280 PETTICHAPS. 



LETTEE CI. 



TO THE SAME. 



A EAEB, and I think a new, little bird* frequents my 

 garden, which, I have great reason to think, is the petti- 

 chaps : it is common in some parts of the kingdom ; and I 

 have received formerly several dead specimens from Gibraltar. 

 This bird much resembles the white-throat, but has a 

 more white, or rather silvery, breast and belly ; is restless 

 and active like the willow-wrens, and hops from bough to 

 bough, examining every part for food : it also runs up the 

 stems of the crown imperials, and putting its head into the 

 bells of those ilowers, sips the liquor which stands in the 

 nectarium of each petal. Sometimes it feeds on the ground 

 like the hedge-sparrow, by hopping about on the grass-plots 

 and mown walks. 



One of my neighbours, an intelligent and observing man, 

 informs me, that in the beginning of May, and about ten 

 minutes before eight o'clock in the evening, he discovered a 

 great cluster of house-swallows, thirty, at least, he supposes, 

 perching on a willow that hung over the verge of James 

 Knight's upper pond.f His attention was first drawn by 

 the twittering of^ these birds, which sat motionless in a row 

 on the bough, with their heads aU one way, and, by their 

 weight pressing down the twig, so that it nearly touched the 



" Mr. Herbert says that this kind of bird certainly was not the pettichaps, 

 which has not the manners Mr. White describes. The detail exactly answers 

 to the blue-grey, or lesser white-throat {sylvia silmella). 



+ Spallanzani says, very decidedly, that swallows retire under water at the 

 lime of their disappearance from this country ; but acknowledges that he had 

 never himself observed it, though his belief of the fact seemed certain. He 

 had performed a variety of experiments to resolve the question, if cold would 

 have the effect of producing torpidity, and confined swallows in different ways 

 under snow and ice, and in an ice-house. The result, however, was always 

 death, when the temperature and period of immersion were prolonged beyond 

 a certain period ; and the conclusion he draws is, that, at least, our species of 

 hirrnidimdie do not become torpid. — W. J. 



