92 



HERBERT ON BIRDS. 



reputation as a naturalist. This we might have inferred, independent 

 of the valuable notes before us, from his previous experiments on 

 flowers published in the Horticultural Transactions, particularly those 

 on hybrids and parasites. From the notes to White we shall now select 

 a few specimens to prove that we have not overrated Mr. Herbert's 

 talents. The first we extract, we think very excellent ; but though it 

 proves the willow wrens do not eat cherries, it does not prove that they 

 do not eat other fruit, which they certainly do. 



" Food of the Willow Wrens This sentence has probably been the cause of the 



murder of numbers of these most innocent little birds, which are in truth peculiarly the 

 gardener's friends. My garden men were in the habit of catching the hens on their 

 nests in the strawberry beds, and killing them, under the impression that they made 

 great ravage among the cherries ; yet I can assert that they never taste the fruit, nor 

 can those which are reared from the nest in confinement, be induced to touch it. They 

 check the aphides which are injurious to the fruit trees, and being very pugnacious little 

 birds, I have sometimes seen them take post in a cherry tree and drive away every bird 

 that attempted to enter it, though of greater size and strength. The birds which are mista- 

 ken for them are the young of the garden-warbler (Sylvia hortensis,) with which Mr. 

 White was not acquainted ; as it is not mentioned by him and does not appear in his list 

 of summer birds ; yet I am confident that they will be found plentifully at Selborne, 

 when the Kentish cherries are ripe. They attacked my cherries in great numbers when 

 1 lived in the south of Berkshire, not much more than twenty miles from Selborne. 

 These young birds have a strong tinge of yellow on the sides, which disappears after the 

 moult, and gives them very much the appearance of the yellow wren when seen upon 

 trees, though they are larger and stouter, and in habits very much resemble the black- 

 caps, with whom they are associated in the plunder of cherry-trees. I have never seen 

 the pettychaps in Yorkshire until the cherries are ripe, when they immediately make 

 their appearance and attack the Kentish cherry particularly, being so greedy that I 

 have often taken them with a fishing rod tipped with birdlime while they were pulling at 

 the fruit. The moment they have finished the last Kentish cherries they disappear for 

 the season. If they finish the cherries in the morning, they are gone before noon. I 

 am persuaded that they appear and disappear in the same manner at Selborne, and 

 are probably to be found there only while the cherries are ripe, which accounts for Mr. 

 White's having mistaken them for yellow wrens when he saw them in the fruit trees. 

 They breed in the market gardens about London, and I imagine that, as the cherries 

 ripen, they migrate from garden to garden in pursuit of them. I am told that near 

 London they remain late enough to attack the elder berries, of which the fruit eating 

 warblers are very fond, but in Yorkshire they do not even wait for the later cherries. 

 The number of these visitants depends upon the crop of early cherries. This year the 

 crop having nearly failed, I saw but two of them, which appeared on the 15th of July 

 and were not seen after the 17th. The blackcap remains eating the currants and ho- 

 ney-suckle berries ; they are both in confinement very fond of ripe pears, and 1 believe 

 in the south of England they peck some of them before their departure. Mr. White 

 does not seem to have had any reason for putting the Latin name Motacilla trochilus to 

 these distinct birds. There is no cause for believing that Linnaeus confounded them, 

 though he only named one of them and overlooked the others. Indeed the wood wren 

 could not be confounded with the yellow wren by any person of the least discrimination. 



