ity ecg La AP 
Pt = 
« 
| 3 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 107 
It was not in my power to procure you a black-cap, or a less 
reed-sparrow, or sedge-bird, alive. As the first is undoubtedly, 
and the last, as far as I can yet see, a summer bird of passage, 
they would require more nice and curious management in a 
cage than I should be able to give them: they are both dis- 
tinguished songsters. The note of the former has such a wild 
sweetness that it always brings to my mind those lines in a 
song in As You Like /t: 
* And tune his merry note 
Unto the w/7/d bird’s throat.” 
SHAKESPEARE. 
The latter has a surprising variety of notes resembling the 
song of several other birds; but then it has also a hurrying 
manner, not at all to its advantage: it is, notwithstanding, a 
delicate polyglot. 
It is new to me that titlarks in cages sing in the night; per- 
haps only caged birds do so. I once knew a tame redbreast in 
a cage that always sang as long as candles were in the room; 
but in their wild state no one supposes they sing in the night. 
I should be almost ready to doubt the fact, that there are to 
be seen much fewer birds in July than in any former month, 
notwithstanding so many young are hatched daily. Sure I am 
that it is far otherwise with respect to the swallow tribe, which 
increases prodigiously as the summer advances: and I saw at 
the time mentioned many hundreds of young wagtails on the 
banks of the Cherwell, which almost covered the meadows. 
If the matter appears as you say in the other species, may it 
not be owing to the dams being engaged in incubation, while 
_ the young are concealed by the leaves? 
Many times have I had the curiosity to open the stomachs 
of woodcocks and snipes; but nothing ever occurred that 
helped to explain to me what their subsistence might be: all 
that I could ever find was a soft mucus, among which lay many 
_ pellucid small gravels. 
ie en 
