118 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
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 parties of five or six, and get the best fare they can 
within a certain 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 season 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. 
Surely there can be no doubt but that woodcocks and field- 
fares leave us in the spring in order to cross the seas, and to 
retire to some districts more suitable to the purpose of breed- 
ing. ‘That the former pair before they retire, and that the 
hens are forward with egg, I myself, when I was a sportsman, 
have often experienced. It cannot indeed be denied but that 
now and then we hear of a woodcock’s nest, or young birds, 
discovered in some part or other of this island; but then they | 
are all always mentioned as rarities, and somewhat out of the 
common course of things: but as to redwings and fieldfares, 
no sportsman or naturalist has ever yet, that I could hear, 
pretended to have found the nest or young of those species in 
any part of these kingdoms. And I the more admire at this 
instance as extraordinary, since, to all appearance, the same 
food in summer as well as in winter might support them here 
which maintains their congeners, the blackbirds and thrushes, 
did they choose to stay the summer through. From hence it 
appears that it is not food alone which determines some species 
of birds with regard to their stay or departure. Fieldfares or 
* 
“ae 
