34 
NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 
Some birds, haunting with the missel-thrushes, and feeding 
on the berries of the yew-tree, which 
answered to the description of the 
merula torquata, or ring-ouzel, were 
lately seen in this neighbourhood. 
I employed some people to procure 
me a specimen, but without success. 
See Letter VIII. 
Query — Might not Canary birds be 
naturalized to this cHmate, provided 
their eggs were put, in the spring, into th^ nests of some 
of their congeners, as goldfinches, greenfinches, &c. ? Before 
winter perhaps they might be hardened, and able to shift for 
themselves.* 
About ten years ago I used to spend some weeks yearly at 
Sunbury, which is one of those pleasant villages lying on the 
Thames, near Hampton-court. In the autumn, I could not help 
being much amused with those myriads of the swallow kind 
which assemble in those parts. But what struck me most was, 
that, from the time they began to congregate, forsaking the 
chimneys and houses, they roosted every night in the osier-beds 
of the aits of that river. Now this resorting towards that element, 
at that season of the year, seems to give some countenance to the 
northern opinion (strange as it is) of their retiring imder water. 
A Swedish naturalist is so much persuaded of that fact, that he 
talks, in his calendar of Flora, as familiarly of the swallow's going 
under water in the beginning of September, as he would of his 
poultry going to roost a little before sunset.f 
An observing gentleman in London writes me word that he 
saw an house-martin, on the twenty-third of last October, flying 
in and out of its nest in the Borough. And I myself, on the 
twenty-ninth of last October (as I was travelling through Oxford) 
saw four or five swallows hovering round and settling on the roof 
of the county hospital. 
* I have once or twice seen Canary finches flying about loose during the summer months, 
which had of course made their escape from confinement ; but they are too unsuspicious, far 
too easily entrapped, to stand any chance against the snares that are always laid for them. They 
are sure to come down instantly to the call of a bird of their own species. A canary in the vicinity 
of my residence was one evening observed to fly direct to a hole in a dry bank — a warm, but rather 
a singular roosting-place : it was there captured. — Ed. 
t The idea of a swallow being drowned seems never to have occurred to those persons who 
imagine that this tribe of birds pass the winter, like frogs, at the bottom of pools. Independently of 
all other considerations, their plumage would be in rather a strange condition at the time of their 
emergence in the spring. They moult m winter.— Ed. 
