of chaffinches have appeared in the fields; many more, I used to think,
than could be hatched in any one neighbourhood. But, when I came to
observe them more narrowly, I was amazed to find that they seemed to be
almost all hens. I communicated my suspicions to some intelligent
neighbours, who, after taking pains about the matter, declared that
they also thought them all mostly females; at least fifty to one. This
extraordinary occurrence brought to my mind the remark of Linnaeus;
that ‘before winter, all their hen chaffinches migrate through Holland
into Italy.’ Now I want to know, from some curious person in the north,
whether there are any large flocks of these finches with them in the
winter, and of which sex they mostly consist? For, from such
intelligence, one might be able to judge whether our female flocks
migrate from the other end of the island, or whether they come over to
us from the continent.
We have, in the winter, vast flocks of the common linnets; more, I
think, than can be bred in any one district. These, I observe, when the
spring advances, assemble on some tree in the sunshine, and join all in
a gentle sort of chirping, as if they were about to break up their
winter quarters and betake themselves to their proper summer homes. It
is well known, at least, that the swallows and the fieldfares do
congregate with a gentle twittering before they make their respective
departure.
You may depend on it that the bunting, emberiza miliaria, does not
leave this country in the winter. In January 1767 I saw several dozen
of them, in the midst of a severe frost, among the bushes on the downs
near Andover: in our woodland enclosed district it is a rare bird.
Wagtails, both white and yellow, are with us all the winter. Quails
crowd to our southern coast, and are often killed in numbers by people
that go on purpose.
Mr. Stillingfleet, in his Tracts, says that ‘if the wheatear (oenanthe)
does not quit England, it certainly shifts places; for about harvest
they are not to be found, where there was before great plenty of them.’
This well accounts for the vast quantities that are caught about that
time on the south downs near Lewes, where they are esteemed a delicacy.
There have been shepherds, I have been credibly informed, that have
made many pounds in a season by catching them in traps. And though such
multitudes are taken, I never saw (and I am well acquainted with those
parts) above two or three at a time: for they are never gregarious.
They may, perhaps, migrate in general; and, for that purpose, draw
towards the coast of Sussex in autumn; but that they do not all
withdraw I am sure; because I see a few stragglers in many counties, at
all times of the year, especially about warrens and stone quarries.
I have no acquaintance, at present, among the gentlemen of the navy:
but have written to a friend, who was a sea-chaplain in the late war,
desiring him to look into his minutes, with respect to birds that
settled on their rigging during their voyage up or down the channel.
What Hasselquist says on that subject is remarkable: there were little
short-winged birds frequently coming on board his ship all the way from
our channel quite up to the Levant, especially before squally weather.
What you suggest, with regard to Spain, is highly probable. The winters
of Andalusia are so mild, that, in all likelihood, the soft-billed
birds that leave us at that season may find insects sufficient to
support them there.
Some young man, possessed of fortune, health, and leisure, should make
an autumnal voyage into that kingdom; and should spend a year there,
investigating the natural history of that vast country. Mr. Willughby*
passed through that kingdom on such an errand; but he seems to have
skirted along in a superficial manner and an ill humour, being much
disgusted at the rude, dissolute manners of the people.
* See Ray’s Travels, p. 466.
I have no friend left now at Sunbury to apply to about the swallows
roosting on the aits of the Thames: nor can I hear any more about those
birds which I suspected were merulae torquatae.
As to the small mice, I have farther to remark, that though they hang
their nests for breeding up amidst the straws of the standing corn,
above the ground; yet I find that, in the winter, they burrow deep in
the earth, and make warm beds of grass: but their grand rendezvous
seems to be in corn-ricks, into which they are carried at harvest. A
neighbour housed an oat-rick lately, under the thatch of which were
assembled near an hundred, most of which were taken; and some I saw. I
measured them; and found that, from nose to tail, they were just two
inches and a quarter, and their tails just two inches long. Two of them
in a scale, weighed down just one copper halfpenny, which is about a
third of an ounce avoirdupois: so that I suppose they are the smallest
quadrupeds in this island. A full-grown mus medius domesticus weighs, I
find, one ounce, lumping weight, which is more than six times as much
as the mouse above; and measures from nose to rump four inches and a
quarter, and the same in its tail.
We have had a very severe frost and deep snow this month. My
thermometer was one day fourteen degrees and a half below the freezing
point, within doors. The tender evergreens were injured pretty much. It
was very providential that the air was still, and the ground well
covered with snow, else vegetation in general must have suffered
prodigiously. There is reason to believe that some days were more
severe than any since the year 1739-40.
I am, etc., etc.
Letter XIV
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
Selborne, March 12, 1768.
Dear Sir,
If some curious gentleman would procure the head of a fallow-deer, and
have it dissected, he would find it furnished with two spiracula, or
breathing-places, beside the nostrils; probably analogous to the puncta
lachrymalia in the human head. When the deer are thirsty they plunge
their noses, like some horses, very deep under water, while in the act
of drinking, and continue them in that situation for a considerable
time, but, to obviate any inconvenience, they can open two vents, one
at the inner corner of each eye, having a communication with the nose.
Here seems to be an extraordinary provision of nature worthy our
attention; and which has not, that I know of, been noticed by any
naturalist. For it looks as if these creatures would not be suffocated,
though both their mouths and nostrils were stopped. This curious
formation of the head may be of singular service to beasts of chase, by
affording them free respiration: and no doubt these additional nostrils
are thrown open when they are hard run.* Mr. Ray observed that, at
Malta, the owners slit up the nostrils of such asses as were hard
worked: for they, being naturally strait or small, did not admit air
sufficient serve them when they travelled or laboured in that hot
climate. And we know that grooms, and gentlemen of the turf, think
large nostrils necessary, and a perfection, in hunters and running
horses.
* In answer to this account, Mr. Pennant sent me the following curious
and pertinent reply:—‘I was much surprised to find in the antelope
something analogous to what you mention as so remarkable in deer. This
animal has a long slit beneath each eye, which can be opened and shut
at pleasure. On holding an orange to one, the creature made as much use
of those orifices as of his nostrils, applying them to the fruit, and
seeming to smell it through them.’
Oppian, the Greek poet, by the following line, seems to have had some
notion that stags have four spiracula:
Τετράδυμοι ῥινὲς, πίσυρες πνοίῃσι δίαυλοι.
Quadrifidæ nares, quadruplices ad respirationem canales.
Opp. _Cyn_. lib. ii. 1. 181.
Writers, copying from one another, make Aristotle say that goats
breathe at their ears; whereas he asserts just the contrary:—Ἀλκμαίων
γὰρ οὐκ ἀληθῆ λέγει, φάμενος ἀναπνεῖν τὰς αἶγας κατὰ τὰ ὠτά. ‘Alcmaeon
does not advance what is true, when he avers that goats breathe through
their ears.’—History of Animals. Book I. chap. xi.
Letter XV
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
Selborne, Mark 30, 1768.
Dear Sir,
Some intelligent country people have a notion that we have, in these
parts, a species of the genus mustelinum, besides the weasel, stoat,
ferret, and polecat; a little reddish beast, not much bigger than a
field mouse, but much longer, which they call a cane. This piece of
intelligence can be little depended on; but farther inquiry may be
made.
A gentleman in this neighbourhood had two milk-white rooks in one nest.
A booby of a carter, finding them before they were able to fly, threw
them down and destroyed them, to the regret of the owner, who would
have been glad to have preserved such a curiosity in his rookery. I saw
the birds myself nailed against the end of a barn, and was surprised to
find that their bills, legs, feet, and claws were milk-white.
A shepherd saw, as he thought, some white larks on a down above my
house this winter: were not these the emberiza nivalis, the snow-flake
of the Brit. Zool.? No doubt they were.
A few years ago I saw a cock bullfinch in a cage, which had been caught
in the fields after it had come to its full colours. In about a year it
began to look dingy; and, blackening every succeeding year, it became
coal-black at the end of four. Its chief food was hemp-seed. Such
influence has food on the colour of animals! The pied and mottled
colours of domesticated animals are supposed to be owing to high,
various, and unusual food.
I had remarked, for years, that the root of the cuckoo-pint (arum) was
frequently scratched out of the dry banks of hedges, and eaten in
severe snowy weather. After observing, with some exactness, myself, and
getting others to do the same, we found it was the thrush kind that
searched it out. The root of the arum is remarkably warm and pungent.
Our flocks of female chaffinches have not yet forsaken us. The
blackbirds and thrushes are very much thinned down by that fierce
weather in January.
In the middle of February I discovered, in my tall hedges, a little
bird that raised my curiosity: it was of that yellow-green 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 autumn. 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 sheep walks, 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. Linnaeus, perhaps,
would call the species mus minimus.
Letter XVI
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
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 that the countryman, in
stirring his fallows, often destroys them. The young run immediately
from the egg like partridges, etc., and are withdrawn to some flinty
field by their 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 observer, 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. Oedicnemus
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 willow-wrens: 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 constancy, 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 drams and a half;
while the latter weighs but two: so 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 two notes in
the middle of March, and continues them through the spring and summer
till the end of August, as appears by my journals. The legs of the
larger of these two are flesh-coloured; 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 a 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 Philosophical 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, etc., and are so tame that a gun will not scare
them.
A List of the summer birds of passage discovered in this neighbourhood,
ranged somewhat in the order in which they appear:
Linnæi Nomina
Smallest willow-wren, _Motacilla trochilus._
Wryneck, _Lynx torquilla._
House-swallow, _Hirundo rustica._
Martin, _Hirundo urbica._
Sand-martin, _Hirundo riparia._
Cuckoo, _Cuculus canorus._
Nightingale, _Motacilla luscinia._
Black-cap, _Motacilla atricapilla._
White-throat, _Motacilla sylvia._
Middle willow-wren, _Motacilla trochilus._
Swift, _Hirundo apus._
Stone curlew,? _Charadrius oedicnemus?_
Turtle-dove,? _Turtur aldrovandi?_
Grasshopper-lark, _Alauda trivialis._
Landrail, _Rallus crex._
Largest willow-wren, _Motacilla trochilus._
Redstart, _Motacilla phœnicurus._
Goat-sucker, or fern-owl, _Caprimulgus europæus._
Fly-catcher, _Muscicapa grisola._
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
europaea (the nut-hatch). Mr. Ray 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 any remarks on such a restless
tribe; and, when once the young begin to appear, it is all confusion:
there is no distinction of genus, species, or sex.
In breeding-time snipes play over the moors, piping and humming: they
always hum as they are descending. Is not their hum ventriloquous like
that of a turkey? Some suspect it is made by their wings.
This morning I saw the golden-crowned wren, whose crown glitters like
burnished gold. It often hangs lice a titmouse, with its back
downwards.
Yours, etc., etc.
Letter XVII
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
Selborne, June 18, 1768.
Dear Sir,
On Wednesday last arrived your agreeable letter of June the 10th. It
gives me great satisfaction to find that you pursue these studies still
with such vigour, and are in such forwardness with regard to reptiles
and fishes.
The reptiles, few as they are, I am not acquainted with, so well as I
could wish, with regard to their natural history. There is a degree of
dubiousness and obscurity attending the propagation of this class of
animals, sometimes analogous to that of the cryptogamia in the sexual
system of plants: and the case is the same as regards some of the
fishes: as the eel, etc.
The method in which toads procreate and bring forth seems to me very
much in the dark. Some authors say that they are viviparous: and yet
Ray classes them among his oviparous animals; and is silent with regard
to the manner of their bringing forth. Perhaps they may be ἔσω μὲν
ὠοτὸκοι, ἔξω δε ζωοτόκοι, as is known to be the case with the viper.
The copulation of frogs (or at least the appearance of it; for
Swammerdam proves that the male has no penis intrans) is notorious to
everybody: because we see them sticking upon each other’s backs for a
month together in spring: and yet I never saw, or read, of toads being
observed in the same situation. It is strange that the matter with
regard to the venom of toads has not yet been settled. That they are
not noxious to some animals is plain: for ducks, buzzards, owls, stone
curlews, and snakes, eat them, to my knowledge, with impunity. And I
well remember the time, but was not eye-witness to the fact (though
numbers of persons were), when a quack, at this village, ate a toad to
make the country people stare; afterwards he drank oil.
I have been informed also, from undoubted authority, that some ladies
(ladies you will say of peculiar taste) took a fancy to a toad, which
they nourished summer after summer, for many years, till he grew to a
monstrous size, with the maggots which turn to flesh flies. The reptile
used to come forth every evening from an hole under the garden-steps;
and was taken up, after supper, on the table to be fed. But at last a
tame raven, kenning him as he put forth his head, gave him such a
severe stroke with his horny beak as put out one eye. After this
accident the creature languished for some time and died.
I need not remind a gentleman of your extensive reading of the
excellent account there is from Mr. Derham, in Ray’s Wisdom of God in
the Creation (p. 365), concerning the migration of frogs from their
breeding ponds. In this account he at once subverts that foolish
opinion of their dropping from the clouds in rain; showing that it is
from the grateful coolness and moisture of those showers that they are
tempted to set out on their travels, which they defer till those fall.
Frogs are as yet in their tadpole state; but in a few weeks, our lanes,
paths, fields, will swarm for a few days with myriads of these
emigrants, no larger than my little finger nail. Swammerdam gives a
most accurate account of the method and situation in which the male
impregnates the spawn of the female. How wonderful is the oeconomy of
Providence with regard to the limbs of so vile a reptile! While it is
aquatic it has a fish-like tail, and no legs: as soon as the legs
sprout, the tail drops off as useless, and the animal betakes itself to
the land.
Merret, I trust, is widely mistaken when he advances that the rana
arborea is an English reptile; it abounds in Germany and Switzerland.
It is to be remembered that the salamandra aquatica of Ray (the
water-newt or eft) will frequently bite at the angler’s bait, and is
often caught on his hook. I used to take it for granted that the
salamandra aquatica was hatched, lived, and died in the water. But John
Ellis, Esq., F.R.S. (the coralline Ellis), asserts, in a letter to the
Royal Society, dated June 5th, 1766, in his account of the mud inguana,
an amphibious bides, from South Carolina, that the water-eft, or newt,
is only the larva of the land-eft, as tadpoles are of frogs. Lest I
should be suspected to misunderstand his meaning, I shall give it in
his own words. Speaking of the opercula or covering to the gills of the
mud inguana, he proceeds to say that ‘The forms of these pennated
coverings approach very near to what I have some time ago observed in
the larva or aquatic state of our English lacerta, known by the name of
eft, or newt; which serve them for coverings to their gills, and for
fins to swim with while in this state; and which they lose, as well as
the fins of their tails, when they change their state, and become land
animals, as I have observed, by keeping them alive for some time
myself:’
Linnaeus, in his Systema Naturae, hints at what Mr. Ellis advances more
than once.
Providence has been so indulgent to us as to allow of but one venomous
reptile of the serpent kind in these kingdoms, and that is the viper.
As you propose the good of mankind to be an object of your
publications, you will not omit to mention common salad-oil as a
sovereign remedy against the bite of the viper. As to the blind worm
(anguis fragilis, so called because it snaps in sunder with a small
blow), I have found, on examination, that it is perfectly innocuous. A
neighbouring yeoman (to whom I am indebted for some good hints) killed
and opened a female viper about the twenty-seventh of May: he found her
filled with a chain of eleven eggs, about the size of those of a
blackbird; but none of them were advanced so far towards a state of
maturity as to contain any rudiments of young. Though they are
oviparous, yet they are viviparous also, hatching their young within
their bellies, and then bringing them forth. Whereas snakes lay chains
of eggs every summer in my melon beds, in spite of all that my people
can do to prevent them; which eggs do not hatch till the spring
following, as I have often experienced. Several intelligent folks
assure me that they have seen the viper open her mouth and admit her
helpless young down her throat on sudden surprises, just as the female
opossum does her brood into the pouch under her belly, upon the like
emergencies and yet the London viper-catchers insist on it, to Mr.
Barrington, that no such thing ever happens. The serpent kind eat, I
believe, but once in a year; or rather, but only just at one season of
the year. Country people talk much of a water-snake, but I am pretty
sure, without any reason; for the common snake (coluber natrix)
delights much to sport in the water, perhaps with a view to procure
frogs and other food.
I cannot well guess how you are to make out your twelve species of
reptiles, unless it be by the various species, or rather varieties, of
our lacerti, of which Ray enumerates five. I have not had an
opportunity of ascertaining these; but remember well to have seen,
formerly, several beautiful green lacerti on the sunny sandbanks near
Farnham, in Surrey; and Ray admits there are such in Ireland.
Letter XVIII
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
Selborne, July 27, 1768.
Dear Sir,
I received your obliging and communicative letter of June the 28th,
while I was on a visit at a gentleman’s house, where I had neither
books to turn to, nor leisure to sit down, to return you an answer to
many queries, which I wanted to resolve in the best manner that I am
able.
A person, by my order, has searched our brooks, but could find no such
fish as the gasterosteus pungitius: he found the gasterosteus aculeatus
in plenty. This morning, in a basket, I packed a little earthen pot
full of wet moss, and in it some sticklebacks, male and female; the
females big with spawn: some lamperns; some bull’s heads; but I could
produce no minnows. This basket will be in Fleet-street by eight this
evening; so I hope Mazel will have them fresh and fair to-morrow
morning. I gave some directions, in a letter, to what particulars the
engraver should be attentive.