SELBORNE, _Aug. 30th_, 1769.
Dear Sir,--It gives me satisfaction to find that my account of the _ousel
migration_ pleases you. You put a very shrewd question when you ask me
how I know that their autumnal migration is southward? Was not candour
and openness the very life of natural history, I should pass over this
query just as a sly commentator does over a crabbed passage in a classic;
but common ingenuousness obliges me to confess, not without some degree
of shame, that I only reasoned in that case from analogy. For as all
other autumnal birds migrate from the northward to us, to partake of our
milder winters, and return to the northward again when the rigorous cold
abates, so I concluded that the ring-ousels did the same, as well as
their congeners the fieldfares; and especially as ring-ousels are known
to haunt cold mountainous countries: but I have good reason to suspect,
since, that they may come to us from the westward, because I hear from
very good authority, that they breed on Dartmoor, and that they forsake
that wild district about the time that our visitors appear, and do not
return till late in the spring.
I have taken a great deal of pains about your _salicaria_ and mine, with
a white stroke over its eye and a tawny rump. I have surveyed it alive
and dead, and have procured several specimens, and am perfectly persuaded
myself (and trust you will soon become convinced of the same) that it is
no more nor less than the _passer arundinaceus minor_ of Ray. This bird,
by some means or other, seems to be entirely omitted in the British
Zoology; and one reason probably was because it is so strangely classed
in Ray, who ranges it among his _picis affines_. It ought, no doubt, to
have gone among his _aviculae cauda unicolore_, and among your
slender-billed small birds of the same division. Linnaeus might with
great propriety have put it into his genus of _motacilla_; and _motacilla
salicaria_ of his _fauna suecica_ seems to come the nearest to it. It is
no uncommon bird, haunting the sides of ponds and rivers where there is
covert, and the reeds and sedges of moors. The country people in some
places call it the sedge-bird. It sings incessantly night and day during
the breeding-time, imitating the note of a sparrow, a swallow, a skylark,
and has a strange hurrying manner in its song. My specimens correspond
most minutely to the description of your _fen salicaria_ shot near
Revesby. Mr. Ray has given an excellent characteristic of it when he
says, "_Rostrum et pedes in hac avicula multo majores sunt quam pro
corporis ratione_." See letter, May 29th, 1769. (Preceding letter
xxiv.)
I have got you the egg of an _oedicnemus_, or stone-curlew, which was
picked up in a fallow on the naked ground. There were two, but the
finder inadvertently crushed one with his foot before he saw them.
When I wrote to you last year on reptiles, I wish I had not forgot to
mention the faculty that snakes have of stinking _se defendendo_. I knew
a gentleman who kept a tame snake, which was in its person as sweet as
any animal while in good humour and unalarmed, but as soon as a stranger,
or a dog or cat, came in, it fell to hissing, and filled the room with
such nauseous effluvia as rendered it hardly supportable. Thus the
squnck, or stonck, of Ray's "Synop. Quadr." is an innocuous and sweet
animal; but, when pressed hard by dogs and men, it can eject such a most
pestilent and fetid smell and excrement, that nothing can be more
horrible.
A gentleman sent me lately a fine specimen of the _lanius minor
cinerascens cum macula in scapulis alba_, _Raii_; which is a bird that,
at the time of your publishing your two first volumes of "British
Zoology," I find you had not seen. You have described it well from
Edwards's drawing.