XY.] 
OF SELBORNE. 
49 
animals are supposed to be owing to high, various, and unusual 
food. 
I had remarked for years that tlie root of the cuckoo-piut 
{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 
ariwi is remarkably warm and pungent. 
Our flocks of female cliaffinches 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 i\o par us ; 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 dow^nwards, 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 oedicnemiis, should 
be mentioned by 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, with any propriety be called, as they are 
by Mr. Eay, dwellers about streams or ponds, circa aquas 
versaiites ; for with us, by day at least, they haunt only the most 
dry, open, upland fields and sheep walks, far removed from water ; 
what they may do in the night I cannot say. Worms are their 
usual food, but they also eat toads and frogs. 
I can show you some good specimens of my new mice. Lin- 
naeus, perhaps, would call the species Mus minimus. 
