Page:White - The natural history of Selborne, and the naturalist's calendar, 1879.djvu/173

Rh for about ten minutes while we watched it. Next day I went again with a photographic camera and exposed three plates, the lens being within six feet of the bird, and the front leg of the stand being well within two feet. On trying to get a fourth view still nearer, the bird rose. As I do not suppose a photograph of a sitting woodcock has ever been taken before, I enclose you a print from one of my negatives The nest to-day was empty, with signs of the young birds having been satisfactorily hatched."

LETTER IX. , near, Feb. 12th, 1772 ,—You are, I know, no great friend to migration; and the well-attested accounts from various parts of the kingdom seem to justify you in your suspicions, that at least many of the swallow kind do not leave us in the winter, but lay themselves up like insects and bats in a torpid state, and slumber away the more uncomfortable months till the return of the sun and fine weather awakens them.

But then we must not, I think, deny migration in general; because migration certainly does subsist in some places, as my brother in Andalusia has fully informed me. Of the motions of these birds he has ocular demonstration, for many weeks together, both spring and fall; during which periods myriads of the swallow kind traverse the straits from north to south, and from south to north, according to the season. And these vast migrations consist not only of hirundines but of bee-birds, hoopoes, Oro pendolos, or golden thrushes, etc., etc., and also of many of our soft-billed summer birds of passage; and moreover of birds which never leave us, such as all the various sorts of hawks and kites. Old Belon, two hundred years ago, gives a curious account of the incredible armies of hawks and kites which he saw in the spring-time traversing the Thracian Bosphorus from Asia to Europe. Besides the above mentioned, he remarks that the procession is swelled by whole troops of eagles and vultures.

Now it is no wonder that birds residing in Africa should retreat