LETTER XXIV.
Selborne, May 29th, 1769.
Dear Sir,—The scarabœus fullo I know very well, having seen it in collections, but have never been able to discover one wild in its natural state. Mr. Banks told me he thought it might be found on the sea-coast.
On the 13th April I went to the sheep-down, where the ring-ousels have been observed to make their appearance at spring and fall, in their way perhaps to the north or south, and was much pleased to see these birds about the usual spot. We shot a cock and a hen; they were plump and in high condition. The hen had but very small rudiments of eggs within her, which proves they are late breeders; whereas those species of the thrush kind that remain with us the whole year have fledged young before that time. In their crops was nothing very distinguishable, but somewhat that seemed like blades of vegetables nearly digested. In
autumn they feed on haws and yew-berries, and in the spring on ivy-berries. I dressed one of these birds, and found it juicy and well-flavoured. It is remarkable that they make but a few days’ stay in their spring visit, but rest near a fortnight at Michaelmas. These birds, from the observations of three springs and two autumns, are most punctual in their return, and exhibit a new migration unnoticed by the writers, who supposed they never were to be seen in any southern countries.
One of my neighbours lately brought me a new salicaria, which at first I suspected might have proved your willow-lark, but, on a nicer examination, it answered much better to the description of that species which you shot at Revesby, in Lincolnshire. My bird I describe thus: “It is a size less than the grasshopper-lark; the head, back, and coverts of the wings, of a dusky brown, without those dark spots of the grasshopper-lark; over each eye is a milk-white stroke; the chin and throat are white; and the under parts of a yellowish white; the rump is tawny, and the feathers of the tail sharp-pointed; the bill is dusky and sharp, and the legs are dusky; the hinder claw long and crooked.” The person that shot it says that it sung so like a reed sparrow that he took it for one; and that it sings all night: but this account merits farther inquiry. For my part I suspect it is a second sort of locustela,
hinted at by Dr. Derham in Ray’s Letters: see p. 108. He also procured me a grasshopper-lark.
The question that you put with regard to those genera of animals that are peculiar to America, viz., how they came there, and whence? is too puzzling for me to answer, and yet so obvious as often to have struck me with wonder. If one looks into the writers on that subject, little satisfaction is to be found. Ingenious men will readily advance plausible arguments to support whatever theory they shall choose to maintain; but then the misfortune is, every one’s hypothesis is each as good as another’s, since they are all founded on conjecture. The late writers of this sort, in whom may be seen all the arguments of those that have gone before, as I remember, stock America from the western coast of Africa and the south of Europe, and then break down the Isthmus that bridged over the Atlantic. But this is making use of a violent piece of machinery; it is a difficulty worthy of the interposition of a god! “Incredulus odi.”
TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQUIRE.
THE NATURALIST’S SUMMER-EVENING WALK.
—equidem credo, quia sit divinitus illis
Ingenium.Virg. Georg.
When day declining sheds a milder gleam,
What time the may-fly haunts the pool or stream;
When the still owl skims round the grassy mead,
What time the timorous hare limps forth to feed;
Then be the time to steal adown the vale,
And listen to the vagrant cuckoo’s tale;
To hear the clamorous curlew call his mate,
Or the soft quail his tender pain relate;
To see the swallow sweep the dark’ning plain
Belated, to support her infant train;
To mark the swift in rapid giddy ring
Dash round the steeple, unsubdued of wing:
Amusive birds!—say where your hid retreat
When the frost rages and the tempests beat;
Whence your return, by such nice instinct led,
When spring, soft season, lifts her bloomy head:
Such baffled searches mock man’s prying pride,
The God of Nature is your secret guide!
While deep’ning shades obscure the face of day,
To yonder bench leaf-shelter’d let us stray,
Till blended objects fail the swimming sight,
And all the fading landscape sinks in night;
To hear the drowsy dor come brushing by
With buzzing wing, or the shrill cricket cry;
To see the feeding bat glance through the wood;
To catch the distant falling of the flood;
While o’er the cliff th’ awaken’d churn-owl hung
Through the still gloom protracts his chattering song;
While high in air, and poised upon his wings,
Unseen, the soft-enamour’d woodlark sings:
These, Nature’s works, the curious mind employ,
Inspire a soothing melancholy joy:
As fancy warms, a pleasing kind of pain
Steals o’er the cheek, and thrills the creeping vein!
Each rural sight, each sound, each smell, combine;
The tinkling sheep-bell or the breath of kine;
The new-mown hay that scents the swelling breeze,
Or cottage-chimney smoking through the trees.
The chilling night-dews fall—away, retire!
For see, the glow-worm lights her amorous fire!
Thus, ere night’s veil had half obscured the sky,
Th’ impatient damsel hung her lamp on high:
True to the signal, by love’s meteor led,
Leander hasten’d to his Hero’s bed.
I am, etc.
LETTER XXV.
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 aviculæ caudâ unicolore, and among your slender-billed small birds of the same division. Linnæus 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 hâc aviculâ multò majores sunt quâm pro corporis ratione.” See letter, May 29th, 1769. (Preceding letter xxiv.)
I have got you the egg of an œdicnemus, 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 maculâ in scapulis albâ, 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.
LETTER XXVI.
Selborne, December 8th, 1769.
Dear Sir,—I was much gratified by your communicative letter on your return from Scotland, where you spent some considerable time, and gave yourself good room to examine the natural curiosities of that extensive kingdom, both those of the islands, as well as those of the highlands. The usual bane of such expeditions is hurry, because men seldom allot themselves half the time they should do, but, fixing on a day for their return, post from place to place, rather as if they were on a journey that required despatch than as philosophers investigating the works of nature. You must have made, no doubt, many discoveries, and laid up a good fund of materials for a future edition of the “British Zoology;” and will have no reason to repent that you have bestowed so much pains on a part of Great Britain that perhaps was never so well examined before.
It has always been matter of wonder to me that fieldfares, which are so congenerous to thrushes and blackbirds, should never choose to breed in England; but that they should not think even the highlands cold and northerly, and sequestered enough, is a circumstance still more strange and wonderful. The
ring-ousel, you find, stays in Scotland the whole year round, so that we have reason to conclude that those migrators that visit us for a short space every autumn do not come from thence.
And here, I think, will be the proper place to mention that those birds were most punctual again in their migration this autumn, appearing, as before, about the 30th September; but their flocks were larger than common, and their stay protracted somewhat beyond the usual time. If they came to spend the whole winter with us, as some of their congeners do, and then left us, as they do, in spring, I should not be so much struck with the occurrence, since it would be similar to that of the other winter birds of passage; but when I see them for a fortnight at Michaelmas, and again for about a week in the middle of April, I am seized with wonder, and long to be informed whence these travellers come, and whither they go, since they seem to use our hills merely as an inn or baiting place.
Your account of the greater brambling, or snow-fleck, is very amusing; and strange it is that such a short-winged bird should delight in such perilous voyages over the northern ocean. Some country people in the winter time have, every now and then, told me that they have seen two or three white larks on our downs, but, on considering the matter, I begin to
suspect that these are some stragglers of the birds we are talking of, which sometimes perhaps may rove so far to the southward.
It pleases me to find that white hares are so frequent on the Scottish mountains, and especially as you inform me that it is a distinct species, for the quadrupeds of Britain are so few, that every new species is a great acquisition.
The eagle-owl, could it be proved to belong to us, is so majestic a bird, that it would grace our fauna much. I never was informed before where wild geese are known to breed.
You admit, I find, that I have proved your fen salicaria to be the lesser reed-sparrow of Ray; and I think you may be secure that I am right, for I took very particular pains to clear up that matter, and had some fair specimens, but, as they were not well preserved, they are decayed already. You will, no doubt, insert it in its proper place in your next edition. Your additional plates will much improve your work.
De Buffon, I know, has described the water shrew-mouse; but still I am pleased to find you have discovered it in Lincolnshire, for the reason I have given in the article of the white hare.
As a neighbour was lately ploughing a dry, chalky field, far removed from any water, he turned out a water-rat, that was curiously lain up in a hybernaculum
artificially formed of grass and leaves. At one end of the burrow lay above a gallon of potatoes regularly stowed, on which it was to have supported itself for the winter. But the difficulty with me is how this amphibius mus came to fix its winter station at such a distance from the water. Was it determined in its choice of that place by the mere accident of finding the potatoes which were planted there, or is it the constant practice of the aquatic rat to forsake the neighbourhood of the water in the colder months?
Though I delight very little in analogous reasoning, knowing how fallacious it is with respect to natural history, yet, in the following instance, I cannot help being inclined to think it may conduce towards the explanation of a difficulty that I have mentioned before, with respect to the invariable early retreat of the hirundo apus, or swift, so many weeks before its congeners; and that not only with us, but also in Andalusia, where they also begin to retire about the beginning of August.
The great large bat (which, by-the-bye, is at present a nondescript in England, and what I have never been able yet to procure) retires or migrates very early in the summer. It also ranges very high for its food, feeding in a different region of the air, and that is the reason I never could procure one. Now this is exactly the case with the swifts; for they take their food in a
more exalted region than the other species, and are very seldom seen hawking for flies near the ground, or over the surface of the water. From hence I would conclude that these hirundines and the larger bats are supported by some sorts of high-flying gnats, scarabs, or phalœnæ, that are of short continuance, and that the short stay of these strangers is regulated by the defect of their food.
By my journal it appears that curlews clamoured on to October 31st, since which I have not seen nor heard any. Swallows were observed on to November 3rd.