THE BUNTINGS AND WAGTAILS. 
37 
known, at least, that the swallows and the fieldfares do con- 
gregate with a gentle twittering before they make their respective 
departure. 
You may depend on it that the 
bunting, emberiza miliaria, does not 
leave this country in the winter. In 
January, 1767, I saw several dozen 
of them, in the midst of a severe frost, 
among the bushes on the downs 
near Andover. In our woodland-en- 
closed district it is a rare bird.* 
Wagtails, both white and yellow,t 
are with us all the winter. Quails crowd to our southern coast, 
and are often killed in numbers by people that go on purpose. 
Mr StiUingfleet, in his tracts, says that, " if the wheatear 
((Bnanthe) does not quit England, it certainly shifts places; for 
about harvest they are not to be found, where there was before 
* The " common" or corn-buuting (^emberiza miliaria) is plentiful enough throughout the year 
in Surrey, and most parts of the south of ;England, frequenting the arable lands. Mr. Knapp 
says of it, " I witnessed this morning a rick of barley entirely stripped of its thatching, which 
the bunting had effected, by seizing the end of the straw and deliberately drawing it out, to search 
for any grain that might yet remain. The sparrow and other birds will burrow in the stack and 
pilfer the corn ; but the deliberate operation of unroofing the edifice appears to be peculiar to 
this bunting." — Ed. 
t By " yellow" Mr. White here evidently intends the gray-wagtail of the books {motacilla 
cinerea, boarula of Linnaeus), a species partly yellow, but which in general ronly appears in the 
southern counties during the winter, and of which no instance that I am aware of has been 
hitherto recorded of its having been known to breed in the south of England. 1 once, however, 
observed a pair of them upon Penge-common, Kent, at the end of May, that evidently had a nest 
in the neighbourhood, though 1 was unsuccessful in my repeated endeavours to find it. The 
common field-wagta.il ^{motacilla-budytes flavissima)t or "yellow-wagtail" of most writers, but 
which is now with propriety arranged in a separate minimum division, invariably migrates, a 
fact of which (independently of their disappearance) I have the best possible evidence, having 
noticed a small flock of them, early one morning in September, upon the sands in the isle of 
Jersey, which had apparently not long alighted from a journey across the channel, and had pro- 
bably taken their departure from some part of the west of England. They re-appear lin the 
southern counties about April. An allied continental species, the blue-headed field-wagtail 
(motacilla-budytes neglecta), differing considerably in the colour of its head, but otherwise very 
similar to the flaoissima, has lately been detected by Mr. Doubleday, in Essex, the attention of 
that gentleman having been aroused by observing a pair of them in the month of October, som* 
time after the common kind had left the country, from which, indeed, it would seem, that the 
motacilla-budytes neglecta departs later in the season. Both are handsome, but songless birds, 
in which latter they differ from the more typical motacill<B (of which our common pied species 
may be considered a characteristic example), which do sing a little. They differ also in their 
habits, frequenting corn-fields and enclosures rather than the vicinity of water, and generally 
abound very much where sheep are pastured. The general character of their colouring is different, 
and they have the long hind claw and very much the form and manners of the typical pipits 
{anthus)t to which genus they are considerably allied. All these birds undergo two general 
changes of feather in the year. The field-wagtaiPs summer garb is merely much brighter than 
that of winter; but the summer plumage of all the typical motacillcB exhibits a black throat, and 
their winter dress a white one (as in many of their plovers), besides which they otherwise more 
or less differ, according to the species. — Ed. 
