Page:White - The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.djvu/148

 feeding.

Was your reed-sparrow, which you kept in a cage, the thick-billed reed-sparrow of the Zoology, p. 320; or was it the less reed- sparrow of Ray, the sedge-bird of Mr. Pennant's last publication, p. 16?

As to the matter of long-billed birds growing fatter in moderate frosts, I have no doubt within myself what should be the reason. The thriving at those times appears to me to arise altogether from the gentle check which the cold throws upon insensible perspiration. The case is just the same with blackbirds, etc.; and farmers and warreners observe, the first, that their hogs fat more kindly at such times, and the latter that the rabbits are never in such good case as in a gentle frost. But when frosts are severe, and of long continuance, the case is soon altered; for then a want of food soon overbalances the repletion occasioned by a checked perspiration. I have observed, moreover, that some human constitutions are more inclined to plumpness in winter than in summer.

When birds come to suffer by severe frost, I find that the first that fail and die are the redwing-fieldfares, and then the song-thrushes.

You wonder, with good reason, that the hedge-sparrows, etc., can be induced to sit at all on the egg of the cuckoo without being scandalized at the vast disproportioned size of the supposititious egg; but the brute creation, I suppose, have very little idea of size, colour, or number. For the common hen, I know, when the fury of incubation is on her, will sit on a single shapeless stone instead of a nest full of eggs that have been withdrawn: and, moreover, a hen- turkey, in the same circumstances, would sit on in the empty nest till she perished with hunger.

I think the matter might easily be determined whether a cuckoo lays one or two eggs, or more, in a season, by opening