In the middle of February, I discovered in my tall hedges, a little bird that raised my curiosity; it was of that yellowgreen colour that belongs to the salicaria kind, and, I think, was soft-billed. It was no parus, and was too long and too big for the golden-crowned wren, appearing most like the largest willow-wren. It hung sometimes with its back downwards, but never continuing one moment in the same place. I shot at it, but it was so desultory that I missed my aim.

I wonder that the stone curlew, charadrius oedicnemus, should be mentioned by the writers as a rare bird; it abounds in all the champaign parts of Hampshire and Sussex, and breeds, I think, all the summer, having young ones, I know, very late in the antumn. Already they begin clamouring in the evening. They cannot, I think, with any propriety be called, as they are by Mr. Ray, "circa aquas versantes; " for with us (by day at least) they haunt only the most dry, open, upland fields and sheepwalks, far removed from water: what they may do in the night I cannot say. Worms are their usual food, but they also eat toads and frogs.

I can show you some good specimens of my new mice. Linnæus, perhaps, would call the species mus minimus.

LETTER XVI.

TO THE SAME.

SELBORNE, April 18, 1768.

DEAR SIR, The history of the stone curlew, charadrius oedicnemus, is as follows: It lays its eggs, usually two, never more than three, on the bare ground, without any nest, in the field, so the countryman in stiring his fallows, often destroys them. The young run immediately from the egg like partridges, &c., and are withdrawn to some flinty field by the dam, where they skulk among the stones, which are their best security; for their feathers are so exactly of the colour of our grey spotted flints, that the most exact ob

server, unless he catches the eye of the young bird, may be eluded. The eggs are short and round, of a dirty white, spotted with dark bloody blotches. Though I might not be able, just when I pleased, to procure you a bird, yet I could show you them almost any day; and any evening you may hear them round the village; for they make a clamour which may be heard a mile. Edicnemus is a most apt and expressive name for them, since their legs seem swollen like those of a gouty man. After harvest, I have shot them before the pointers in turnip fields.

I make no doubt but there are three species of the willowwrens; two I know perfectly, but have not been able yet to procure the third.* No two birds can differ more in their notes, and that constantly, than those two that I am acquainted with; for the one has a joyous, easy, laughing note, the other a harsh loud chirp. The former is every way larger, and three-quarters of an inch longer, and weighs two drachms and a half, while the latter weighs but two; so that the songster is one-fifth heavier than the chirper. The chirper (being the first summer bird of passage that is heard, the wryneck sometimes excepted) begins his notes in the middle of March, and continues them through the spring and summer, till the end of August, as appears by

* Mr. White clearly distinguishes three species of these little birds; and he seems to have had some idea of a fourth: but on this point there is a confusion in the entries in the Naturalist's Calendar, which has perhaps arisen from his having used different names for the same bird in noting down his observations in different years. The small uncrested wren of the calendar, appearing on the 9th of March, is called in the Natural History, p. 84, the chirper, and is said to have black legs: it must be either sylvia rufa or sylv. loquax; I believe the former, for I doubt the fact of sylv. loquax, the chiffchaff, which seems not to reach the north of England, arriving so early. The third entry in the Calendar, second willow or laughing wren, is certainly sylv. trochilus; because he says in the Natural History, p. 82, that the songster has a laughing note. The fourth entry, large shivering wren, is unquestionably sylv. sylvicola. It appears to me that the second and fifth entries, middle yellow wren, and middle willow wren, mean the same thing as second willow wren, and refer alike to sylv. trochilus: but it is possible that at a later period than the date of Letter XIX. written in 1768, he may have suspected the existence of a fourth species.-W. H.

There has hitherto existed very great confusion in the works of British and foreign naturalists concerning the four nearly allied species of wrens, which Mr. W. Herbert has satisfactorily cleared up in his very elaborate note on the subject, printed in Bennett's edition.-ED.

my journals. The legs of the larger of these two are fleshcoloured; of the less, black.

The grasshopper lark began his sibilous note in my fields last Saturday.* Nothing can be more amusing than the whisper of this little bird, which seems to be close by, though at an hundred yards' distance; and, when close at your ear, is scarce any louder than when a great way off. Had I not been a little acquainted with insects, and known that the grasshopper kind is not yet hatched, I should have hardly believed but that it had been a locusta whispering in the bushes. The country people laugh when you tell them that it is the note of a bird. It is a most artful creature, skulking in the thickest part of a bush, and will sing at a yard distance, provided it be concealed. I was obliged to get a person to go on the other side of the hedge where it haunted; and then it would run, creeping like a mouse before us for an hundred yards together, through the bottom of the thorns; yet it would not come into fair sight; but in a morning early, and when undisturbed, it sings on the top of a twig, gaping and shivering with its wings. Mr. Ray himself had no knowledge of this bird, but received his account from Mr. Johnson, who apparently confounds it with the reguli non cristati, from which it is very distinct. See Ray's Philos. Letters, p. 108.

The fly-catcher (stoparola) has not yet appeared: it usually breeds in my vine. The redstart begins to sing: its note is short and imperfect, but is continued till about the middle of June. The willow-wrens (the smaller sort) are horrid pests in a garden, destroying the pease, cherries, currants, &c., and are so tame that a gun will not scare them.t

* Sylvia locustella. Lath. Grasshopper-warbler.-Selby's Ornith.-W. J. This sentence has probably been the cause of the murder of numbers of these most innocent little birds, which are in truth peculiarly the gardener's friends. My garden men were in the habit of catching the hens on their nests in the strawberry beds, and killing them, under the impression that they made great ravage among the cherries; yet I can assert that they never taste the fruit, nor can those which are reared from the nest in confinement be induced to touch it. They peck the aphides which are injurious to the fruit trees; and being very pugnacious little birds, I have sometimes seen them take post in a cherry-tree, and drive away every bird that attempted to enter it, though of greater size and strength.

The birds which are mistaken for them are the young of the garden-warbler,

A List of the Summer Birds of Passage discovered in this neighbourhood, ranged somewhat in the order in which they appear.

My countrymen talk much of a bird that makes a clatter with its bill against a dead bough or some old pales, calling it a jar-bird. I procured one to be shot in the very fact; it proved to be the sitta europea (the nuthatch). Mr. Ray

curruca hortensis, BECHST., with which Mr. White was not acquainted, as it is not mentioned by him, and does not appear in his list of summer birds; yet I am confident that they will be found plentifully at Selborne, when the Kentish cherries are ripe. They attacked my cherries in great numbers when I lived in the south of Berkshire, not much more than twenty miles from Selborne. These young birds have a strong tinge of yellow on the sides, which disappears after they moult, and gives them very much the appearance of the yellow wren when seen upon the tree, though they are larger and stouter, and in habits very much resemble the blackcaps, with whom they are associated in the plunder of cherry-trees. I have never seen the pettychaps in Yorkshire until the cherries are ripe, when they immediately make their appearance and attack the Kentish cherry particularly, being so greedy that I have often taken them with a fishing-rod tipped with birdlime, while they were pulling at the fruit. The moment they have finished the last Kentish cherry, they disappear for the scason. If they finish the cherries in the morning, they are gone before noon. I am persuaded that they appear and disappear in the same manner at Selborne, and are probably to be found there only while the cherries are ripe, which accounts for Mr. White's having mistaken them for yellow wrens when he saw them in the fruit trees. They breed in the market gardens about London,

says, that the less spotted woodpecker does the same. This noise may be heard a furlong or more.*

Now is the only time to ascertain the short-winged summer birds: for, when the leaf is out, there is no making

and I imagine that as the cherries ripen they migrate from garden to garden in pursuit of them. I am told that near London they remain late enough to attack the elder-berries, of which the fruit-eating warblers are very fond, but in Yorkshire they do not even wait for the later cherries. The number of these visitants depends upon the crop of early cherries. This year the crop having nearly failed, I saw but two of them, which appeared on the 15th of July, and were not seen after the 17th. The blackcap remains eating the currants and honeysuckle berries; they are both very fond in confinement of ripe pears, and I believe, in the south of England, they peck some of them before their departure.-W. H.

*The nuthatch, sitta europæa, Linn. is the only species of the genus. inhabiting Europe; in this country it appears confined to England, never having been traced further north than Northumberland. The following animated sketch, a good deal in the style of our author, I have extracted from Loudon's Journal of Natural History, as giving a correct idea of the manners of this curious species :-"I had never seen the little bird called: the nuthatch, when one day, whilst I was expecting the transit of some wood-pigeons under a birch-tree, with my gun in my hand, I observed a littleash-coloured bird squat himself on one of the large lateral trunks over my head, and after some observation, begin to tap loudly, or rather solidly, upon the wood, and then proceed round and round the branch, it being clearly the same thing to him whether his nadir or zenith were uppermost. shot, and the bird fell; there was a lofty hedge between us, and when I got over, he had removed himself. It was some time before I secured him; and I mention this, because the manner in which he eluded me was characteristic of his cunning. He concealed himself in holes at the bottom of a ditch, so long as he heard the noise of motion; and when all was still, he would scud out and attempt to escape. A wing was broken, and I at length got hold of him. He proved small, but very fierce, and his bite would have made a child cry out. The elbow joint of his wing being thoroughly shattered, and finding that he had no other wound, I cut off the dangling limb, and put him into a large cage with a common lark. The wound did not in the least diminish his activity, nor yet his pugnacity, for he instantly began to investigate all means of escape; he tried the bores, then tapped the woodwork of the cage, and produced a knocking sound which made the room re-echo; but after finding his efforts vain, he then turned upon the lark, ran under him with his gaping beak to bite, and effectually alarmed his far more gentle and clegant antagonist. Compelled to separate them, the nuthatch-for this bird I discovered him to be, by turning over the leaves of an Ornithologia-was put into a smaller cage of plain oak wood and wire. Here he remained all night, and the next morning his knocking, or tapping with his beak, was the first sound I heard, though sleeping in an apartment divided from the other by a landing-place. He had food given to him, minced chicken and bread crumbs, and water. He ate and drank with a most perfect impudence, and the moment he had satisfied himself,

F