166 
NATUBAL HISTORY 
Your letter came too late for me to procure a ring-ousel 
for Mr. Tunstal during their autumnal visit } but I will 
endeavour to get him one when they call on us again in 
April. I am glad that you and that gentleman saw my 
Andalusian birds ; I hope they answered your expectation. 
Royston, or gray crows, are winter birds, that come much 
about the same time with the woodcock : they, like the 
fieldfare and redwing, have no apparent reason for migra- 
tion, for as they fare in the winter like their congeners, so 
might they, in all appearance, in the summer. Was not 
Tenant, when a boy, mistaken ? Did he not find a missel- 
thrushes nest, and take it for the nest of a fieldfare ? 
The stock-dove, or wood-pigeon^ (^CEhias, Raii), is the 
last winter bird of passage which appears with us, and is 
not seen till towards the end of November. About twenty 
years ago they abounded in the district of Selborne, and 
strings of them were seen morning and evening that reached 
a mile or more ; but since the beechen woods have been 
greatly thinned, they are much decreased in number/ The 
Thomas Allis states, not further. Along the line thus sketched out, 
and immediately to the east and south of it, the appearance of the 
nightingale, even if regular, is in most cases rare, and the bird local ; 
but further away fi-om the boundary it occurs yearly with great regu- 
larity in every county, and in some places is very numerous. Mr. More 
states that it is ' thought to have once bred near Sunderland,' and it is 
said to have been once heard in Westmoreland and also in the summer 
of 1808 near Carlisle ; but these assertions must be looked upon with 
great suspicion, particularly the last, which rests on anonymous 
authority only. Still more open to doubt are the statements of the 
nightingale's occurrence in Scotland, such as Mr. Duncan's (not on his 
own evidence, be it remarked), published by Macgillivray ('British Birds,' 
ii. p. 334) respecting a pair believed to have visited Calder Wood in 
Mid Lothian in 1826 ; or Mr. TurnbuU's (' Birds of East Lothian,' 
p. 39), of its being heard near Dalmeny Park, in the same county, in 
June, 1839. In Ireland there is no trace of this species." On the 
continent it may be observed that the nightingale has not been met with 
further north than Funen in Denmark, and the neighbourhood of 
Copenhagen. — Ed. 
^ The name wood- pigeon is generally applied to the ring-dove, Co- 
lumba palumhus. — Ed. 
^ This subject has been already noticed in Letter XLIV. to Pen- 
nant. The stock-dove breeds in parts of Hants and Sussex, although 
doubtless it is most numerous in these counties in winter. "SV^e 
