54 
NATURAL HISTORY 
was surprised to find that their bills, l^gS; 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 snow- 
flake, the Emheriza nivalis of the British Zoology ? "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 was come to its full 
colours. In about a year it began to look dingy; and, 
blackening every succeeding year, it became coal-black at 
tho 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 obser- 
ving' 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 chafiinches 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, appear- 
ing 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. 
* By Salicaria, White evidently means the willow-wren group, and 
not the reed warblers, to which the generic term Salicaria is often ap- 
plied. — Ed. 
2 It was probably the Chiff-chaff, although the date mentioned would 
be an unusually early one at which to find this hardy little bird here. In 
1872, the Chiff-chaff was seen at Torquay on the 2nd March, and at 
Chudleigh and Taunton on the 9th of that month. — Ed. 
