap- 

 plied. ED. ' 



2 It was probably the Chiff-chaff, although the date mentioned would 

 be an unusually early one at which to find this hardy little bird here. In 

 1872, the Chiff-chaff was seen at Torquay on the 2nd March, and at 

 Chudleigh and Taunton on the 9th of that month. ED. 



