OF SELBORNE 39 



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 

 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 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 

 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 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, and, I think, 

 was soft-billed. It was no parus ; and was too long and 

 too big for the golden-crowned wren, appearing 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 

 Sussex, and breeds, I think, all the summer, having young 

 ones, I know, very late in the autumn. Already they 

 begin clamouring in the evening. They cannot, I think, 



