OF SELBOENE 87 



wren, that shadow of a bird, braves our severest frosts without 

 availing himself of houses or villages, to which most of our 

 winter birds crowd in distressful seasons, while this keeps aloof 

 in fields and woods ; but perhaps this may be the reason why 

 they may often perish, and why they are almost as rare as any 

 bird we know.^ 



I have no reason to doubt but that the soft-billed birds, which 

 winter with us, subsist chiefly on insects in their aurelia state.^ 

 All the species of wagtails in severe weather haunt shallow 

 streams near their spring-heads, where they never freeze ; and, 

 by wading, pick out the aurelias of the genus of ^ Phryganeae, &c. 



Hedge-sparrows frequent sinks and gutters in hard weather, 

 where they pick up crumbs and other sweepings : and in mild 

 weather they procure worms, which are stirring every month in 

 the year, as any one may see that will only be at the trouble of 

 taking a candle to a grass-plot on any mild winter's night. Red- 

 breasts and wrens in the winter haunt out-houses, stables, and 

 bams, where they find spiders and flies that have laid themselves 

 up during the cold season. But the grand support of the soft- 

 billed birds in winter is that infinite profusion of aureliw of the 

 lepidoptera ordo, which is fastened to the twigs of trees and their 

 trunks ; to the pales and walls of gardens and buildings ; and is 

 found in every cranny and cleft of rock or rubbish, and even in 

 the ground itself. 



Every species of titmouse winters with us ; they have what I 

 call a kind of intermediate bill between the hard and the soft, 

 between the Linnaean genera of fiingiUa and motacilla. One 

 species alone spends it's whole time in the woods and fields, 

 never retreating for succour in the severest seasons to houses and 

 neighbourhoods ; and that is the delicate long-tailed titmouse, 

 which is almost as minute as the golden-crowned wren : but the 

 blue titmouse, or nun (pants cceruleus), the cole-mouse (pants 

 ater), the great black-headed titmouse (Jringillago), and the 

 marsh titmouse (pants palustris), all resort, at times, to buildings ; 

 and in hard weather particularly. The great titmouse, driven 

 by stress of weather, much frequents houses ; and, in deep snows, 

 I have seen this bird, while it hung with it's back downwards (to 



' [It is now a well-known fact that this minute bird, though resident in small 

 numbers, migrates to our eastern shores in vast numbers every autumn.] 



2 [The truth of this conjecture, which is amplified in the next paragraph, has 

 recently been remarkably confirmed by experiments made by Prof. Poul^on. See 

 Report of British Association for 1898.] 



' See Derham'% Physico-theology , p. 235. 



