I have taken a great deal of pains about your salicaria and mine,
with a white stroke over its eye, and a tawny rump. I have surveyed
it alive and dead, and have procured several specimens; and am
perfectly persuaded myself (and trust you will soon be convinced
of the same) that it is no more nor less than the passer
arundinaceus minor of Ray. This bird, by some means or other,
seems to be entirely omitted in the British Zoology; and one reason
probably was because it is so strangely classed in Ray, who ranges
it among his picis affines. It ought no doubt to have gone among
his aviculae cauda unicolore, and among your slender-billed small
birds of the same division. Linnaeus might with great propriety
have put it into his genus of motacilla; and the motacilla salicaria
of his Fauna Suecica seems to come the nearest to it. It is no
uncommon bird, haunting the sides of ponds and rivers where there
is covert, and the reeds and sedges of moors. The country people in
some places call it the sedge-bird.
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