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.