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OBSERVATIONS ON 
Birds are much influenced in their choice of food by- 
colour, for though white currants are a much sweeter fruit 
than red, yet they seldom touch the former till they have 
devoured every bunch of the latter. 
Redstarts, flycatchers, and blackcaps arrive early in 
April. If these little delicate beings are birds of passage 
(as we have reason to suppose they are, because they are 
never seen in winter) how could they, feeble as they seem, 
bear up against such storms of snow and rain, and make 
their way through such meteorous turbulences, as one 
should suppose would embarrass and retard the most 
hardy and resolute of the winged nation ? Yet they 
keep their appointed times and seasons ; and in spite of 
frost and winds return to their stations periodically, as if 
they had met with nothing to obstruct them. The with- 
drawing and appearance of the short- winged summer birds 
is a very puzzling circumstance in natural history ! ^ 
When the boys bring me wasps' nests, my bantam fowls 
fare deliciously, and when the combs are pulled to pieces,, 
devour the young wasps in their maggot state with the 
highest glee and delight. Any insect-eating bird would do 
the same; and therefore I have often wondered that the 
accurate Mr. Ray should call one species of buzzard Buteo 
apivorous sive vespivorous, the honey buzzard, because some 
combs of wasps happened to be found in one of their nests. 
The combs were conveyed thither doubtless for the sake of 
the maggots or nymphs, and not for their honey: since 
none is to be found in the combs of wasps. Birds of prey 
occasionally feed on insects : thus have I seen a tame kite 
picking up the female ants full of eggs with much satis- 
faction. 
^ That redstarts, flycatchers, blackcaps, and other slender-billed in- 
sectivorous small birds, particularly the swallow tribe, make their first 
appearance very early in the spring, is a well-known fact ; though the 
flycatcher is the latest of them aU in its visit (as this accurate naturalist 
observes in another place), for it is never seen before the month of May. 
If these delicate creatures come to us from a distant country, they will 
probably be exposed in their passage, as White justly remarks, to much 
greater difficulties from storms and tempests than their feeble powers 
