PREFACE. 
Xlll 
that towered above the shrubs, and thence poured forth their 
evening jubilee. 
To name all the birds that cultivation, the erection of houses,* 
the plantation of trees and shrubs together with the attraction of 
a garden, brought to the place, would be tedious. It will therefore 
only be further observed, that the beautiful goldfinch, so long as 
a neighbouring hill-side was covered with thistles and other plants 
on the seeds of which it fed, visited the standard cherry-trees to 
nidify ; and the spotted flycatcher, which particularly delights in 
pleasure-grounds and gardens, annually spent the summer there. 
Of the six species of British Merulidae, the resident missel and 
song thrushes, and the blackbird, inhabited the place ; the fieldfare 
and redwing, winter visitants, were to be seen in their season; 
and the ring ouzel, annually during summer, frequented an ad- 
jacent rocky glen. Curlews on their way from the sea to the 
mountain-moor, occasionally alighted in the pasture-fields. The 
entire number of species seen at this place (seventy-five English 
acres in extent) was seventy ; forty- one or forty- two of which bred 
there. A few others,- — the kestrel, ring-ouzel, sand-martin, and 
quail, — built in the immediate neighbourhood. 
Nearly seventy species have been noticed in Kensington Gardens, 
London.! White remarks that “ Selborne parish alone has exhi- 
bited at times [120 species] more than half the birds that are 
ever seen in all Sweden. The parish comprises an extent of 
thirty miles in circumference ; and where else within the same 
* Including houses in the category may seem inadvertent. But the house-martin 
annually built about the windows or under the roof of the dwelling-house ; as the 
sparrow did in the spouts ; the swallow against the rafters of sheds, and the swift in 
apertures at the eaves : — the thrush, redbreast, and wren also, occasionally nidified in 
the outhouses. 
t. Yarrell. 
