The Calandrelle, or Crèou, as Provence calls it, is the first to arrive. As soon as August has begun it may be seen exploring the stony fields, seeking the seeds of the Setaria, an ill weed affecting cultivated ground. At the least alarm it flies off, making a harsh guttural sound sufficiently expressed by its Provençal name. It is soon followed by the whinchat, which preys quietly on small weevils, crickets, and ants in old fields of luzern. With the whinchat begins the long line of small birds suitable for the spit. It is continued in September by the most celebrated of them—the common wheat-ear, glorified by all who are capable of appreciating its high qualities. Never did the Beccafico of the Roman gourmet, immortalised in Martial’s epigrams, rival the delicious, perfumed ball of fat the wheat-ear makes when it has grown scandalously obese on an immoderate diet. It consumes every kind of insect voraciously. My archives as a sportsman-naturalist give a list of the contents of its gizzard. All the small people of the fallows are in it,—larvæ and weevils of every kind, crickets, chrysomelides, grasshoppers, cassidides, earwigs, ants, spiders, hundred-legs, snails, wire-worms, and ever so many more. And as a change from this spicy diet there are grapes, blackberries, and cornel-berries. Such is the bill of fare sought incessantly by the wheat-ear as it flutters from clod to clod, the white feathers of its outspread tail giving it the look of a butterfly on the wing. Heaven only knows to what amount of fat it can attain. Only one other bird surpasses it in the art of fattening itself, and that is its fellow emigrant,—another voracious devourer of insects,—the bush pipit as it is absurdly styled by those who name birds, while the dullest of our shepherds never hesitate to call it Le Grasset, i.e. the fattest of the fat. The name is sufficient to point out its leading characteristic. Never another bird attains such a degree of obesity. A moment arrives when, loaded all over with fat, it becomes like a small pat of butter. The unfortunate bird can hardly flutter from one mulberry tree to another, panting in the thick foliage, half choked with melting fat, a victim to his love of weevil.