Page:White - The natural history of Selborne, and the naturalist's calendar, 1879.djvu/170

148 LETTER VIII. , Dec. 20th, 1770 ,—The birds that I took for aberdavines were reed-sparrows (Passeres torquati).

There are doubtless many home internal migrations within this kingdom that want to be better understood: witness those vast flocks of hen-chaffinches that appear with us in the winter without hardly any cocks among them. Now was there a due proportion of each sex, it should seem very improbable that any one district should produce such numbers of these little birds; and much more when only one-half of the species appears; therefore we may conclude that the Fringillæ cælebes, for some good purposes, have a peculiar migration of their own in which the sexes part. Nor should it seem so wonderful that the intercourse of sexes in this species of bird should be interrupted in winter; since in many animals, and particularly in bucks and does, the sexes herd separately, except at the season when commerce is necessary for the continuance of the breed. For this matter of the chaffinches see "Fauna Suecica," p. 58, and "Systema Naturæ," p. 318. I see every winter vast flights of hen-chaffinches, but none of cocks.

Your method of accounting for the periodical motions of the British singing birds, or birds of flight, is a very probable one; since the matter of food is a great regulator of the actions and proceedings of the brute creation; there is but one that can be set in competition with it, and that is love. But I cannot quite acquiesce with you in one circumstance when you advance that, "when they have thus feasted, they again separate into small parties of five or six, and get the best fare they can within a certain district, having no inducement to go in quest of fresh-turned earth." Now if you mean that the business of congregating is quite at an end from the conclusion of wheat sowing to the season of barley and oats, it is not the case with us; for larks and chaffinches, and particularly linnets, flock and congregate as much