WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
The Natural History of Selborne cover

The Natural History of Selborne

Chapter 28: Letter XIX
By Gilbert White
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

Environmental IssuesEssays, Letters & SpeechesNature/Gardening/Animals

About This Book

The collection presents a series of dated letters and naturalistic notes from a local observer detailing the plants, birds, insects, weather, and seasonal cycles of a rural parish. Entries combine close field observations, phenological records, anecdotal reports of animal behavior, descriptions of landscapes and agricultural life, and occasional short poems. Observations are organized around months, species, and phenomena, often noting variation across years and linking weather patterns to biological events. The narrative emphasizes careful, patient observation and the relationship between human activity and the surrounding natural world.

Letter XIX

To Thomas Pennant, Esquire

Selborne, Aug. 17, 1768.

Dear Sir,

I have now, past dispute, made out three distinct species of the willow-wrens (motacillae trochili) which constantly and invariably use distinct notes. But, at the same time, I am obliged to confess that I know nothing of your willow-lark.* In my letter of April the 18th, I told you peremptorily that I knew your willow-lark, but had not seen it then: but, when I came to procure it, it proved, in all respects, a very motacilla trochilus; only that it is a size larger than the two other, and the yellow-green of the whole upper part of the body is more vivid, and the belly of a clearer white. I have specimens of the three sorts now lying before me; and can discern that there are three gradations of sizes, and that the least has black legs, and the other two flesh-coloured ones. The yellowest bird is considerably the largest, and has its quill-feathers and secondary feathers tipped with white, which the others have not. This last haunts only the tops of trees in high beechen woods, and makes a sibilous grasshopper-like noise, now and then, at short intervals, shivering a little with its wings when it sings; and is, I make no doubt now, the regulus non cristatus of Ray, which he says ‘cantat voce stridula locustae.’ Yet this great ornithologist never suspected that there were three species.

* Brit. Zool. edit. 1776, octavo, p. 381.