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THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 99 
but, as soon as they begin to breed, betake themselves to the 
fastnesses of Ormshead, and deposit their young in safety 
amidst the inaccessible caverns and precipices of that stupen- 
dous promontory. “Though you drive out nature with a 
pitchfork, she will ever return.” 
I have consulted a sportsman, now in his seventy-eighth 
year, who tells me that fifty or sixty years back, when the 
beechen woods were much more extensive than at present, the 
number of wood-pigeons was astonishing; that he has often 
killed near twenty in a day: and that with a long wild-fowl 
piece he has shot seven or eight at a time on the wing as they 
_came wheeling over his head: he moreover adds, which I was 
not aware of, that often there were among them little parties of 
small blue doves, which he calls rockiers. The food of these 
. numberless emigrants was beech-mast and some acorns; and 
particularly barley, which they collected in the stubbles. But 
of late years, since the vast increase of turnips, that vegetable 
has furnished a great part of their support in hard weather ; 
and the holes they pick in these roots greatly damage the crop. 
From this food their flesh has contracted a rancidness which 
occasions them to be rejected by nicer judges of eating, who 
_ thought them before a delicate dish. ‘They were shot not only 
as they were feeding in the fields, and especially in snowy 
weather, but also at the close of the evening, by men who lay 
in ambush among the woods and groves to kill them as they 
came in to roost.1 These are the principal circumstances 
relating to this wonderful internal migration, which with us 
takes place towards the end of November, and ceases early in 
the spring. Last winter we had in Selborne High Wood about 
a hundred of these doves ; but in former times the flocks were 
so vast, not only with us but all the district round, that on 
mornings and evenings they traversed the air like rooks, in 
1“Some old sportsmen say that the main part of these flocks used to 
withdraw as soon as the heavy Christmas frosts were over.” — W. 
