36 THE NATURAL HISTORY 



immediately from the egg like partridges, &c. and are withdrawn 

 to some flinty field by the dam, where they skulk among the 

 stones, which are their best security ; for their feathers are so 

 exactly of the colour of our grey spotted flints, that the most 

 exact observer, unless he catches the eye of the young bird, may 

 be eluded. The eggs are short and round ; of a dirty white, 

 spotted with dark bloody blotches. Though I might not be able, 

 just when I pleased, to procure you a bird, yet I could show 

 you them almost any day ; and any evening you may hear them 

 round the village, for they make a clamour which may be heard 

 a mile. Oedicnemus is a most apt and expressive name for them, 

 since their legs seem swoln like those of a gouty man. After 

 harvest I have shot them before the pointers in turnip-fields. ^ 



I make no doubt but there are three species of the willorv- 

 ivren : two I know perfectly ; but have not been able yet to 

 procure the third. No two birds can differ more in their notes, 

 and that constantly, than those two that I am acquainted with ; 

 for the one has a joyous, easy, laughing note ; the other a harsh 

 loud chirp. The former is every way larger, and three quarters 

 of an inch longer, and weighs two drams and an half; while the 

 latter weighs but two : so the songster is one fifth heavier than 

 the chirper. The chirper (being the first summer-bird of passage 

 that is heard, the wryneck sometimes excepted) begins his two 

 notes in the middle of March, and continues them through the 

 spring and summer till the end of August, as appears by my 

 journals. The legs of the larger of these two are flesh-coloured ; 

 of the less, black. ^ 



1 [This bird is not a curlew, which it resembles only in its cry, but is related to 

 the bustards and plovers. See also Letters XXI., XXXIII. to Pennant, LIX. to 

 Barrington, and the Observations on Nature. White's account of the stone 

 curlew is one of his best contributions to ornithology ; it was supplemented, as we 

 learn from Letter XXL, by the observations of a friend in Sussex. The observa- 

 tion of the protective colouration of the young seems to be White's own. The bird 

 is not common in the Selborne district, which is not well suited to its mode of life. 

 Even in White's day it seems to have been on the chalk downs of Sussex that 

 new observations on this bird were to be made. On the cry of the stone curlew 

 see Letter LIX. to Barrington.] 



2 [This passage is an important one in the history of British ornithology. The 

 three common species of Pkylloscopus have only been clearly distinguished since it 

 was written; (i) the chiffchaff (Z'. rufus, Bechst.), whose loud chirp {harsh seems 

 hardly appropriate), black legs and early arrival are accurately noted ; (2) the 

 willow-wren [P. trochilus, L.), slightly larger and heavier, with pale legs and 

 "laughing" note; (3) the wood-wren (/*. sibilatrix, Bechst.), which White had not 

 yet procured, the bird alluded to in Letter X. to Pennant, which makes "a 

 sibilous shivering noise in the top of tall woods", It is accurately described in 

 Letter XIX. to Pennant.] 



