108 
NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
The song of the redstart is superior, though somewhat like 
that of the white-throat : some birds have a few more notes than 
others. Sitting very placidly on the top of a tall tree in a village, 
the cock sings from morning to night: he affects neighbour- 
hoods, and avoids solitude, and loves to build in orchards and 
about houses ; with us he perches on the vane of a tall maypole.* 
The fly-catcher is of all our summer birds the most mute and 
the most famihar ; it also appears the last of any. It builds in a 
vine, or a sweetbriar, against the wall of a house, or in the hole 
of a wall, or on the end of a beam or plate, and often close to the 
post of a door where people are going in and out all day long. 
This bird does not make the least pretension to song, but uses a 
little inward wailing note when it thinks its young in danger 
from cats or other annoyances : it breeds but once, and retires 
early.f 
Selborne parish alone can and has exhibited at times more 
than half the birds that are ever seen in all Sweden ; the former 
has produced more than one hundred and twenty species, the 
latter only tv/o hundred and twenty-one. Let me add also that 
* This is a habit very characteristic of the group to which the redstart naturally belongs, being 
observable also, in a greater or less degree, in the robins, the chats, and wheatears, the Ameri- 
can bluebacks {sialia)^ the ousels (petrocincla) , and several other allied genera which might be 
named, being most conspicuous in the saxicolcEy and others that inhabit open places. Redstarts 
are expert fly-catchers, and may often be seen to follow their insect prey upon the wing. — Ed. 
t The grey fl3'-catcher breeds more than once in the season, and is remarkable for the perti- 
nacity with which it returns, year after year, to the same spot, a fact which was noticed by 
Wilson in an analogous species, the pewit tyrannule {tyranyiula fusea) of North America, but 
which is only perhaps the more noticed, in these particular species, from their familiarity, as it 
is a general rule for all migratory birds to return, both in summer and winter, to the locality they 
had previously occupied, impelled probably by the same inexplicable instinct whiclf giiides a bee 
to its hive, which draws a common pigeon homeward from one extremity of Europe to another, 
and by means of which various quadrupeds have been known to return straight to their accus- 
tomed haunts, over pastures and across streams they never could have traversed before, and by 
a nearer and very different route from that by wiiich they had been removed. All birds indeed 
appear to have a regular summer home, which they return to every breeding season, this appa- 
rently being the principal law which regulates their geographical distribution: and that numerous 
species return also to their former winter habitation can likewise be proved by various recorded 
facts, such as are mentioned by Bewick in his account of the European woodsnipe; while other 
species, on the contrary, probably always remain unsettled through the winter, of which the wax- 
wing and crossl)ills, and apparently most of the fringillidcB, may be cited as characteristic ex- 
amples, these, however, being mostly, if not entirely, birds that winter in more changeable 
climates, as they even are comparatively stationary when the weather is settled. The observa- 
tions of Messrs. Herbert and Sweet show that young migratory birds of the year return to the 
place of their nativity ; nay, in one instance, would qyen have returned to confinement after a 
winter's absence, which extraordinary faot was noticed in the song pettychaps. I have been 
credibly informed of a lame redstart that for sixteen years was noticed to take up its abode in the 
same garden ; and, to remove any shadow of doubt that may yet remain on the subject, m.ay be 
adduced the following anecdote, which I lately met with in a little original work on migration, 
and which refers to the species by which these remarks were suggested : — " Fly-catchers,^' ob- 
serves the writer, 1 have known to build eight, nine, and even ten years, successively, in a little 
crevice of an old wall, not far from my dwelling. Apprehending that it was the same bird which 
