80 
NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
history, I should pass over this query just as a sly commentator 
does over a crabbed passage in a classic ; but common ingenu- 
ousness obliges me to confess, not without some degree of shame, 
that I only reasoned in that case from analogy. For as all other 
autumnal birds migrate from the northward to us, to partake of 
our milder winters, and return to the northward again when the 
rigorous cold abates, so I concluded that the ring-ousels did the 
same, as well as their congeners the fieldfares ; and especially as 
ring-ousels are known to haunt cold mountainous countries : 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 spe- 
cimens ; and am perfectly persuaded myself (and trust you will 
soon be convinced of the same) that it is no more nor less than 
the passer arundinaceus minor of Ray. 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 qffines. It ought no doubt 
to have gone among his aviculce caudd unicolore, and among your 
slender-billed small birds of the same division. Linnseus might 
with great propriety have put it into his genus of motacilla j and 
the 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 character- 
istic of it when he says, " Rostrum et pedes in hac avicula multo, 
majores sunt quam pro corporis ratione." See letter May 29 
1769. 
I have got you the egg of an oadicnemus, or stone-curlew, 
which was picked up in a fallow on the naked ground : there 
* The sedge reedling, described in a former note. — Ed. 
