HAWFINCH. 
61 
Genu s — Coccothraustes. 
70. Coccothratistes vulgaris. Hawfinch. 
Cow-bird (Isle of Wight). 
A resident. During spring and sun:imer it is sparingly 
distributed throughout the county, but there is a consider- 
able increase in their numbers in autumn and winter. 
In the Isle of Wight it has occurred only in the 
winter. It is a species which appears to be increasing in 
all parts. 
Gilbert White in his eleventh letter to Pennant ^ says 
" Three gros-beaks appeared some years ago in my fields, 
in the winter ; one of which I shot : since that, now and 
then, one is occasionally seen in the same dead season." 
And Wise, writing a hundred years later, says that the 
New Forest hawfinches " do not stay all the year round, as 
might be expected, or, at least, only one or two pairs, 
simply because there are no hornbeams in the forest, nor 
gardens to tempt them with their fruit." 
But Mr. Meade- Waldo says that " in winter I have seen 
frequently as many as two hundred individuals collected 
together in a kind of straggling flock ... it is certainly 
very far from scarce at the present day." 
Bell writes in his edition of White's Selborne : — " It is 
a mistake to suppose that this bird is only seen in the 
depth of winter. On the 17th of August, 1859, I picked 
up on my lawn the wing and some feathers of one which 
had doubtless been killed by a cat. 
"On the 8th of April, 1867, I saw a pair of them fly 
across the lawn into an Abies Douglasii. 
* Selborne. September 9th, 1767. 
