Let me hear from your own observation whether skylarks do not dust. I think they do; and if they do, whether they wash also.
The Alauda pratensis of Ray was the poor dupe that was educating the booby of a cuckoo mentioned in my letter of October last.
Your letter came too late for me to procure a ring-ouzel for Mr. Tunstal during their autumnal visit; but I will endeavour to get him one when they call on us again in April. I am glad that you and that gentleman saw my Andalusian birds; I hope they answered your expectation. Royston, or grey crows, are winter birds that come much about the same time with the woodcock; they, like the fieldfare and redwing, have no apparent reason for migration; for as they fare in the winter like their congeners, so might they in all appearance in the summer. Was not Tenant, when a boy, mistaken? did he not find a missel-thrush’s nest, and take it for the nest of a fieldfare?
The stock-dove, or wood-pigeon, Œnas Raii, is the last winter bird of passage which appears with us; it is not seen till towards the end of November: about twenty years ago they abounded in the district of Selborne; and strings of them were seen morning and evening that reached a mile or more; but since the beechen woods have been greatly thinned they are much decreased in number. The ring-dove, Palumbus
Raii, stays with us the whole year, and breeds several times through the summer.
Before I received your letter of October last I had just remarked in my journal that the trees were unusually green. This uncommon verdure lasted on late into November; and may be accounted for from a late spring, a cool and moist summer; but more particularly from vast armies of chafers, or tree-beetles, which, in many places, reduced whole woods to a leafless naked state. These trees shot again at Midsummer, and then retained their foliage till very late in the year.
My musical friend, at whose house I am now visiting, has tried all the owls that are his near neighbours with a pitch-pipe set at concert pitch, and finds they all hoot in B flat. He will examine the nightingales next spring.
I am, etc., etc.
LETTER X.
Selborne, Aug. 1st., 177l.