SELBORNE, _March 15th_, 1773.
Dear Sir,--By my journal for last autumn it appears that the
house-martins bred very late, and stayed very late in these parts; for,
on the 1st October, I saw young martins in their nest nearly fledged; and
again, on the 21st October, we had at the next house a nest full of young
martins just ready to fly; and the old ones were hawking for insects with
great alertness. The next morning the brood forsook their nest, and were
flying round the village. From this day I never saw one of the swallow
kind till November 3rd, when twenty, or perhaps thirty, house-martins
were playing all day long by the side of the hanging wood, and over my
field. Did these small weak birds, some of which were nestling twelve
days ago, shift their quarters at this late season of the year to the
other side of the northern tropic? Or rather, is it not more probable
that the next church, ruin, chalk-cliff, steep covert, or perhaps
sandbank, lake, or pool (as a more northern naturalist would say), may
become their _hybernaculum_, and afford them a ready and obvious retreat?
We now begin to expect our vernal migration of ring-ousels every week.
Persons worthy of credit assure me that ring-ousels were seen at
Christmas, 1770, in the forest of Bere, on the southern verge of this
county. Hence we may conclude that their migrations are only internal,
and not extending to the continent southward, if they do at first come at
all from the northern parts of this island only, and not from the north
of Europe. Come from whence they will, it is plain, from the fearless
disregard that they show for men or guns, that they have been little
accustomed to places of much resort. Navigators mention that in the Isle
of Ascension, and other such desolate districts, birds are so little
acquainted with the human form that they settle on men's shoulders, and
have no more dread of a sailor than they would have of a goat that was
grazing. A young man at Lewes, in Sussex, assured me that about seven
years ago ring-ousels abounded so about that town in the autumn that he
killed sixteen himself in one afternoon; he added further, that some had
appeared since in every autumn, but he could not find that any had been
observed before the season in which he shot so many. I myself have found
these birds in little parties in the autumn cantoned all along the Sussex
downs, wherever there were shrubs and bushes, from Chichester to Lewes,
particularly in the autumn of 1770.