Page:White - The natural history of Selborne, and the naturalist's calendar, 1879.djvu/406

384 delight. Any insect-eating bird would do the same; and therefore I have often wondered that the accurate Mr. Ray should call one species of buzzard buteo apivorus sive vespivorus, or the honey buzzard, because some combs of wasps happened to be found in one of their nests. The combs were conveyed thither doubtless for the sake of the maggots or nymphs, and not for their honey, since none is to be found in the combs of wasps. Birds of prey occasionally feed on insects; thus have I seen a tame kite picking up the female ants full of eggs, with much satisfaction.—

That red-starts, fly-catchers, black-caps, and other slender-billed insectivorous small birds, particularly the swallow tribe, make their first appearance very early in the spring, is a well-known fact; though the fly-catcher is the latest of them all in its visit (as this accurate naturalist observes in another place), for it is never seen before the month of May. If these delicate creatures come to us from a distant country, they will probably be exposed in their passage, as Mr. White justly remarks, to much greater difficulties from storms and tempests than their feeble powers appear to be able to surmount: on the other hand, if we suppose them to pass the winter in a dormant state in this country, concealed in caverns or other hiding-places sufficiently guarded from the extreme cold of our winter to preserve their life, and that at the approach of spring they revive from their torpid state and reassume their usual powers of action, it will entirely remove the first difficulty, arising from the storms and tempests they are liable to meet with in their passage; but how are we to get over the still greater difficulty of their revivification from their torpid state? What degree of warmth in the temperature of the air is necessary to produce that effect, and how it operates on the functions of animal life, are questions not easily answered.

How could Mr. White suppose that Ray named this species the honey buzzard, because it fed on honey, when he not only named it in Latin buteo apivorus et vespivorus, but expressly says that "it feeds on insects, and brings up its young with the maggots or nymphs of wasps"?