Page:White - The natural history of Selborne, and the naturalist's calendar, 1879.djvu/74

52 call a cane. This piece of intelligence can be little depended on; but farther inquiry may be made.

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A gentleman in this neighbourhood had two milkwhite rooks in one nest. A booby of a carter, finding them before they were able to fly, threw them down and destroyed them, to the regret of the owner, who would have been glad to have preserved such a curiosity in his rookery. I saw the birds myself nailed against the end of a barn, and was surprised to find that their bills, legs, feet, and claws were milkwhite.

A shepherd saw, as he thought, some white larks on a down above my house this winter: were not these the Emberiza nivalis, the snow-flake of the Brit. Zool.? No doubt they were.

A few years ago I saw a cock bullfinch in a cage, which had been caught in the fields after it was come to its full colours. In about a year it began to look dingy; and, blackening every succeeding year, it became coal-black at the end of four. Its chief food was hempseed. Such influence has food on the colour of