OF SELBORNE 49 



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

 down above my house this winter : were not these the 

 emberiza nivalis, the snow-flake of the Brit. Zool. ? 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 had 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 hemp- 

 seed. 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 observing, 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 remark- 

 ably 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, 

 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. 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. 



I wonder that the stone curlew, charadrius oedicnemus, 

 should be mentioned by the writers as a rare bird : it 

 abounds in all the campaign parts of Hampshire and 



