WOODCOCKS, MIGRATORY. 137 
this kingdom that want to be better understood : witness those 
yast flocks of hen chaffinches that appear with us in the winter 
w'thout hardly any cocks among them. Now was there a due 
proportion of each sex, it should seem 
very improbable that any one district 
should produce such numbers of these 
little birds ; and much more when 
only one half of the species appears : 
therefore we may conclude that the 
fringillce ccelehes, for some good pur- 
poses, have a peculiar migration of 
J.1 ■ " 1 • 1 i A.T White-winged Chaffinch. 
their own m which the sexes part. r\ or 
should it seem so wonderful that the intercourse of sexes in this 
species of birds should be interrupted in winter ; since in many 
animals, and particularly in bucks and does, the sexes herd se- 
parately, except at the season when commerce is necessary for 
the continuance of the breed. For this matter of the chaffinches 
see Fauna Suecica, p. 85, and Sy sterna Natures, p. 318. I see 
every winter vast ffights of hen chaffinches, but none of cocks. 
Your method of accounting for the periodical motions of the 
British singing birds, or birds of flight, is a very probable one ; 
since the matter of food is a great regulator of the actions and 
proceedings of the brute creation : there is but one that can be 
set in competition with it, and that is love. But I cannot quite 
acquiesce with you in one circumstance when you advance that, 
" when they have thus feasted, they again separate into small 
pai'ties of five or six, and get the best fare they can within a cer- 
tain district, having no inducement to go in quest of fresh-turned 
earth." Now if you mean that the business of congregating is 
quite at an end from the conclusion of wheat-sowing to the sea- 
son of barley and oats, it is not the case with us ; for larks and 
chaffinches, and particularly linnets, flock and congregate as 
much in the very dead of winter as when the husbandman is busy 
with his ploughs and harrows. 
Sure there can be no doubt but that woodcocks and fieldfares 
leave us in the spring, in order to cross the seas, and to retire to 
some districts more suitable to the purpose of breeding. That 
the former pair before they retire, and that the hens are forward 
with egg, I myself, when I was a sportsman, have often expe- 
rienced. It cannot indeed be denied but that now and then we 
hear of a woodcock's nest, or young birds, discovered in some 
