NATURAL HISTORY 
vast increase of turnips, that vegetable has furnished a great 
part of their support in hard weather, and the holes they 
pick in these roots greatly damage the crop. From this 
food their jBesh has contracted a rancidness which occasions 
them to be rejected by nicer judges of eating, who thought 
them before a delicate dish. They were shot not only as 
they were feeding in the fields, and especially in snowy 
weather, but also at the close of the evening, by men who 
lay in ambush among the woods and groves to kill them as 
they came in to roost.^ These are the principal circum- 
stances relating to this wonderful internal migration whicb 
with us takes place towards the end of November, and 
ceases early in the spring. Last winter we had in Selborne 
high wood about a hundred of these doves ; but in former 
times the flocks were so vast, not only with us but all the 
district round, that on mornings and evenings they traversed 
the air like rooks, in strings, reaching for a mile together. 
When they thus rendezvoused here by thousands, if they 
happened to be ^^uddenly roused from their roost trees on an 
evenings 
*' Their rising all at once was like the sonnd 
Of thunder heard remote." 
It will by no means be foreign to the present purpose to 
add that I had a relation in this neighbourhood who made it 
a practice, for a time, whenever he could procure the eggs 
of a ring-dove, to place them under a pair of Joves that were 
sitting in his own pigeon-house, hoping thereby, if he could 
bring about a coalition, to enlarge his breed, and teach his 
own doves to beat out into the woods, and to support them- 
selves by mast. The plan was plausible, but something 
always interrupted the success, for though the birds were 
usually hatched, and sometimes grew to half their size, yet 
none ever arrived at maturity. I myself have seen thesti 
foundlings in their nest displaying a strange ferocity of 
nature, so as scarcely to bear to be looked at, and snapping 
with their bills by way of menace. In short, they always 
^ Some old sportsmen say that the main part of these flocks used to 
withdraw as soon as the heavy Christmas frosts were over. — G. W. 
