BLACKBIRD. 
209 
with grey or brown, and the margins of the quills brown. In 
the adult female the upper parts are sometimes of a lighter 
brown, the forehead tinged with rust-colour, and the neck in 
front brownish red, spotted as usual, namely, in some faint 
degree, as the Thrushes. 
Varieties more or less pied with white are not of very 
unfrequent occurrence. Mr. Jesse, in his ‘Gleanings in Natural 
History,’ mentions a pair of white ones in the grounds of a 
nobleman at Blackheath, near London, whose brood were also 
white, so that it could not in their case have been an 
accidental circumstance. Some are cream-coloured. In one 
the top of the head and the breast and wings were black, 
the rest white. One in the Zoological Gardens, London, 
white, with reddish bill and eyelids. One with a white head. 
One white, with black feathers interspersed; the quills and 
tail, black, except two feathers of the latter and one of the 
former; the bill, pale yellow; the feet, dusky, curiously 
variegated with pale yellow. One with the lower parts 
variegated with grey and greyish brown feathers. One 
patched with white, some of the quills being also of that 
colour. One with the head white, and also the neck, the 
latter divided by a black band, with a few white feathers 
interspersed, and one or two more on the shoulder. Another 
with the nape of the neck white, shading off with the same 
colour towards the head. One, a female, white, with a few 
brown feathers on the shoulders. One silvery white all over. 
The late William Thompson, Esq., of Belfast, describes one 
which had a white head, and the whole of the upper plumage 
black, like a male, while the under plumage was that of a 
female, a specimen, in the language of the Pigeon-fanciers, 
of a ‘Hooded Nun.’ One had the quill feathers white and 
the wing coverts black. 
One of these birds, which had been kept by the Bev. J. 
Pemberton Bartlett from the nest, became white on both 
wings in its sixth year, the following year’s moult restoring 
it to its original plumage; another was noticed by Mr. Bix, 
near Norwich, which had at first shewed one ‘white feather’ 
in its tail, and the next year it had two or three, and the 
head, neck, and back much speckled with similar ones. 
One, a female, of a complete cream-colour, with yellow bill 
and legs, was shot by Mr. George Johnson, of Melton Boss, 
near Brigg, Lincolnshire. 
VOL. III. 
