NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBOKNE* 
59 
but I have good reason to suspect since that they may come to us from 
the westward ; because I hear^ from very good authority, that they 
breed on Dartmoor ; and that they forsake that wild district about the 
time that our visitors appear, and do not return till late in the spring. 
I have taken a great deal of pains about your salicaria and mine, 
with a white stroke over its eye and a tawny rump. I have surveyed 
it alive and dead, and have procured several specimens, and am 
perfectly persuaded myself (and trust you will soon become convinced 
of the same) that it is no more nor less than the passer arundinaceus 
minor of Eay. This bird, by some means or other, seems to be 
entirely omitted in the British Zoology ; and one reason probably was 
because it is so strangely classed in Ray, who ranges it among his 
picis offines. It ought no doubt to have gone among his aviculce caudd 
unicolore, and among your slender-billed small birds of the same 
division. Linnaeus might with great propriety have put it into his 
genus of motacilla ; and motacilla salicaria of his fauna suecica seems 
to come the nearest to it. It is no uncommon bird, haunting the sides 
of ponds and rivers where there is covert, and the reeds and sedges of 
moors. The country people in some places call it the sedge-bird. It 
sings incessantly night and day during the breeding-time, imitating the 
note of a sparrow, a swallow, a sky-lark ; and has a strange hurrying 
manner in its song. My specimens correspond most minutely to the 
description of your fen salicaria shot near Revesby.* Mr. Ray has 
given an excellent characteristic of it when he says, Rostrum et pedes 
in hdc aviculd multo mojores sunt qudm p)ro corporis rationed See 
letter. May 29, 1769. (Preceding letter, xxiv.) 
I have got you the egg of an oedicnemus, or stone-curlew, w^hicli w^as 
picked up in a fallow on the naked ground ; there were two, but the 
finder inadvertently crushed one with his foot before he saw them. 
When I wrote to you 
last year on reptiles, I 
wish I had not forgot to 
mention the faculty that 
snakes have of stinking 
se defendendo. I knew 
a gentleman who kept 
a tame snake, which was 
in its person as sweet as 
any animal while in good 
humour and unalarmed ; 
but as soon as a stranger, 
or a dog or cat, came in, 
it fell to hissing, and 
filled the room with such 
nauseous effluvia as ren- 
dered it hardly supportable. Thus the squnck, or stonck, of Ray's 
" Synop. Quadr." is an innocuous and sweet animal ; but, when pressed 
* This is the Salicaria jphragmitis, the sedge warbler, sedge bird, or Reed fauvette 
of British authors. It is by far the most common and generally distributed of our 
native species of Salicaria, and is distinct from that referred to in preceding letters 
STONE curlew's EGG, 
