SPIRACULA IN DEER. 35 vegetation in general must have suffered prodigiously. There is reason to believe that some days were more severe than any since the year 1739-40. LETTER XIV. TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ. SELBORNE, March 12, 1768. DEAR SIR,-If some curious gentleman would procure the head of a fallow deer, and have it dissected, he wound find it furnished with two spiracula, or breathing places, besides the nostrils; probably analogous to the puncta lachrymalia in the human head.* When deer are thirsty, they plunge their noses, like some horses, very deep under water, while in the act of drinking, and continue them in that situation for a considerable time; but, to obviate any inconveniency, they can open two vents, one at the inner corner of each eye, having a communiIcation with the nose. Here seems to be an extraordinary provision of nature worthy our attention, and which has not, that I know of, been noticed by any naturalist: for it looks as if these creatures would not be suffocated, though both their mouths and nostrils were stopped. This curious formation of the head may be of singular service to beasts of chase, by affording them free respiration; and no doubt these additional nostrils are thrown open when they are hard run. † Mr Ray observed, that at Malta the owners slit up the nostrils of such asses as were hard worked; for they, being naturally strait or small, did not admit air sufficient to serve them when they travelled or laboured in that hot climate. And we know that grooms and gentlemen of the turf, think large nostrils necessary, and a perfection, in hunters and running horses. Oppian, the Greek poet, by the following line, seems to have had some notion that stags have four spiracula : — * This is termed the lachrymal sinus, is common to the whole of the genus cervus, and exists in many of the antelopes.-ED. In answer to this account, Mr Pennant sent me the following curious and pertinent reply: "I was much surprised to find in the antelope something analogous to what you mention as so remarkable in deer. This animal also has a long slit beneath each eye, which can be opened and shut at pleasure. On holding an orange to one, the creature made as much use of those orifices as of his nostrils, applying them to the fruit, and seeming to smell it through them." Τετράδυμοι οινες, πισύρες πνοιησι διαυλοι. Writers, copying from one another, make Aristotle say, that goats breathe at their ears, whereas he asserts just the contrary: - Αλκμαιων γαρ ουκ αληθη λεγει, φάμενος αναπνειν τας αιγας NATA TA WTα.-" Alcmæon does not advance what is true, when he avers that goats breathe through their ears.". History of Animals, Book i. chap. xi. LETTER XV. TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ. SELBORNE, March 30, 1768. DEAR SIR,- Some intelligent country people have a notion that we have, in these parts, a species of the genus mustelinum, besides the weasel, stoat, ferret, and polecat; a little reddish beast, not much bigger than a field mouse, but much longer, which they call a cane. This piece of intelligence can be little depended on; but farther inquiry may be made.* A gentleman in this neighbourhood had two milk-white 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 milk-white. 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 British Zoology? No doubt they were.† The cane has been satisfactorily proved to be the common weasel. It is called in Suffolk the mouse-hunt.-ED. We can see no reason why the bird referred to may not have been a white lark, as well as a snow-bunting. We have seen white birds of many British species. There was a white lark shot in the neighbourhood of Kingston Rectory, near Canterbury, in October, 1828. In the Natural History Magazine there is a notice of a blackbird's nest found at St Anstell, Cornwall, containing two birds, one of them perfectly white. In the summer of 1831, a blackbird's nest was found at Newbottle, near Edinburgh, containing four young; two of which were of the ordinary colour, and two perfectly white. The former turned out females, and the latter were both male birds. On the grounds of Drumsheugh, the property of our friend Sir Patrick Walker, there was, some years ago, a beautifully mottled blackbird, which became so tame that it fed along EFFECT OF FOOD ON THE COLOUR OF BIRDS. 37 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 animals! The pied and mottled colours of domesticated animals are supposed to be owing to high, various, and unusual food.* I had remarked, for years, that the root of the cuckoo-pint (arum) was frequently scratched out of the dry banks of hedges, and in severe snowy weather. After observing, with some exactness, myself, and getting others to do the same, we found it was the thrush kind that searched it out. The root of the arum is remarkably warm and pungent. Our flocks of female chaffinches have not yet forsaken us. The blackbirds and thrushes are very much thinned down by that fierce weather in January. In the middle of February, I discovered, in my tall hedges, a little bird that raised my curiosity: it was of that yellowgreen colour that belongs to the salicaria kind, and, I think, was soft-billed. It was no parus, and was too long and too big for the golden-crowned wren, appearing most like the largest willow-wren. It hung sometimes with its back downwards, but never continuing one moment in the same place. I shot at it, but it was so desultory that I missed my aim.† with the domestic fowls. It continued at Drumsheugh for some years, and was shot by a gentleman from a back window in Melville Street, who had not heard of it, and supposed it a bird of some very uncommon species. It is now in the museum of Sir Patrick. Another mottled blackbird was some years ago kept in a cage by Mr Veitch, the distinguished optician, at Inchbonny, near Jedburgh. We have seen white crows very often; a white robin, with red eyes; a white sparrow, and a white jack-daw. These accidental varieties, we believe, have existed in almost every species of birds. Sir William Jardine mentions a pair of magpies of a cream colour, which were hatched at a farm-steading in Eskdale, Dumfriesshire. In the Natural History Magazine it is stated, that a greenfinch was shot in the neighbourhood of Ross, Herefordshire, the prevailing colour of which was a rich yellow, mottled with green, yellow, and dirty white.-ED. Food, climate, and domestication, have a great influence in changing the colour of animals. Hence the varied plumage of almost all our domestic birds. In a wild state, the dark colour of most birds is a great safeguard to them against their enemies. Naturalists suppose that this is the reason why birds, which have a very varied plumage, seldom assume their gay attire till the second or third year, when they have acquired cunning and strength to avoid their enemies.-ED. In all probability the bearded titmouse.-ED. I wonder that the stone curlew, charadrius oedicnemus, should be mentioned by the writers as a rare bird: it abounds in all the champaign parts of Hampshire and Sussex, and breeds, I think, all the summer, having young ones, I know, very late in the autumn. Already they begin clamouring in the evening. They cannot, I think, with any propriety, be called, as they are by Mr Ray, "circa aquas versantes;" for with us (by day at least) they haunt only the most dry, open, upland fields and sheep-walks, far removed from water: what they may do in the night I cannot say. Worms are their usual food, but they also eat toads and frogs. I can shew you some good specimens of my new mice. Linnæus, perhaps, would call the species mus minimus. LETTER XVI. TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ. SELBORNE, April 18, 1768. DEAR SIR,- The history of the stone curlew, charadrius oedicnemus, is as follows:- It lays its eggs, usually two, never more than three, on the bare ground, without any nest, in the field, so that the countryman, in stirring his fallows, often destroys them. The young run immediately from the egg like partridges, &c. and are withdrawn to some flinty field by the dam, where they skulk among the stones, which are their best security; for their feathers are so exactly of the colour of our grey spotted flints, that the most exact observer, unless he catches the eye of the young bird, may be eluded. The eggs are short and round, of a dirty white, spotted with dark bloody blotches. Though I might not be able, just when I pleased, to procure you a bird, yet I could shew you them almost any day; and any evening you may hear them round the village; for they make a clamour which may be heard a mile. Oedicnemus is a most apt and expressive name for them, since their legs seem swollen like those of a gouty man. After harvest, I have shot them before the pointers in turnip fields. I make no doubt but there are three species of the willowwrens ;* two I know perfectly, but have not been able yet to These are the wood-wren, s. sibilatrix, the hay bird, s. trochilus, and the chiff-chaff, s. hippolais, the latter of which generally appears in this country in the end of April. Mr Sweet says, the chiff-chaff soon becomes familiar in confinement; so much so, that one he captured took a fly out of his hand in three or four days, and "learnt to drink milk out GRASSHOPPER LARK. 39 procure the third. No two birds can differ more in their notes, and that constantly, than those two that I am acquainted with; for the one has a joyous, easy, laughing note, the other a harsh loud chirp. The former is every way larger, and three quarters of an inch longer, and weighs two drachms and a half, while the latter weighs but two; so that the songster is one-fifth heavier than the chirper. The chirper (being the first summer bird of passage that is heard, the wryneck sometimes excepted) begins his two notes in the middle of March, and continues them through the spring and summer, till the end of August, as appears by my journals. The legs of the larger of these two are flesh-coloured; of the less, black. The grasshopper lark began his sibilous note in my fields last Saturday. Nothing can be more amusing than the whisper of this little bird, which seems to be close by, though at an hundred yards' distance; and, when close at your ear, is scarcely any louder than when a great way off. Had I not been a little acquainted with insects, and known that the grasshopper kind is not yet hatched, I should have hardly believed but that it had been a locusta whispering in the bushes. The country people laugh when you tell them that it is the note of a bird. It is a most artful creature, skulking in the thickest part of a bush, and will sing at a yard distance, provided it be concealed. I was obliged to get a person to go on the other side of the hedge where it haunted; and then it would run, creeping like a mouse before us for an hundred yards together, through the bottom of the thorns; yet it would not come into fair sight; but in a morning early, and when undisturbed, it sings on the top of a twig, gaping, and shivering with its wings. Mr Ray himself had no knowledge of this bird, but received his account from Mr Johnston, who apparently confounds it with the reguli non cristati, from which it is very distinct. See Ray's Philosophical Letters, p. 108. The fly-catcher (stoparola) has not yet appeared: it usually breeds in my vine. The redstart begins to sing its note is of a tea-spoon, of which it was so fond, that it would fly after it all round the room, and perch on the hand that held it, without shewing the least symptoms of fear; it would fly up to the ceiling, and bring down a fly in its mouth every time. At last it got so tame, that it would sit on my knee at the fire, and sleep."-ED. The grasshopper warbler, sylvia locustella of Latham. It is quite distinct in habits and character from the lark genus; it is destitute of the long claw behind; it resides in thickets, and is incapable of running on the ground like a lark; its progressive movement consists of hopping, It frequents low and damp situations.-ED. |