I was often at Farringdon, a village close by, and there, too, the churchyard had its cirl bunting, singing merrily at intervals from a perch not above thirty yards from the building. And as at Selborne and Farringdon, so I have found it in most places in Hampshire, especially in the southern half of the county; the cirl is the village bunting whose favourite singing place is in the quiet churchyard or the shade-trees at the farm: compared with other members of the genus he might almost be called our domestic bunting. The yellowhammer is never heard in a village: at Selborne to find him one had to climb the hill and go out on the common, and there he could be heard drawling out his lazy song all day long. How curious to think that Gilbert White never distinguished between these two species, although it {174} is probable that he heard the cirl on every summer day during the greater part of his life. [Sidenote: Visiting swifts] The swifts at Selborne interested me even more, and I spent a good many hours observing them; but the swifts I watched were not, strange to say, the native Selborne birds. When I arrived I took particular notice of the swallows and swifts--a natural thing to do in Gilbert White's village. The swallows, I was sorry to find, had decreased so greatly in numbers since my former visits that there were but few left. The house-martins, though still not scarce, had also fallen off a good deal. Of swifts there were about eight or nine pairs, all with young in their nests, in holes under the eaves of different cottages. The old birds appeared to be very much taken up with feeding their young: they ranged about almost in solitude, never more than four or five birds being seen together, and that only in the evening, and even when in company they were silent and their flight comparatively languid. This continued from the 12th to the 16th, but on that day, at a little past seven o'clock in the evening, I was astonished to see a party of over fifty swifts rushing through the air over the village in the usual violent way, uttering excited screams as they streamed by. Rising to some height in the air, they would scatter and float above the church for a few moments, then close and rush down and stream across the Plestor, coming as low as the roofs of the cottages, then along the village street for a distance of forty or fifty yards, after which they would mount up and return to the {175} church, to repeat the same race over the same course again and again. They continued their pastime for an hour or longer, after which the flock began to diminish, and in a short time had quite melted away. On the following evening I was absent, but some friends staying at the village watched for me, and they reported that the birds appeared after seven o'clock and played about the place for an hour or two, then vanished as before.