For this matter of the chaffinches see Fauna Suecica, p. 85,
and Systema Naturae, p. 318. I see every winter vast flights of hen
chaffinches, but none of cocks.
Your method of accounting for the periodical motions of the
British singing birds, or birds of flight, is a very probable one;
since the matter of food is a great regulator of the 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.
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