THE SWALLOW. 
161 
Here is a large rookery round this house, the inhabitants of 
which seem to get their livelihood very easily ; for they spend 
the greatest part of the day on their nest-trees when the weather 
is noiild. These rooks retire every evening all the winter from 
this rookery, where they only call by the way, as they are going 
to roost in deep woods : at the dawn of day they always revisit 
their nest-trees, and are preceded a few minutes by a flight of 
daws, that act, as it were, as their harbingers. 
I am, &c. 
LETTER XVIIL To the Hon. DAINES BARRINGTON. 
DEAR SIR, Selborne, Jan. 29, 1774. 
The house-swallow, or chimney-swallow, is undoubtedly the first 
comer of all the British hirundines ;* and appears in general on 
or about the thirteenth of April, as I have remarked from many 
years' observation. Not but now and then a straggler is seen 
much earlier : and, in particular, when I was a boy I observed 
a swallow for a whole day together on a sunny warm Shrove 
Tuesday ; which day could not fall out later than the middle of 
March, and often happened early in February. 
It is worth remarking that these birds are seen first about 
lakes and mill-ponds ; and it is also very particular, that if these 
early visitors happen to find frost and snow, as was the case of 
the two dreadful springs of 1770 and 1771, they immediately 
withdraw for a time. A circumstance this much more in favour 
of hiding than migration ; since it is much more probable that a 
bird should retire to its hybernaculum just at hand than return 
for a week or two only to warmer latitudes. 
The swaUow, though called the chimney- swallow, by no means 
builds altogether in chimneys, but often within barns and out- 
houses against the rafters ; and so she did in Virgil's time : 
Antd 
Garrula quam tignis nidos suspendat hirundo." 
In Sweden she builds in barns, and is called ladu swala, the 
barn-swallow. Besides, in the warmer parts of Europe there are 
no chimneys to houses except they are English-built : in these 
; * I think the bank-swallow usually precedes it, which species often arrives towards the latter 
end of March.— Ed. 
M 
