SELBORNE, _March 30th_, 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 was 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 hempseed. 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_.