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 in
the very dead of winter as when the husbandman is busy with his ploughs
and harrows.

Sure there can be no doubt but that woodcocks and fieldfares leave us in
the spring, in order to cross the seas, and to retire to some districts
more suitable to the purpose of breeding. That the former pair before
they retire, and that the hens are forward with egg, I myself, when I was
a sportsman, have often experienced. It cannot indeed be denied but that
now and then we hear of a woodcock's nest, or young birds, discovered in
some part or other of this island; but then they are all always mentioned
as rarities, and somewhat out of the common course of things: but as to
redwings and fieldfares, no sportsman or naturalist has ever yet, that I
could hear, pretended to have found the nest or young of those species in
any part of these kingdoms. And I the more admire at this instance as
extraordinary, since, to all appearance, the same food in summer as well
as in winter might support them here which maintains their congeners, the
black-birds and thrushes, did they choose to stay the summer through.
From hence it appears that it is not food alone which determines some
species of birds with regard to their stay or departure. Fieldfares or
redwings disappear sooner or later according as the warm weather comes on
earlier or later. For I well remember, after that dreadful winter
1739-40, that cold north-east winds continued to blow on through April
and May, and that these kind of birds (what few remained of them) did not
depart as usual, but were seen lingering about till the beginning of
June.

The best authority that we can have for the nidification of the birds
above-mentioned in any district, is the testimony of faunists that have
written professedly the natural history of particula