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NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE
BY
GILBERT WHITE
eee wes «6oINTRODUCTION BY
EDWARD S. MORSE
ABRIDGED
Boston, U.S.A., AND LONDON GINN & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS 1896
COPYRIGHT, 1896 By GINN & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
BC
INTRODUCTION.
\
__ Avy effort to revive the pre-Darwinian spirit of the study of ' nature is to be commended, and the republication of White’s ‘Natural History of Selborne as an aid to this awakening will
__ be one of the strongest helps. The younger students engaged in section cutting, the tracing of cell lineage and the like, have never known the simple charms of collecting and observing the .
habits and behaviors of animals. Their only knowledge of animals oftentimes comes to them in the laboratory and here
_ the creatures hardened in alcohol or with tissues topographically
mapped out with staining fluid, give little indication of their _ appearance in life.
_ The older naturalist who is equally interested in the methods and results of modern research, looks back to the earlier meet- ings of his Natural History Societies with the same tender rs feeling that one might look back to his first love. In these _ meetings were brought up for the entertainment of all and within the understanding of all, accounts of the habits of % various animals, curious manifestations of instinct, gleams of intelligence in low forms of life, odd ways of building nests, parental solicitude and unexpected traits never dreamed of. _ Beside all these attractive revelations was the announcement of the discovery of new species which sent as keen a thrill _ through the collector’s mind as that following the announce- : ment of a new star or a new continent. The aesthetic side was: also cultivated, and objects were exhibited solely for their
IV INTRODUCTION. . :
beauty,in color or form, and microscopic objects were shown because of their marvellous sculpture. The recently published works of Bolles, Burroughs, Torrey, Abbott, Mrs. Miller and others, and early in the century Thoreau, are in the direct line’ of this spirit, which should never have waned. From the time of White’s Natural History of Selborne up to within thirty years, a very large number of people were finding instruction and pleasure in the simple charms of animated nature. Hogarth’s letter to Ellis typifies this spirit:
“As for your pretty little seed-cups, or vases, they are a sweet confirmation of the pleasure Nature seems to take in superadding an elegance of form to most of her works, wherever you find them. How poor and bungling are all the imitations of art! When I have the pleasure of seeing you next we will sit down — nay, kneel down if you will—and admire these things.”
The realization of the idea that species were artificial and not natural, that they had all come about by a process of varia- tion and natural selection and were not struck off like coins from a die, deadened for a time the interest in species making and collecting. What had been for the outdoor naturalist a simple pastime for leisure hours, was now turned into unremit- ting and sustained work, and few were able to command the time and enthusiasm for this task. Even the appliances for research were beyond his handling, and the redundant nomenclature was a serious task to his memory. He could no longer bring the results of his dallyings with birds and insects before the societies where formerly he had held his audience entranced, and so he retired discomforted and gave up in despair.
The private collections of shells, insects, and minerals so common forty years ago are rarely seen to-day. A distinguished old-time naturalist of Liverpool in speaking of this change testifies that: “Private collections are failing in this city and
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alla ) und, and teaching is everywhere hard and hardening in its ; results. ” Yet the spirit of the collector is abroad in the Ii nd, as witness the schoolboys’ persistent ardor for stamps which continues through life, and the thousand and one fads of the collector, from autographs, coins, bookplates, to the luminated posters. With this spirit still dominant let us velcome every book that shall incite us to seek rest and a eation in the great school of nature.
_ Allusion has been made to the pre-Darwinian naturalists, meaning of course the men of White’s character, not systema- 7 tists nor embryologists, but the amiable lovers of nature who in a quiet and leisurely way informed themselves of the habits and appearances of the wild creatures in their haunts. This ; y] pe of naturalist has in a measure passed away and the change came with’the appearance of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Yet that book with the contributions of Wallace, depended largely or the kinds of observations made by students like White, ‘Huber, Kirby, Buckland, Audubon, and others. ‘The reason of this decadence it is difficult to seek, yet the transcendent interest in the modern views of the origin of animals and 1 Sank has drawn away those who formerly entertained the field ings of Natural History Societies, and none have arisen to ti ake their places. ‘This is to be lamented, and every effort Ss ipod. be made to rekindle the study of these subjects in the d way and for all.
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INTRODUCTORY SKETCH.’
Ir would be hard to overestimate the influence of the “Natural History of Selborne” in promoting the study of Nature ; and when it is considered that there is perhaps noth- ing that yields so pure and simple a delight, or that tends so much to keep the mind fresh and young, as the pursuit of natural science, it will be seen that the author of this delight- ful book was a benefactor to his race of no secondary or unim-
portant rank. Indeed, it is not putting Gilbert White on too
high a pedestal to say that, among those who have done their best in the humbler and obscurer walks of life to which they have been called, few have left an influence more wide-spread and enduring than he has. No life could emphasize that truth
_ better than his. Frank Buckland, the well-known writer and
authority on natural history, in writing of Gilbert White says :—
“White was a true student of all created things — lynx-eyed, quick to observe accurately, and patient to interpret the mean- ing of facts brought under his notice. ‘The same facts that
_White saw and recorded are still going on around us at the
present time. The birds come and go at the same dates as did their ancestors a century ago. ‘The rabbits, hedgehogs, rats, bats, snakes, mice, etc., still keep up their old, old cus-
_ toms unaltered and unchanged. White is the teacher who has
1 This Introductory Sketch has been compiled from the Introduction
" to an edition of White’s Selborne, published by Blackie & Sons of London in their “ Home and School Library.”
Vill INTRODUCTORY SKETCH.
shown four generations how and what to observe — in fact, he taught them the ‘ Art of Observation.’ For the above reason, therefore, White’s ‘Selborne’ has held its own as a standard book for a hundred years, and will probably be as fresh as ever a hundred years hence.
‘““We live in a beautiful and happy world ; the waters teem with life, the earth is populated by creatures innumerable : some live on the mountains, some on the plains, some in the forest, some in the desert ; to observe the habits of all living things that came under his notice was White’s delight; and rest assured that if we — like White — love animals (commonly called dumb because we cannot understand their language), we shall never experience the feeling of solitude.”
Of the details of the life of Gilbert White we know little. Nor is it specially necessary that we should, his work, like that of all great men, being his life. To an edition of his “Sel- borne” published in 1802, his brother John appended a short biographical sketch of the author, and we cannot do better than quote here the particulars he there gave.
“ Gilbert White was the eldest son of John White of Selborne, Esq., and of Anne, the daughter of Thomas Holt, rector of Streatham in Surrey. He was born at Selborne on July 18th, 1720; and received his school education at Basingstoke, under the Rev. Thomas Warton, vicar of that place, and father of those two distinguished literary characters, Dr. Joseph Warton, master of Winchester school, and Mr. Thomas Warton, poetry- professor at Oxford. He was admitted at Oriel College, Oxford, in December, 1739, and took his degree of Bachelor of Arts in June,1743. In March, 1744, he was elected fellow of his college. He became Master of Arts in October, 1746, and was admitted as one of the senior proctors of the University in April, 1752. Being of an unambitious temper, and strongly attached to the charms of rural scenery, he early fixed his residence in his native village, where he spent the greater part
INTRODUCTORY SKETCH. ix
of his life in literary occupations, and especially in the study of Nature. This he followed with a patient assiduity, and a mind ever open to the lessons of piety and benevolence, which such a study is so well calculated to afford. Though several occasions offered of settling upon a college living, he could never persuade himself to quit the beloved spot, which was indeed a peculiarly happy situation for an observer. He was much esteemed by a select society of intelligent and worthy friends, to whom he paid occasional visits. Thus his days passed tranquil and serene, with scarcely any other vicissitudes than those of the seasons, till they closed at a mature age on June 26th, 1793.”
White was the eldest of a large family, eight of whom grew up. Of these, several of Gilbert’s brothers turned their atten- _ tion to natural history, the same as himself, and aided him considerably in his investigations. One of them, Benjamin, became a publisher, chiefly of works on natural history, and it is probably to his suggestion that we owe the publication of the “Natural History of Selborne.” It was certainly first issued by him.
Taking up his residence at Selborne in 1755, while his father was still living, White became the owner of the house’ in which he was born shortly after the latter’s death, which occurred in 1758, and made it his abode for the remainder of his days. He was successively curate of Faringdon, a neighboring parish, and of Selborne. Subsequently he accepted a living which required no service on his part, the duties being performed by others. The fact is, he had a sufficient income to keep him in
ease and comfort ; and as he never married, and had no ambi- tion for place or power, he was content to spend his days in the rural village he loved so well, occupying himself with the simple duties that came in his way, and devoting the plentiful leisure which remained to him to the never-wearying study of Nature.
x INTRODUCTORY SKETCH.
At what time he began his observations is not known, but we may presume that they were commenced soon after his settlement at Selborne, the habit growing and growing, till it became the almost all-absorbing passion that it eventually did. The Letters of which his book consists were probably not originally intended for publication, and it is possibly to that cause that their success must be attributed. They have nothing of the nature of a treatise about them, but are full of the interest and pleasure which the writer takes in his observations and investigations: and therein lies their charm.
The “ Natural History of Selborne”’ was published in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. It has gone through many editions ; a German one having been published as early as 1792, a year before White’s death, which occurred in June, 1793. Since that time the pleasant Hampshire village, which has become through his labors a synonym for a love of Nature, and the devoted study of her ways, has been as it were a shrine to which students of natural history, and especially admirers of Gilbert White’s work, have made loving pilgrimage.
As regards the “ Natural History” itself, it must be borne in mind that our knowledge, in respect to the subjects wherein White was specially interested, has greatly advanced since his time ; so that in many points his views will be found erroneous, and in some cases his observations not sustained by subsequent research. In some instances these errors have been pointed out in the present edition ; but a sparing use has been made of notes, as they tend to distract the attention ; and besides it has been thought that, if the book serve its purpose by creating an interest in natural history, and by inculcating habits of observation, the necessary exactness of information as regards contemporary science will easily be obtained from other and more modern works.
One instance in which White inclined to an erroneous view is that regarding the habits of swallows, As will be seen from
INTRODUCTORY SKETCH. xl
the letters, he became more and more convinced that they pass the winter in a state of torpidity. Daines Barrington, the correspondent to whom the second series of letters were addressed, was still more positive in favor of that theory as against migration. Yet nothing is now more clearly established than the fact of the annual migration of the hirundines.
Of White’s other correspondent, Pennant, it may be as well to say that he was the author of a number of works on natural history, chief among which was his #ritish Zodlogy, which _ gained him considerable reputation both in England and on the Continent.
For the sake of concentration, some of White’s Observations relating to birds, reptiles, and insects, usually printed sepa- rately, under the general heading of “ Observations on Nature,” have been incorporated with the Letters.
No more appropriate quotation can be found with which to close this brief sketch than the following graphic and stimu- lating selection from the writings of the late Frank Buckland, the eminent and genial English writer on natural history : —
“I trust, moreover, that this book (White’s Selborne) may induce my fellow-countrymen to learn that in this beautiful world there are many other creatures besides themselves, all living and acting with the utmost independence of human aid or advice. ‘They do not consult mankind as to how, when or where they shall build their nest or make their holes, or how they shall get their daily rations; they do not ask us leave to come, nor do they ask leave to go. They know their own business, and obey what we, for want of a better word, call ‘instinct,’ the mysteries of which remain as yet unsolved by human intelligence.”
“I feel assured that the education of children, both in town and country, might greatly be forwarded if they were taught in the schools what and how to observe. Especially in the country should they be encouraged to make collections of common
xii INTRODUCTORY SKETCH.
objects, animal, vegetable and mineral. They should also be taught to recognize indigenous British birds and beasts, and to send in notes as to what they have observed of their habits. Such studies tend to sharpen the natural faculties, while they humanize the intellect.”
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PUBLISHERS’ NOTE.
It has been thought best in this edition of White’s Selborne which has been edited for school and home use, to omit certain passages objectionable on account of the plainness of the language, many
_ Latin words, phrases and quotations, and a few paragraphs of no
special worth or interest to the reader of the present day. Latin words and phrases and scientific terms still remain on almost every page of the book, which could not be omitted without an unwarranted mutilation of the text. These may call for some explanation from the teacher or parent.
For collateral reading the student is advised to consult Macmillan’s edition of White’s Selborne edited by Frank Buckland, Routledge’s edition of Selborne with notes by the eminent English naturalist, J. G. Wood, Appleton’s edition of Selborne with an introduction by John Burroughs; also a charming essay on “White and_ his Selborne” in a volume of John Burroughs’s Essays.
THE INVITATION TO SELBORNE.
SEE Selborne spreads her boldest beauties round, The varied valley, and the mountain ground, Wildly majestic ! what is all the pride
Of flats, with loads of ornament supplied ? Unpleasing, tasteless, impotent expense, Compared with Nature’s rude magnificence.
Arise, my stranger, to these wild scenes haste ; The unfinished farm awaits your forming taste : Plan the pavilion, airy, light, and true ;
Through the high arch call in the length’ning view ; Expand the forest sloping up the hill ;
Swell to a lake the scant, penurious rill ;
Extend the vista, raise the castle mound
In antique taste with turrets ivy-crown’d ;
O’er the gay lawn the flowery shrub dispread,
Or with the blending garden mix the mead ;
Bid China’s pale, fantastic fence delight ;
Or with the mimic statue trap the sight.
Oft on some evening, sunny, soft, and still, The Muse shall lead thee to the beech-grown hill, To spend in tea the cool, refreshing hour,
Where nods in air the pensile, nest-like bower ;# Or where the Hermit hangs the straw-clad cell,? Emerging gently from the leafy dell ;
By Fancy planned ; as once th’ inventive maid Met the hoar sage amid the secret shade ;
1 A kind of an arbor on the side of a hill. 2 A grotesque building, contrived by a young gentleman, who used on occasion to appear in the character of a hermit.
The russet fallow, or the golden grain,
Till all the fading picture fail the sight.
Deep fix the kettle’s props, a forky row,
Or from our very shifts some joy arises.
Still oft at eve belated shepherd-swains
In Jewry first this order found a name,
THE INVITATION TO SELBORNE,
Romantic spot ! from whence in prospect lies ‘Whate’er of landscape charms our feasting eyes ; The pointed spire, the hall, the pasture-plain,
The breezy lake that sheds a gleaming light,
Each to his task ; all different ways retire ; Cull the dry stick ; call forth the seeds of fire ;
Or give with fanning hat the breeze to blow. Whence is this taste, the furnish’d hall forgot,
To feast in gardens, or the unhandy grot ?
Or novelty with some new charms surprises,
Hark, while below the village-bells ring round,
y Echo, sweet nymph, returns the soften’d sound ; But if gusts rise, the rushing forests roar,
’ Like the tide tumbling on the pebbly shore.
Adown the vale, in lone, sequester’d nook,
Where skirting woods embrown the dimpling brook, The ruin’d convent lies ; here wont to dwell The lazy canon midst his cloister’d cell ;? While papal darkness brooded o’er the land, Ere Reformation made her glorious stand :
See the cowl’d spectre skim the folded plains. To the high Temple would my stranger go,” The mountain-brow commands the woods below :
When madding Croisades set the world in flame ; When western climes, urged on by Pope and priest, Pour’d forth their millions o’er the deluged East :
XV
1 The ruins of a priory, founded by Peter de Rupibus, Bishop of Win-
chester.
2 The remains of a preceptory of the Knights Templars; at least it was
40K 01 farm dependent upon some preceptory of that order.
Xvi
THE INVITATION TO SELBORNE.
Luxurious knights, ill suited to defy To mortal fight Turcéstan chivalry.
Nor be the Parsonage by the muse forgot ; The partial bard admires his native spot 5 Smit with its beauties, loved, as yet a child, (Unconscious why) its scapes grotesque, and wild. High on a mound th’ exalted gardens stand, Beneath, deep valleys scoop’d by Nature’s hand. A Cobham here, exulting in his art,
Might blend the General’s with the Gardener’s part ; Might fortify with all the martial trade
Of rampart, bastion, fosse, and palisade ;
Might plant the mortar with wide threatening bore, Or bid the mimic cannon seem to roar.
Now climb the steep, drop now your eye below, Where round the blooming village orchards grow ; There, like a picture, lies my lowly seat,
A rural, shelter’d, unobserved retreat.
Me far above the rest Selbornian scenes,
The pendent forests, and the mountain greens Strike with delight ; there spreads the distant view, That gradual fades till sunk in misty blue :
Here Nature hangs her slopy woods to sight,
Rills purl between, and dart a quivering light.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
LETTERS TO THOMAS PENNANT.
LETTER I.
HE parish of Selborne lies in the extreme eastern corner of the county of Hampshire, bordering on the county of Sussex, and not far from the county of Surrey; is about
. fifty miles southwest of London, in latitude fifty-one, and near
mid-way between the towns of Alton and Petersfield. Being very large and extensive, it abuts on twelve parishes, two of which are in Sussex, viz., Trotton and Rogate. The soils of this district are almost as various and diversified as the views and aspects. The high part of the southwest consists of a vast hill of chalk, rising three hundred feet above the village, and is divided into a sheep-down, the high wood and a long hanging wood, called the Hanger. The covert of this emi- nence is altogether deech, the most lovely of all forest trees, whether we consider its smooth rind or bark, its glossy foliage, or graceful pendulous boughs. ‘The down, or sheepwalk, is a pleasing park-like spot, of about one mile by half that space, jutting out on the verge of the hill-country, where it begins to
’ break down into the plains, and commanding a very engaging
view, being an assemblage of hill, dale, wood-lands, heath, and water. The prospect is bounded to the southeast and east by the vast range of mountains called the Sussex Downs, by Guild- down near Guildford, and by the downs round Dorking, and Ryegate in Surrey, to the northeast, which altogether, with the
u
2 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
=
country beyond Alton and Farnham, form a noble and exten- sive outline.
At the foot of this hill, one stage or step from the uplands, lies the village, which consists of ote single straggling street, three-quarters of a mile in length, in a sheltered vale, and running parallel with the Hanger. The houses are divided from the hill by a vein of stiff clay (good wheat-land), yet stand on a rock of white stone, little in appearance removed from chalk; but seems so far from being calcareous, that it endures extreme heat. Yet that the freestone still preserves somewhat that is analogous to chalk, is plain from the beeches which descend as low as those rocks extend, and no farther, and thrive as well on them, where the ground is steep, as on the chalks. ee
The cart-way of the village divides, in a remarkable man- ner, two very "incongruous soils. ‘To the southwest is a rank clay, that requires the labor of years to render it mellow; while the gardens to the northeast, and small enclosures behind, consist of a warm, forward, crumbling mould, called black malm, which seems highly saturated with vegetable and animal manure ; and these may perhaps have been the original site of the town; while the woods and coverts might extend down to the opposite bank.
At each end of the village, which runs from southeast to northwest, arises a. small rivulet: that at the northwest end frequently fails ; but the other is a fine perennial spring, little influenced by drought or wet seasons, called Well-head.!
This breaks out of some high grounds joining to Nore Hill, a noble chalk promontory, remarkable for sending forth two
1 This spring produced, September roth, 1781, after a severe hot sum- mer, and a preceding dry spring and winter, nine gallons of water in a minute, which is 540 in an hour, and 12,960, or 216 hogsheads, in twenty- four hours, or one natural day. At this time many of the wells failed, and all the ponds in the vale were dry. — W.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE, ~ 3
streams into two different seas. The one to the south becomes a branch of the Arun, running to Arundel, and so falling into the British Channel; the other to the north. The Selborne stream makes one branch of the Wey; and, meeting the Blackdown stream at Hedleigh, and the Alton and Farnham stream at Tilford-bridge, swells into a considerable river, navi- gable at Godalming ; from whence it passes to Guildford, and so into the Thames at Weybridge ; and thus at the Nore into the German Ocean.
Our wells, at an average, run to about sixty-three feet, and when sunk to that depth seldom fail; but produce a fine limpid water, soft to the taste, and much commended by those - who drink the pure element, but which does not lather well with soap.
To the northwest, north and east of the village, is a range
of fair enclosures, consisting of what is called a white malm, a sort of rotten or rubble stone, which, when turned up to the frost and rain, moulders to pieces, and becomes manure to itself.
Still on to the northeast, and a step lower, is a kind of white land, neither chalk nor clay, neither fit for pasture nor for the plough, yet kindly for hops, which root deep into the freestone, and have their poles and wood for charcoal growing just at hand. The white soil produces the brightest hops. —
As the parish still inclines down towards Wolmer Forest, at the junction of the clays and sand the soil becomes a wet, sandy loam, remarkable for timber, and infamous for roads. The oaks of Temple and Blackmoor stand high in the estimation of purveyors, and have furnished much naval timber; while _ the trees on the freestone grow large, but are what workmen call shaky, and so brittle as often to fall to pieces in sawing. Beyond the sandy loam the soil becomes a hungry lean sand, till it mingles with the forest ; and will produce little without the assistance of lime and turnips.
4 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
Letrer IT.
In the court of Norton farmhouse, a manor farm to the northwest of the village, on the white malm, stood within these twenty years a broad-leaved elm, or wych hazel, which, though it had lost a considerable leading bough, equal to a moderate tree, in the great storm in the year 1703, yet, when felled, contained eight loads of timber ; and, being too bulky for a carriage, was sawn off at seven feet above the but, where it measured near eight feet in the diameter. This elm I men- tion to show to what a bulk planted elms may attain ; as this tree must certainly have been such from its situation.
In the centre of the village, and near the church, is a square - piece of ground surrounded by houses, and vulgarly called the Plestor.1 In the midst of this spot stood, in old times, a vast oak, with a short squat body, and huge horizontal arms ex- tending almost to the extremity of the area. ‘This venerable tree, surrounded with stone steps, and seats above them, was the delight of old and young, and a place of much resort in summer evenings ; where the former sat in grave debate, while the latter frolicked and danced before them. Long might it have stood, had not the amazing tempest in 1703 overturned it at once, to the infinite regret of the inhabitants, and the vicar, who bestowed several pounds in setting it in its place again: but all his care could not avail; the tree sprouted for a time, then withered and died. This oak I mention to show to what a bulk planted oaks also may arrive: and planted this tree must certainly have been, as will appear from what will be said farther concerning this area, when we enter on the antiquities of Selborne.
On the Blackmoor estate there is a small wood called Losel’s, of a few acres, that was lately furnished with a set of
1 Plestor, Saxon Plegstow, means playing-place.
‘
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE, 5
oaks of a peculiar growth and great value; they were tall and taper like firs, but standing near together had very small heads, only a little brush without any large limbs. About twenty years ago the bridge at the Toy, near Hampton Court, being much decayed, some trees were wanted for the repairs that were fifty feet long without bough, and would measure twelve inches diameter, at the little end. Twenty such trees did a purveyor find in this little wood, with this advantage, that many of them answered the description at sixty feet. These trees were sold for twenty pounds apiece.
In the centre of this grove there stood an oak, which, though shapely and tall on the whole, bulged out into a large excrescence about the middle of the stem. On this a pair of ravens had fixed their residence for such a series of years,
_ that the oak was distinguished by the title of the Raven Tree.
Many were the attempts of the neighboring youths to get at this eyry: the difficulty whetted their inclinations, and each was ambitious of surmounting the arduous task. But, when they arrived at the swelling, it jutted out so in their way, and was so far beyond their grasp, that the most daring lads were awed, and acknowledged the undertaking to be too hazardous: so the ravens built on, nest upon nest, in perfect security, till the fatal day arrived in which the wood was to be levelled. It was in the month of February, when these birds usually sit. The saw was applied to the but, the wedges were inserted into the opening, the woods echoed to the heavy blow of the beetle or mallet, the tree nodded to its fall; but still the mother-bird sat on. At last, when it gave way, she was flung from her nest; and, though her parental affection
‘ deserved a better fate, was whipped down by the twigs, which
brought her dead to the ground.
6 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE,.
: LETTER III.
The fossil shells of this district, and sorts of stone, such as have fallen within my observation, must not be passed over in silence. And first I must mention, as a great curiosity, a specimen that was ploughed up in the chalky fields, near the side of the down, and given to me for the singularity of its appearance; which, to an incurious eye, seems like a petrified fish of about four inches long, the cardo (or hinge) passing for a head and mouth. It is in reality a bivalve of the Linnzan Genus of Mytilus, and the species of Crista Gali; called by~ those who make collections, cock’s-comb. ‘Though I applied to several such in London, I never could meet with an entire specimen ; nor could I ever find in books any engraving from a perfect one. In the superb museum at Leicester House, permission was given me to examine for this article; and though I was disappointed as to the fossil, I was highly grati- fied with the sight of several of the shells themselves in high preservation. ‘This bivalve is only known to inhabit the Indian Ocean, where it fixes itself to a zoophyte, known by the name Gorgonia. ‘The curious foldings of the suture the one into the other, the alternate flutings or grooves, and the curved form of’ my specimen are much easier expressed by the pencil than by words.
Ammonites [Cornua Ammonis| are common in this village. As we were cutting an inclining path up the Hanger, the laborers often found them on that steep, just under the soil, in the chalk, and of a considerable size. In the lane above Wall- head, in the way to Emshot, they abound in the bank in a darkish sort of marl, and are usually very small and soft: but in Clay’s Pond, a little farther on, at the end of the pit, where the soil is dug out for manure, I have occasionally observed them of large dimensions, perhaps fourteen or sixteen inches in diameter. But as these did not consist of firm stone, but
~
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.. : 7
were formed of a kind of hardened clay; as soon as they were exposed to the rains and frosts they mouldered away. These seemed as if they were a very recent production.
In the very thickest strata of our freestone, and at con- siderable depths, well-diggers often find large scallops, having both shells deeply striated, and ridged and furrrowed alternately. ‘They are highly impregnated with, if not wholly composed of, the stone of the quarry.
LETTER IV.
As in a former letter the freestone of this place has been only mentioned incidentally, I shall here become more particular.
This stone is in great request for hearth-stones and the beds of ovens; and in lining of lime-kilns it turns to good account ; for the workmen use sandy loam instead of mortar ; the sand of which fluxes, and runs by the intense heat, and so cases over the whole face of the kiln with a strong vitrified coat like glass, that it is well preserved from injuries of weather, and endures thirty or forty years. When chiselled smooth, it makes elegant fronts for houses, equal in color and grain to the Bath stone ; and superior in one respect, that, when sea- soned, it does not scale. Decent chimney-pieces are worked from it of much closer and finer grain than Portland; and rooms are floored with it; but it proves rather too soft for this purpose. It is a freestone, cutting in all directions; yet has something of a grain parallel with the horizon, and therefore should not be surbedded, but laid in the same position that it grows in the quarry. On the ground abroad this firestone will not succeed for pavements, because, probably, some degrees of saltness prevailing within it, the rain tears the slabs to pieces. Though this stone is too hard to be acted on by vinegar, yet both the white part, and even the blue rag, ferment
8 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
strongly in mineral acids. ‘Though the white stone will not bear wet, yet in every quarry at intervals there are thin strata of blue rag, which resist rain and frost ; and are excellent for pitching of stables, paths, and courts, and for building of dry walls against banks, a valuable species of fencing much in use in this village, and for mending of roads. ‘This rag is rugged and stubborn, and will not hew to a smooth face, but is very durable; yet as these strata are shallow and lie deep, large quantities cannot be procured but at considerable expense. Among the blue rags turn up some blocks tinged with a stain of yellow or rust color, which seem to be nearly as lasting as the blue; and every now and then balls of a friable substance, like rust of iron, called rust balls.
In Wolmer Forest I see but-one sort of stone, called by the workmen sand or forest-stone. ‘This is generally of the color of rusty iron, and might probably be worked as iron ore; is very hard and heavy, and of a firm, compact texture, and composed of a small roundish crystalline grit, cemented together by a brown, terrene, ferruginous matter ; will not cut without difficulty, nor easily strike fire with steel. Being often found in broad flat pieces, it makes good pavement for paths about houses, never becoming slippery in frost or rain; 1s excellent for dry walls, and is sometimes used in buildings. In many parts of that waste it lies scattered on the surface of the ground; but is dug on Weaver’s Down, a vast hill on the eastern verge of that forest, where the pits are shallow and the stratum thin. This stone is imperishable.
From a notion of rendering their work the more elegant, and giving it a finish, masons chip this stone into small frag- ments about the size of the head of a large nail, and then stick the pieces into the wet mortar along the joints of their freestone walls; this embellishment carries an odd appearance, and has occasioned strangers sometimes to ask us pleasantly, “ whether we fastened our walls together with tenpenny nails.” —
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. g 9
LETTER V.
Among the singularities of this place the two rocky hollow lanes, the one to Alton, and the other to the forest, deserve our attention. ‘These roads, running through the malm lands, are, by the traffic of ages, and the fretting of water, worn down through the first stratum of our freestone, and partly through the second; so that they look more like water-courses than roads; and are bedded with naked rag for furlongs together. In many places they are reduced sixteen to eighteen feet beneath the level of the fields ; and after floods, and in frosts, exhibit very grotesque and wild appearances, from the tangled roots that are twisted among the strata, and from the torrents rushing down their broken sides ; and especially when those cascades are frozen into icicles, hanging in all the fanciful shapes of frost-work. These rugged gloomy scenes affright the ladies when they peep down into them from the paths above, and make timid horsemen shudder while they ride along them; but delight the naturalist with their various botany, and par- _ ticularly with the curious /#/ices with which they abound. | The manor of Selborne, was it strictly looked after, with all its kindly aspects, and all its sloping coverts,.would swarm with game; even now hares, partridges, and pheasants abound; and in old days woodcocks were as plentiful. There are few quails, because they more affect open fields than enclosures; after harvest some few landrails are seen. [A man brought me a landrail or daker-hen, a bird so rare in this district, that we seldom see more than one or two in a season, and those only in autumn. This is deemed a bird of passage by all the writers; yet from its formation, seems to be poorly qualified for migration; for its wings are short, and _ placed so forward, and out of the centre of gravity, that it flies in a very heavy and embarrassed manner, with its legs hanging down; and can hardly be sprung a second time, as it runs very
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Faas A
IO THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
fast, and seems to depend more on the swiftness of its feet than on its ‘flying. | !
When we came to draw it, we found the entrails so soft and tender in appearance, they might have been dressed like the ropes of a woodcock. ‘The craw or crop was small and lank, containing a mucus; the gizzard thick and strong, and filled with small shell snails, some whole, and many ground to pieces through the attrition which is occasioned by the muscular force and motion of that intestine. We saw no gravels among the food: perhaps the shell snails might perform the functions of gravels or pebbles, and might grind one another. Landrails used to abound formerly, I remember, in the low wet bean- fields of Christian Malford in North Wilts, and in the meadows near Paradise Gardens at Oxford, where I have often heard them cry crex, crex. The bird mentioned above weighed seven and a half ounces, was fat and tender, and in flavor like the flesh of a woodcock. The liver was very large and delicate. — Observations on Nature." |
The parish of Selborne, by taking in so much of the forest, is a vast district. ‘Those who tread the bounds are employed part of three days in the business, and are of opinion that the outline, in all its curves and indentings, does not comprise less than thirty miles.
The village stands in a sheltered spot, secured by the Hanger from the strong westerly winds. ‘The air is soft, but rather moist from the effluvia of so many trees; yet perfectly healthy and free from agues.
The quantity of rain that falls on it is very considerable, as may be supposed in so woody and mountainous a district. As my experience in measuring the water is but of short date, I am not qualified to give the mean quantity.
1 Tt has been thought by the Editor better to introduce these Observa- tions in the text, where they fit in with the subject, than to print them separately.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ; If
The ‘village of Selborne, and large hamlet of Oakhanger, with the single farms, and many scattered houses along the verge of the forest, contain upwards of six hundred and seventy inhabitants.
We abound with poor; many of whom are sober and in- dustrious, and live comfortably in good stone or brick cottages, which are glazed, and have chambers above stairs; mud build- ings we have none. Besides the employment from husbandry, the men work in hop-gardens, of which we have many; and fell and bark timber. In the spring and summer the women weed the corn; and enjoy a second harvest in September by hop-picking. Formerly, in the dead months they availed themselves greatly by spinning wool, for making of barragons, a genteel corded stuff, much in vogue at that time for summer wear; and chiefly manufactured at Alton, a neighboring town, by some of the people called Quakers ; but from circum- stances this trade is at an end.’ The inhabitants enjoy a good share of health and longevity; and the parish swarms with children.
LETTER VI.
Should I omit to describe with some exactness the forest of Wolmer, of which three-fifths perhaps lie in this parish, my account of Selborne would be very imperfect, as it is a district abounding with many curious productions, both animal and vegetable, and has often afforded me much entertainment both as a sportsman and as a naturalist.
The royal forest of Wolmer is a tract of land of about seven miles in length, by two and a half in breadth, running nearly
4 Since the passage above was written, I am happy in being able to say that the spinning employment is a little revived, to the no small comfort of the industrious housewife. — W.
I2 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
from north to south. This royalty consists entirely of sand covered with heath and fern ; but is somewhat diversified with hills and dales, without having one standing tree in the whole extent. In the bottoms, where the waters stagnate, are many bogs, which formerly abounded with subterraneous trees ; though Dr. Plot says positively, that “there never were any fallen trees hidden in the mosses of the southern counties.” But he was mistaken: for I myself have seen cottages on the verge of this wild district whose timbers consisted of a black hard wood, looking like oak, which the owners assured me they procured from the bogs by probing the soil with spits, or some such instruments: but the peat is so much cut out, and the moors have been so well examined, that none has been found of late.’ Besides the oak, I have also been shown pieces of fossil wood of a paler color, and softer nature, which the inhabitants called fir: but, upon a nice examination, and trial by fire, I could discover nothing resinous in them; and there-
1 Old people have assured me, that on a winter’s morning they have discovered these trees, in the bogs, by the hoar frost, which lay longer over the space where they are concealed than in the surrounding morass. Nor does this seem to be a fanciful notion, but consistent with true philosophy. Dr. Hales saith, “That the warmth of the earth, at some depth under ground has an influence in promoting a thaw, as well as the change of the weather from a freezing to a thawing state, is manifest from this observa- tion, viz., Nov. 29th, 1731, a little snow having fallen in the night, it was, by eleven the next morning, mostly melted away on the surface of the earth, except in several places in Bushy Park, where there were drains dug and covered with earth, on which the snow continued to lie, whether those ~ drains were full of water or dry; as also where elm-pipes lay under ground: a plain proof this, that those drains intercepted the warmth of the earth from ascending from greater depths below them; for the snow lay where the drain had more than four feet depth of earth over it. It continued also to lie on thatch, tiles, and the tops of walls.”,— See Hale’s Hema- Statics, p. 360. QUERY: Might not such observations be reduced to domestic use, by promoting the discovery of old obliterated drains and wells about houses ; and in Roman stations and camps lead to the finding of pave- ments, baths and graves, and other hidden relics of curious antiquity?
-
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ; r3
fore rather suppose that they were parts of a willow or alder, or some such aquatic tree.
This lonely domain is a very agreeable haunt for many sorts of wild fowls, which not only frequent it in the winter, but breed there in the summer; such as lapwings, snipes, wild- ducks, and, as I have discovered within these few years, teals. Partridges in vast plenty are bred in good seasons on the verge of this forest, into which they love to make excursions; and in particular, in the dry summers of 1740 and 1741, and some years after, they swarmed to such a degree that parties of un- reasonable sportsmen killed twenty and sometimes thirty brace
in a day.
But there was a nobler species of game in this forest, now extinct, which I have heard old people say abounded much before shooting flying became so cummon, and that was the
-heath-cock, black-game or grouse. When I was a little boy I
recollect one coming now and then to my father’s table. The last pack remembered was killed about thirty-five years ago, and within these ten years one solitary gray hen was sprung by some beagles in beating for a hare. ‘The sportsmen cried out “A hen pheasant!” but a gentleman present, who had often seen black-game in the north of England, assured me that it was a gray hen.
Nor does the loss of our black-game prove the only gap in
the Fauna of Selborne. For another beautiful link in the
chain of beings is wanting: I mean the red deer, which toward the beginning of this century amounted to about five hundred head, and made a stately appearance. ‘There is an old keeper, now alive, named Adams, whose great-grandfather (mentioned
‘in a perambulation taken in 1635), grandfather, father, and self, enjoyed the head keepership of Wolmer Forest in suc-
cession for more than a hundred years. ‘This person assures me, that his father has often told him, that Queen Anne, as
she was journeying on the Portsmouth road, did not think the
14 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
forest of Wolmer beneath her royal regard. For she came out of the great road at Lippock, which is just by, and, reposing herself on a bank smoothed for that purpose, lying about half a mile to the east of Wolmer Pond, and still called Queen’s Bank, saw with great complacency and satisfaction the whole herd of red deer brought by the keepers along the vale before her, consisting then of about five hundred head. A sight this, worthy of the attention of the greatest sovereign! But he farther adds that, by means of the Waltham blacks, or to use his own expression, as soon as they began blacking, they were reduced to about fifty head, and so continued decreasing till the time of the late Duke of Cumberland. It is now more than thirty years ago that his highness sent down a huntsman, and six yeoman-prickers, in scarlet jackets laced with gold, attended by the stag-hounds ; ordering them to take every deer in this forest alive, and to convey them in carts to Windsor. In the course of the summer they caught every stag, some of which showed extraordinary diversion; but in the following winter, when the hinds were also carried off, such fine chases were exhibited as served the country people for matter of talk and wonder for years afterwards. I saw myself one of the yeoman- prickers single out a stag from the herd, and must confess that it was the most curious feat of activity I ever beheld, superior to anything in Mr. Astley’s riding-school. The exertions made by the horse and deer much exceeded all my expectations ; though the former greatly excelled the latter in speed. When the devoted deer was separated from his companions, they gave him, by their watches, law, as they called it, for twenty minutes ; when, sounding their horns, the stop-dogs were per- mitted to pursue, and a most gallant scene ensued.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 15
LETTER VII.
Though large herds of deer do much harm to the neighbor- hood, yet the injury to the morals of the people. is of more moment than the loss of their crops. ‘The temptation is irre- sistible; for most men are sportsmen by constitution: and there is such an inherent spirit for hunting in human nature, as scarce any inhibitions can restrain. Hence, towards the be- ginning of this century, all this country was wild about deer- stealing. Unless he was a hunter, as they affected to call themselves, no young person was allowed to be possessed of manhood or gallantry. The Waltham blacks at length com- mitted such enormities, that government was forced to inter-
-fere with that severe and sanguinary act called the “ Black
Act,” which now comprehends more felonies than any law that ever was framed before. And, therefore, a late Bishop of Winchester, when urged to re-stock Waltham Chase, re- fused, from a motive worthy of a prelate, replying “that it had done mischief enough already.”
Our old race of deer-stealers is hardly extinct yet: it was but a little while ago that, over their ale, they used to recount the exploits of their youth; such as the shooting at one of their neighbors with a bullet in a turnip-field by moonshine,
mistaking him for a deer; and the losing a dog in the following
extraordinary manner: some fellows, suspecting that a calf new-fallen was deposited in a certain spot of thick fern, went, with a lurcher, to surprise it; when the parent-hind rushed out
of the brake, and, taking a vast spring with all her. feet close
together, pitched upon the neck of the dog, and broke it short in two.
Another temptation to idleness and sporting was a number of rabbits, which possessed all the hillocks and dry places: but these being inconvenient to the huntsmen, on account of their
16 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
burrows, when they came to take away the deer they per- mitted the country people to destroy them all.
Such forests and wastes, when their allurements to irregu- larities are removed, are of considerable service to neighbor- hoods that verge upon them, by furnishing them with peat and turf for their firing ; with fuel for the burning their lime; and with ashes for their grasses; and by maintaining their geese and their stock of young cattle at little or no expense.
The manor farm of the parish of Greatham has an admitted claim, I see (by an old record taken from the Tower of London), of turning all live stock on the forest, at proper seasons (sheep excepted). The reason, I presume, why sheep? are excluded is because, being such close grazers, they would pick out all the finest grasses, and hinder the deer from thriving.
Though (by statute 4 and 5 Wm. and Mary, c. 23) “to burn on any waste, between Candlemas and Midsummer, any grig, ling, heath and furze, goss or fern, is punishable with whip- ping and confinement in the house of correction ”’; yet, in this forest, about March or April, according to the dryness of the season, such vast heath-fires are lighted up, that they often get to a masterless head, and, catching the hedges, have sometimes been communicated to the underwoods, woods, and coppices, where great damage has ensued. ‘The plea for these burnings is, that when the old coat of heath, etc., is consumed, young will sprout up, and afford much tender browse for cattle; but where there is large old furze, the fire, following the roots, consumes the very ground; so that for hundreds of acres noth- ing is to be seen but smother and desolation, the whole cir- cuit round looking like the cinders of a volcano; and, the soil being quite exhausted, no traces of vegetation are to be found
1 For this privilege the owners of that estate used to pay to the king annually seven bushels of oats. — W.
2 In the Holt, where a full stock of fallow-deer has been kept up till lately, no sheep are admitted to this day. — W,
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE, ; 17.
for years. These conflagrations, as they take place usually with a northeast or east wind, much annoy this village with their smoke, and often alarm the country; and, once in par- ticular, I remember that a gentleman, who lives beyond An- dover, coming to my house, when he got on the downs between that town and Winchester, at twenty-five miles’ dis- tance, was surprised much with smoke and a hot smell of fire; and concluded that Alresford was in flames; but, when he came to that town, he then had apprehensions for the next village, and so on to the end of his journey.
On two of the most conspicuous eminences of this forest stand two arbors or bowers, made of the boughs of oak; the one called Waldon Lodge, the other Brimstone Lodge: these the keepers renew annually on the feast of St. Barnabas, taking _the old materials for a perquisite. The farm called Black- moor, in this parish, is obliged to find the posts and brush- wood for the former; while the farms at Greatham, in rotation, furnish for the latter; and are all enjoined to cut and deliver the materials at the spot. This custom I mention, because I look upon it to be of very remote antiquity.
LETTER VIII.
On the verge of the forest, as it is now circumscribed, are three considerable lakes, two in Oakhanger, of which I have nothing particular to say; and one called Bin’s, or Bean’s Pond, which is worthy the attention of a naturalist or a sports- ‘man. For, being crowded at the upper end with willows, it affords such a safe and pleasing shelter to wild-ducks, teals, snipes, etc., that they breed there. In the winter this covert is also frequented by foxes, and sometimes by pheasants ; and the bogs produce many curious plants.
18 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
By a perambulation of Wolmer Forest and the Holt, made in 1635, and the eleventh year of Charles I (which now lies before me), it appears that the limits of the former are much circumscribed. For, to say nothing of the farther side, with which I am not so well acquainted, the bounds on this side, in old times, came into Binswood; and extended to the ditch of Wardleham Park, in which stands the curious mount called King John’s Hill, and Lodge Hill; and to the verge of Hartley Mauduit, called Mauduit Hatch; comprehending also Short Heath, Oakhanger, and Oakwoods; a large district, now private property, though once belonging to the royal domain.
It is remarkable that the term purlieu is never once men- tioned in this long roll of parchment. It contains, besides the perambulation, a rough estimate of the value of the timbers, which were considerable, growing at that time in the district of the Holt; and enumerates the officers, superior and inferior, of those joint forests, for the time being, and their ostensible fees and perquisites. In those days, as at present, there were hardly any trees in Wolmer Forest.
Within the present limits of the Forest are three consider- able lakes, Hogmer, Cranmer, and Wolmer ; all of which are stocked with carp, tench, eels, and perch; but the fish do not thrive well, because the water is hungry, and the bottoms are a naked sand.
A circumstance respecting these ponds, though by no means peculiar to them, I cannot pass over in silence; and that is that instinct by which in summer all the kine, whether oxen, cows, calves, or heifers, retire constantly to the water during the hotter hours; where, being more exempt from flies, and inhaling the coolness of that element, some belly deep, and some only to midleg, they ruminate and solace themselves from about ten in the morning till four in the afternoon, and then return to their feeding. ‘Thomson, who was a nice ob- server of natural occurrences, says in his “ Summer,”
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ; 19
“ A various group the herds and flocks compose; —on the grassy bank Some ruminating lie; while others stand Half in the flood, and, often bending, sip The circling surface.”
Wolmer Pond, so called, I suppose, for eminence sake, is a
vast lake for this part of the world, containing, in its whole circumference, 2646 yards, or very near a mile and a half. The length of the northwest and opposite side is about 704 yards, and the breadth of the southwest end about 456 yards. This measurement, which I caused to be made with good exactness, gives an area of about sixty-six acres, exclusive of a large irregular arm at the northeast corner, which we did not take into the reckoning. __ On the face of this expanse of waters, and perfectly secure _ from fowlers, lie all day long, in the winter season, vast flocks of ducks, teals, and widgeons, of various denominations ; where they preen and solace and rest themselves, till towards sunset, when they issue forth in little parties (for in their natural state they are all birds of the night) to feed in the brooks and meadows ; returning again with the dawn of the morning. Had this lake an arm or two more, and were it planted round with thick covert (for now it is perfectly naked), it might make a valuable decoy.
Yet neither its extent, nor the clearness of its water, nor the resort of various and curious fowls, nor its picturesque groups of cattle, can render this meer so remarkable as the great quantity of coins that were found in its bed about forty years ago. But, as such discoveries more properly belong to the antiquities of this place, I shall suppress all particulars for the present, till I enter professedly on my series of letters respecting the more remote history of this village and district.
“t20 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE,
LETTER IX.
By way of supplement, I shall trouble you once more on this subject, to inform you that Wolmer, with her sister forest Ayles Holt, alias Alice Holt, as it is called in old rec- ords, is held by grant from the crown for a term of years.
The grantees that the author remembers are Brigadier- General Emanuel Scroope Howe, and his lady, Ruperta, who was a daughter of Prince Rupert; a Mr. Mordaunt, of the Peterborough family, who married a dowager Lady Pembroke; Henry Bilson Legge and lady; and now Lord Stawell, their son.
The lady of General Howe lived to an advanced age, long surviving her husband; and, at her death, left behind her many curious pieces of mechanism of her father’s constructing, who was a distinguished mechanic and artist, as well as warrior ; and among the rest, a very complicated clock, lately in possession of Mr. Elmer, the celebrated game-painter at Farnham, in the county of Surrey.
Though these two forests are only parted by a narrow range of enclosures, yet no two soils can be more different ; for the Holt consists of a strong loam, of a miry nature, carry- ing a good turf, and abounding with oaks that grow to be large timber ; while Wolmer is nothing but a hungry, sandy, barren waste.
The former being all in the parish of Binsted, is about two miles in extent from north to south, and near as much from east to west; and contains within it many woodlands and lawns, and the great lodge where the grantees reside, and a smaller lodge called Goose Green; and is abutted on by the parishes of Kingsley, Frinsham, Farnham, and Bentley; all of which have right of common.
One thing is remarkable: that though the Holt has been of old well stocked with fallow-deer, unrestrained by any pales
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ‘ 21
or fences more than a common hedge, yet they were never seen within the limits of Wolmer; nor were the red deer of Wolmer ever known to haunt the thickets or glades of the Holt.
At present the deer of the Holt are much thinned and reduced by the night hunters, who perpetually harass them in spite of the efforts of numerous keepers, and the severe penalties that have been put in force against them as often as they have been detected, and rendered liable to the lash of the law. Neither fines nor imprisonments can deter them; so im- possible is it to extinguish the spirit of sporting which seems to be inherent in human nature.
General Howe turned out some Getman wild boars and sows in his forests, to the great terror of the neighborhood, _and, at one time, a wild bull or buffalo; but the country rose upon them and destroyed them.
A very large fall of timber, consisting of about one thousand oaks, has been cut this spring (viz., 1784) in the Holt forest: one-fifth of which, it is said, belongs to the grantee, Lord Stawell. He lays claim also to the lop and top; but the poor of the parishes of Binsted and Frinsham, Bentley and Kingsley, assert that it belongs to them, and assembling in a riotous manner, have actually taken it all away. One man, who keeps a team, has carried home for his share forty sacks of wood. Forty-five of these people his lordship has served with actions. These trees, which were very sound and in high perfection, were winter-cut, viz., in February and March, before the bark would run. -In- old times the Holt was estimated to be eighteen miles, computed measure from water-carriage, viz., from the town of Chertsey, on the Thames; but now it is not half that distance, since the Wey is made navigable up to the town of Godalming in the county of Surrey.
.22 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
LETTER X. August ath, 1767.
It has been my misfortune never to have had any neighbors whose studies have led them towards the pursuit of natural knowledge; so that, for want of a companion to quicken my industry and sharpen my attention, I have made but slender progress in a kind of information to which I have been attached from my childhood.
As to swallows being found in a torpid state during the winter in the Isle of Wight, or any part of this country, I never heard any such account worth attending to. But a clergyman of an inquisitive turn assures me that when he was a great boy, some workmen, in pulling down the battlements of a church tower early in the spring, found two or three swifts among the rubbish, which were at first appearance dead, but on being ° carried towards the fire revived. He told me, that out of his great care to preserve them, he put them in a paper bag, and hung them by the kitchen fire, where they were suffocated.
Another intelligent person has informed me, that while he was a schoolboy at Brighthelmstone, in Sussex, a great frag- ment of the chalk cliff fell down one stormy winter on the beach, and that many people found swallows among the rub- bish ; but on my questioning him whether he saw any of those birds himself, to my no small disappointment, he answered me in the negative ; but that others assured him they did.
Young broods of swallows began to appear this year on July r1th, and young martins were then fledged in their nests. Both species will breed again once. For I see by my fauna of last year, that young broods came forth so late as September 18th. Are not these late hatchings more in favor of hiding than migration? Nay, some young martins remained in their nests last year so late as September 29th ; and yet they totally disappeared with us by the 5th October,
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ‘ 23
How strange it is that the swift, which seems to live exactly the same life with the swallow and house-martin, should leave us before the middle of August invariably, while the latter stay often till the middle of October. And once I saw numbers of house-martins on the 7th November. ‘The martins and red- wing fieldfares were flying in sight together, an uncommon
'assemblage of summer and winter birds !
[Writing nearly twenty-one years later (March 23rd, 1788), White gives us, in his Odservations on Nature, the following additional notes on the swallows : —
“A gentleman, who was this week on a visit at Waverley, took the opportunity of examining some of the holes in the sand-banks with which that district abounds. As these are undoubtedly bored by bank martins, and are the places where they avowedly breed, he was in hopes they might have slept
there also, and that he might have surprised them just as they
were awaking from their winter slumbers. When he had dug for some time, he found the holes were horizontal and serpen- tine, as I had observed before; and that the nests were deposited at the inner end, and had been occupied by broods in former summers, but no torpid birds were to be found. He opened and examined about a dozen holes. Another gentle- man made the same search many years ago, with as little success. ‘These holes were in depth about two feet.
“March 21st, 1790. A single bank or sand-martin was seen hovering and playing round the sand-pit at Short Heath, where in the summer they abound.
“ April gth, 1793. A sober hind assures us, that this day, on Wishhanger common between Hedleigh and Frinsham, he
_ saw several bank martins playing in and out, and hanging
before some nest-holes in a sand-hill, where these birds usually nestle.
“The incident confirms my suspicions, that this species of hirundo is to be seen first of any; and gives great reason to
24 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE,
suppose that they do not leave their wild haunts at all, but are secreted amidst the clefts and caverns of those abrupt cliffs, where they usually spend their summers.
“The late severe weather considered, it is not very probable that these birds should have migrated so early from a tropical region, through all these cutting winds and pinching frosts ; but it is easy to suppose that they may, like bats and flies, - have been awakened by the influence of the sun, amidst their secret lurking-places, where they have spent the uncomfortable foodless months in a torpid state, and in the profoundest of slumbers.
“There is a large pond at Wishhanger, which induces these sand-martins to frequent that district. For I have ever remarked that they haunt near great waters, either rivers or lakes.”
Somewhat later White writes : — “ During the severe winds that often prevail late in the spring, it is not easy to say how the hirundines subsist ; for they withdraw themselves, and are hardly ever seen, nor do any insects appear for their support. That they can retire to rest, and sleep away these uncomfort- able periods, as bats do, is a matter rather to be suspected than proved; or do they not rather spend their time in deep and sheltered vales near waters, where insects are more likely to be found? Certain it is, that hardly any individuals of this” genus have at such times been seen for several days together.
“September 13th, 1791. The congregating flocks of hirun- dines on the church and tower are very beautiful and amusing. When they fly off together from the roof, on any alarm, they quite swarm in the air. But they soon settle in heaps, and preening their feathers, and lifting up their wings to admit the sun, seem highly to enjoy the warm situation. Thus they spend the heat of the day, preparing for their emigration, and, as it were, consulting when and where they are to go. The flight about the church seems to consist chiefly of house-
_— = w =. .
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. . 25
martins, about-4oo in number ; but there are other places of rendezvous above the village frequented at the same time.
“It is remarkable that though most of them sit on the battlements and roof, yet many hang or cling for some time by their claws against the surface of the walls, in a manner not practised by them at any other time of their remaining with us.
“The swallows seem to delight more in holding their assem- blies on trees.
“ November 3rd, 1789. Two swallows were seen this morn- ing at Newton vicarage house, hovering and settling on the roofs and out-buildings. None have been observed at Selborne since October 11th. It is very remarkable that after the hirundines have disappeared for some weeks, a few are occa- sionally seen again ; sometimes in the first week in November,
- and that only for one day. Do they not withdraw and slumber
in some hiding-place in the interval? For we cannot suppose they had emigrated to warmer climes and so returned again for one day. Is it not more probable that they are awakened from sleep, and like the bats, are come forth to collect a little food? Bats appear at all seasons through the autumn and spring months, when the thermometer is at 50°, because then moths are stirring. These swallows looked like young ones.’’]
A little yellow bird still continues to make a sibilous shiver- ing noise in the tops of tall woods. The Svtoparo/a of Ray (for which we have as yet no name in these parts) is called in your
zoology the fly-catcher. There is one circumstance charac-
teristic of this bird which seems to have escaped observation, and that is, it takes its stand on the top of some stake or post,
_ from whence it springs forth on its prey, catching a fly in the
air, and hardly ever touching the ground, but returning still to the same stand for many times together.
I perceive there are more than one species of the MWoftacilla trochilus: Mr, Derham supposes, in “ Ray’s Philos. Letters,”
26 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
that he has discovered three.’ In these there is again an instance of some very common birds that have as me no English name.
Mr. Stillingfleet makes a question whether the hanes be a bird of passage or not: I think there is no doubt of it: for, in April, in the first fine weather, they come trooping all at once, into these parts, but are never seen in the winter. They are delicate songsters.
Numbers of snipes breed every summer in some moory ground on the verge of this parish. It is very amusing to see the male bird on wing at that time, and to hear his piping and humming notes. |
I have had no opportunity yet of procuring any of those mice which I mentioned to you in town. The person that brought me the last says they are plenty in harvest, at which time I will take care to get more ; and will endeavor to put the matter out of doubt, whether it be a nondescript species or not.
I suspect much there may be two species of water-rats. Ray says, and Linnzus after him, that the water-rat is web-footed behind. Now I have discovered a rat on the banks of our little stream that is not web-footed, and yet is an excellent swimmer and diver: it answers exactly to the AZus amphibius of Linnzeus, which he says swims and dives in ditches. I should be glad to procure one with feet spreading out like a palm. Linnzus seems to be in a puzzle about his Wus amphi- dius, and to doubt whether it differs from his AZus terrestris ; which, if it be, as he allows, is widely different from the water- rat, both in size, make, and manner of life.
As to the falcon, which I mentioned in town, I shall take the liberty to send it down to you in Wales ; presuming on your candor that you will excuse me if it should appear as familiar to you as it is strange to me.
1 Modern ornithologists recognize three, the willow-wren, the wood- wren, and the chiff-chaff.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. . 27
It haunted a marshy piece of ground in quest of wild-ducks and snipes; but, when it was shot, had just knocked down a rook; which it was tearing in pieces. I cannot make it answer to any of our English hawks; neither could I find any like it at the curious exhibition of stuffed birds in Spring Gardens. I found it nailed up at the end of a barn, which is the country- man’s museum.
The parish I live in is a very abrupt, uneven country, full of hills and woods, and therefore full of birds.
LETTER XI.
SELBORNE, September oth, 1767.
It will not be without impatience that I will wait for your thoughts with regard to the falcon; as to its weight, breadth, etc., I wish I had set them down at the time; but, to the best of my remembrance, it weighed two pounds and eight ounces, and measured, from wing to wing, thirty-eight inches. Its cere and feet were yellow, and the circle of its eyelids a bright yellow. As it had been killed some days, and the eyes were sunk, I could make no good observation on the color of the pupils and the irides.?
The most unusual birds I ever observed in these parts were a pair of hoopoes, which came several years ago in the summer, and frequented an ornamented piece of ground, which joins to my garden, for some weeks. They used to march about ina stately manner, feeding in the walks many times in the day; and seemed disposed to breed in my outlet ; but were frighted and persecuted by idle boys, who would never let them be at rest.
1 Jrides — plural of iris, the colored circle which surrounds the pupil of the eye.
28 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
Three grosbeaks appeared some years ago in my fields, in the winter; one of which I shot. Since that, now and then, one is occasionally seen in the same dead season.
[ Mr. B. shot a cock grosbeak which he had observed to haunt his garden for more than a fortnight. I began to accuse this bird of making sad havoc among the buds of the cherries, gooseberries, and wall-fruit of all the neighboring orchards. Upon opening its crop or craw, no buds were to be seen; but a mass of kernels of the stones of fruits. Mr. B. observed that this bird frequented the spot where plum-trees grow, and that he had seen it with somewhat hard in its mouth, which it broke with difficulty; these were the stones of damsens. The Latin ornithologists call this bird Coccothraustes, i.e. berry- breaker, because with its large horny beak it cracks and breaks the shells of stone-fruits for the sake of the seed or kernel. Birds of this sort are rarely seen in England, and only in winter. — Observations on Nature. |
A crossbill was killed last year in this neighborbood.
Our streams, which are small, and rise only at the end of the village, yield nothing but the bull’s head or miller’s thumb, the trout, the eel, the lampern, and the stickle-back.
We are twenty miles from the sea, and almost as many from a great river, and therefore see but little of sea-birds. As to wild fowls, we have a few teems of ducks bred in the moors where the snipes breed; and multitudes of widgeons and teals in hard weather frequent our lakes.in the forest.
Having some acquaintance with a tame brown owl, I find that it casts up the fur of mice, and the feathers of birds in pellets, after the manner of hawks; when full, like a dog, it hides what it cannot eat. ;
The young of the barn-owl are not easily raised, as they want a constant supply of fresh mice; whereas the young of the brown owl eat indiscriminately all that is brought ; snails, rats, kittens, puppies, magpies, and any kind of carrion or offal.
mr” AS , rs “-
<
1 .
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 29
The house-martins have eggs still, and squab young. The last swift I observed was about the 21st August: it was a straggler.
Redstarts, fly-catchers, and white-throats still appear : but I. have seen no black-caps lately.
I forgot to mention that I once saw, in Christ Church College quadrangle in Oxford, on a very sunny warm morning, a house- martin flying about, and settling on the parapet, so late as the 20th November.
I was much entertained last summer with a tame bat, which would take flies out of a person’s hand. If you gave it any- thing to eat, it brought its wings round before the mouth, hovering and hiding its head in the manner of birds of prey when they feed. The adroitness it showed in shearing off the
' wings of flies, which were always rejected, was worthy of ob-
servation, and pleased me much. Insects seemed to be most
acceptable, though it did not refuse raw flesh when offered ;
so that the notion that bats go down chimneys and gnaw men’s bacon seems no improbable story. While I amused myself with this wonderful quadruped, I saw it several times confute the vulgar opinion, that bats when down upon a flat surface cannot get on the wing again, by rising with great ease from the floor. It ran, I observed, with more dispatch than I was aware of ; but in a most ridiculous and grotesque manner.
Bats drink on the wing, like swallows, by sipping the surface, as they play over pools and streams. ‘They love to frequent waters, not only for the sake of drinking, but on account of insects, which are found over them in the greatest plenty. As I was going some years ago, pretty late, in a boat from Rich- mond to Sunbury, on a warm summer’s evening, I think I saw myriads of bats between the two places ; the air swarmed with them all along the Thames, so that hundreds were in sight at a time.
30 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
LETTER XII. November ath, 1767.
It gave me no small satisfaction to hear that the falcon turned out an uncommon one. I must confess I should have been better pleased to have heard that I had sent you a bird that you had never seen before; but that, I find, would be a difficult task.
I have procured some of the mice mentioned in my former letter,! a young one and a female, both of which I have pre- served. From the color, shape, size, and manner of nesting, I make no doubt but that the species is nondescript. ‘They are much smaller, and more slender, than the domestic mouse, and have more of the squirrel or dormouse color; their belly is white, a straight line along their sides divides the shades of their back and belly. They never enter into houses ; are car- ried into ricks and barns with the sheaves; abound in harvest; and build their nests amidst the straws of the corn above the ground, and sometimes in thistles. ‘They breed as many as eight at a litter, in a little round nest composed of the blades of grass or wheat.
One of these nests I procured this autumn, most artificially platted, and composed of the blades of wheat, perfectly round, and about the size of a cricket-ball ; with the aperture so in- geniously closed, that there was no discovering to what part it belonged. It was so compact and well filled, that it would roll across the table without being discomposed, though it con- tained eight little mice that were naked and blind. As this nest was perfectly full, how could the mother-mouse come at her litter so as to administer nourishment to each? Perhaps she opens different places for that purpose, adjusting them again when the business is over; but she could not possibly be contained herself in the ball with her young, which, more-
1 Letter X.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE, ° 31
over, would be daily increasing in bulk. This wonderful cradle, an elegant instance of the efforts of instinct, was found in a wheat-field suspended in the head of a thistle.
A gentleman, curious in birds, wrote me word that his servant had shot one last January, in that severe weather, which he believed would puzzle me. I called to see it this summer, not knowing what to expect, but the moment I took it in hand, I pronounced it the male German silk-tail, from the five peculiar crimson tags or points which it carries at the ends of five of the short remiges.'' It cannot, I suppose, with any propriety, be called an English bird; and yet I see, by Ray’s Philosophical Letters, that great flocks of them, feeding on haws, appeared in this kingdom in the winter of 1685.
The mention of haws puts me in mind that there is a total failure of that wild fruit, so conducive to the support of many
of the winged nation. For the same severe weather, late in
the spring, which cut off all the produce of the more tender and curious trees, destroyed also that of the more hardy and common.
Some birds, haunting with the missel-thrushes, and feeding on the berries of the yew tree, which answered to the descrip- tion of the ring-ousel, were lately seen in this neighborhood. I employed some people to procure me a specimen, but without success.”
Query: Might not canary birds be naturalized to this climate, provided their eggs were put, in the spring, into the nests of some of their congeners, as goldfinches, greenfinches, etc.? Before winter perhaps they might be hardened, and able to shift for themselves.
About ten years ago I used to spend some weeks yearly at Sunbury, which is one of those pleasant villages lying on the Thames, near Hampton Court. In the autumn, I could not
! Remiges —the large quills of the wings of birds. 2 See Letters XIII and XX.
32 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.,
help being much amused with those myriads of the swallow kind which ‘assemble in those parts. But what struck me most was, that, from the time they began to congregate, for- saking the chimneys and houses, they roosted every night in the osier-beds of the aits of that river. Now this resorting towards that element, at that season of the year, seems to give some countenance to the northern opinion (strange as it is) of their retiring under water. A Swedish naturalist is so much persuaded of that fact, that he talks in his “‘ Calendar of Flora ” as familiarly of the swallow’s going under water in the begin- ning of September, as he would of his poultry going to roost a little before sunset.
An observing gentleman in London writes me word that he saw a house-martin, on the twenty-third of last October, flying in and out of its nest in the Borough. And I myself, on the twenty-ninth of last October (as I was travelling through Oxford), saw four or five swallows hovering round and settling on the roof of the county hospital.
Now is it likely that these poor little birds (which perhaps had not been hatched but a few weeks) should, at that late season of the year, and from so midland a county, attempt a voyage to Goree or Senegal, almost as far as the equator?
I acquiesce entirely in your opinion — that, though most of the swallow kind may migrate, yet that some do stay behind and hide with us during the winter.
As to the short-winged, soft-billed birds, which come trooping in such numbers in the spring, I am at a loss even what to suspect about them. I watched them narrowly this year, and saw them abound till about Michaelmas, when they appeared no longer. Subsist they cannot openly among us, and yet elude the eyes of the inquisitive: and, as to their hiding, no man pretends to have found any of them in a torpid state in the winter. But with regard to their migration, what difficul- ties attend that supposition — that such feeble bad fliers (who
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. . 33
‘the summer long never flit but from hedge to hedge) should be able to traverse vast seas and continents in order to enjoy milder seasons amidst the regions of Africa!
ERTTER: XII.
SELBORNE, Jan. 22nd, 1768.
As in one of your former letters you expressed the more satisfaction from my correspondence on account of my living in the most southerly county; so now I may return the com- pliment, and expect to have my curiosity gratified by your living much more to the north.
For many years past I have observed that towards Christmas vast flocks of chaffinches have appeared in the fields; many more, I used to think, than could be hatched in any one neighborhood. But, when I came to observe them more narrowly, I was amazed to find that they seemed to me to be almost all hens. I communicated my suspicions to some intel- ligent neighbors, who, after taking pains about the matter, declared that they also thought them mostly females — at least fifty to one. ‘This extraordinary occurrence brought to my mind the remark of Linnzus, that “before winter all their hen chaffinches migrate through Holland into Italy.” Now I want to know, from some curious person in the north, whether there are any large flocks of these finches with them in the winter, and of which sex they mostly consist? For from such intelligence, one might be able to judge whether our female flocks migrate from the other end of the island, or whether they come over to us from the continent.
We have, in the winter, vast flocks of the common linnets ; more, I think, than can be bred in any one district. ‘These, I observe, when the spring advances, assemble on some tree in
34 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
the sunshine, and join all in a gentle sort of chirping, as if they were about to break up their winter quarters and betake themselves to their proper summer homes. It is well known, at least, that the swallows and the fieldfares do congregate with a gentle twittering before they make their respective departure. |
You may depend on it that the bunting does not leave this county in the winter. In January, 1767, I saw several dozen of them, in the midst of a severe frost, among the bushes on the downs near Andover: in our woodland-inclosed district it is a rare bird.
Wagtails, both white and yellow, are with us all the winter. Quails crowd to our southern coast, and are often killed in numbers by people that go on purpose.
[While the cows are feeding in the moist low pastures, broods of wagtails, white and gray, run round them, close up to their noses, and under their very bellies, availing themselves of the flies that settle on their legs, and probably finding worms and /arve that are roused by the trampling of their feet. Nature is such an economist, that the most incongruous animals can avail themselves of each other. Interest makes strange friendships. — Observations on Nature.|
Mr. Stillingfleet, in his Tracts, says that “if the wheatear does not quit England, it certainly shifts places, for about harvest they are not to be found, where there was before great plenty of them.” ‘This well accounts for the vast quantities that are caught about that time on the south downs near Lewes, where they are esteemed a delicacy. There have been shep- herds, I have been credibly informed, that have made many pounds in a season by catching them in traps. And though such multitudes are taken, I never saw (and I am well acquainted with those parts) above two or three at a time, for they are never gregarious. They may perhaps migrate in general; and, for that purpose, draw towards the coast of
-
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE., — 35
Sussex in autumn; but that they do not all withdraw I am sure ; because I see a few stragglers in many counties, at all times of the year, especially about warrens and stone quarries.
I have no acquaintance, at present, among the gentlemen of the navy ; but have written to a friend, who was a sea-chaplain in the late war, desiring him to look into his minutes, with respect to birds that settled on their rigging during their voy- age up or down the Channel. What Hasselquist says on that subject is remarkable; there were little short-winged birds frequently coming on board his ship all the way from our Channel quite up to the Levant, especially before. squally weather.
What you suggest with regard to Spain is highly probable. The winters of Andalusia are so mild that, in all likelihood, the soft-billed birds that leave us at that season may find insects sufficient to support them there.
Some young man, possessed of fortune, health, and leisure, should make an autumnal voyage into that kingdom; and should spend a year there, investigating the natural history of that vast country. Mr. Willughby passed through that king- dom on such an errand; but he seems to have skirted along in a superficial manner and an ill-humor, being much disgusted at the rude, dissolute manners of the people.
I have no friend left now at Sunbury to apply to about the swallows roosting on the aits of the Thames: nor can I hear any more about those birds which I suspected were ring-ousels.
As to the small mice, I have farther to remark, that though they hang their nests for breeding up amidst the straws of the standing corn, above the ground; yet I find that, in the winter, they burrow deep in the earth, and make warm beds of grass : but their grand rendezvous seéms to be in corn-ricks, into which they are carried at harvest. A neighbor housed an oat-rick lately, under the thatch of which were assembled nearly a hundred, most of which were taken, and some I saw.
36 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE,
I measured them, and found that, from nose to tail, they were just two inches and a quarter, and their tails just two inches long. ‘Two of them, in a scale, weighed down just one copper halfpenny, which is about the third of an ounce avoirdupois: so that I suppose they are the smallest quadrupeds in this island. A full-grown domestic mouse weighs, I find, one ounce lumping weight, which is more than six times as much as the mouse above ; and measures from nose to rump four inches and a quarter, and the same in its tail. We have had a very severe frost and deep snow this month. My ther- mometer was one day fourteen degrees and a half below the freezing-point, within doors. The tender evergreens were injured pretty much. It was very providential that the air was still, and the ground well covered with snow, else vegetation in general must have suffered prodigiously. There is reason to believe that some days were more severe than any since the
year 1739-40.
LETTER XIV.
SELBORNE, March rath, 1768.
If some curious gentleman would procure the head of a fallow-deer, and have it dissected, he would find it furnished with two spiracula, or breathing-places, besides the nostrils ; probably analogous to the lachrymal ducts in the human head. When deer are thirsty they plunge their noses, like some horses, very deep under water, while in the act of drinking, and con- tinue them in that situation for a considerable time: but, to obviate any inconveniency, they can open two vents, one at the inner corner of each eye, having a communication with the nose. Here seems to be an extraordinary provision of nature worthy our attention ; and which has not, that I know of, been noticed by any naturalist. For it looks as if these creatures
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. . sh
would not be suffocated, though both their mouths and nostrils were stopped. This curious formation of the head may be of singular service to beasts of chase, by affording them free respiration : and no doubt these additional nostrils are thrown open when they are hard run.1 Mr. Ray observed that at Malta, the owners slit up the nostrils of such asses as were _ hard worked : for they, being naturally strait or small, did not admit air sufficient to serve them when they travelled, or labored, in that hot climate. And we know that grooms, and gentlemen of the turf, think large nostrils necessary, and a perfection, in hunters and running horses.
Writers, copying from one another, make Aristotle say that goats breathe at their ears; whereas he asserts just the con- trary: — “ Alemzon does not advance what is true, when he avers that goats breathe through their ears.” — History of Animals, book I, chap. xi.
LETTER XV.
SELBORNE, March 3oth, 1768.
Some intelligent country people have a notion that we have in these parts, a species of the genus mustelinum, besides the weasel, stoat, ferret, and polecat; a little reddish beast, not much bigger than a field-mouse, but much longer, which they
1 In answer to this account Mr. Pennant sent me the following curious and pertinent reply: —“ I was much surprised to find in the antelope some- thing analogous to what you mentioned as so remarkable in deer. This animal also has a long slit beneath each eye, which can be opened and shut at pleasure. On holding an orange to one, the creature made as much use of these orifices as of his nostrils, applying them to the fruit, and seeming to smell it through them.” — W.
It seems to be the general opinion of naturalists that the slit in question subserves some other sense unknown to us.
ea lh THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
call a cane. ‘This piece of intelligence can be little depended on; but farther inquiry may be made. |
A gentleman in this neighborhood had two milk-white rooks in one nest. A booby of a carter, finding them before they were able to fly, threw them down and destroyed them, to the regret of the owner, who would have been glad to have pre- served such a curiosity in his rookery. I saw the birds myself nailed against the end of a barn, and was surprised to find that their bills, legs, feet, and claws were milk-white.
[ Rooks are continually fighting and pulling each other’s nests to pieces; these proceedings are inconsistent with living in such close community. And yet if a pair offer to build on a single tree, the nest is plundered and demolished at once. Some rooks roost on their nest-trees. The twigs which the rooks drop in building supply the poor with brushwood to light their fires. Some unhappy pairs are not permitted to finish any nest till the rest have completed their building. As soon as they get a few sticks together, a party comes and demolishes the whole. As soon as rooks have finished their nests, and before they lay, the males begin to feed the hens, who receive their bounty with a fondling tremulous voice and fluttering wings, and all the little blandishments that are expressed by the young while in a helpless state. This gallant deportment of the males is continued through the whole season of incubation." ]
A shepherd saw, as he thought, some white larks on a down above my house this winter : were not these the snow-flake of the British Zoology ? No doubt they were.
A few years ago I saw a male bullfinch in a cage, which had been caught in the fields after it was come to its full colors.
1 After the first brood of rooks is sufficiently fledged, they all leave their nest-trees in the day-time, and resort to some distant place in search of food, but return regularly every evening, in vast flights, to their nest- trees, where, after flying round several times with much noise and clamor till they are all assembled together, they take up their abode for the night.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. | 39
In about a year it began to look dingy; and, blackening every succeeding year, it became coal-black at the end of four. Its chief food was hempseed. Such influence has food on the color of animals!’ ‘The pied and mottled colors of domesti- cated animals are supposed to be owing to high, various, and unusual food. '
I had remarked for years, that the root of the cuckoo-pint was frequently scratched out of the dry banks of hedges, and eaten in severe snowy weather. After observing, with some exactness, myself, and getting others to do the same, we found it was the thrush kind that searched it out. ‘The root of the cuckoo-pint is remarkably warm and pungent.
Our flocks of female chaffinches have not yet forsaken us. The blackbirds and thrushes are very much thinned down by that fierce weather in January.
In the middle of February I discovered, in my tall hedges, a little bird that raised my curiosity: it was of that yellow- green color that belongs to the sa/caréa kind,’ and, I think, was soft-billed. It was no titmouse; and was too long and too big for the golden-crowned wren, appearing most like the largest willow-wren. It hung sometimes with its back down- wards, but never continuing one moment in the same place. I shot at it, but it was so desultory that I missed my aim.
I wonder that the stone-curlew should be mentioned by the writers as a rare bird : it abounds in all the champaign parts of Hampshire and Sussex, and breeds, I think, all the summer, having young ones, I know, very late in the autumn. Already they begin clamoring in the evening. They cannot, I think, with any propriety, be called, as they are by Mr. Ray, “ Dwell-
1 White is in error ; food has no influence on color.
2 Supposed to be the chiff-chaff, of which White subsequently writes: — “The smallest uncrested willow-wren, or chiff-chaff, is the next early sum- mer bird which we have remarked; it utters two sharp piercing notes, so
loud in hollow woods as to occasion an echo, and is usually first heard about the zoth March,”
40. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
ers by ponds or water-courses ” ; for with us, by day at least, they haunt only the most dry, open, upland fields and sheep- walks, far removed from water: what they may do in the night I cannot say. Worms are their usual food, but they also eat toads and frogs.
I can show you some good specimens of my new mice. Linnzus perhaps would call the species M/us minimus.
LETTER XVI.
SELBORNE, Afril 18th, 1768.
The history of the stone-curlew is as follows: It lays its eggs, usually two, never more than three, on the bare ground, without any nest, in the field; so that the countryman, in stir- ring his fallows, often destroys them. The young run imme- diately from the egg like partridges, and are drawn to some flinty field by the mother-bird, where they skulk among the stones, which are their best security ; for their feathers are so exactly of the color of our gray spotted flints, that the most exact observer, unless he catches the eye of the young bird, may be eluded. The eggs are short and round; of a dirty white, spotted with dark bloody blotches. Though I might not be able, just when I pleased, to procure you a bird, yet I could show you them almost any day; and any evening you may hear them round the village, for they make a clamor which may be heard a mile. W@dadicnemus is a most apt and ex- pressive name for them, since their legs seem swollen like those of a gouty man. After harvest I have shot them before the pointers in turnip-fields.
[On the 27th February, 1788, stone-curlews were heard to pipe: and on March 1st, after it was dark, some were passing over the village, as might be perceived by their quick, short
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. Sew
note, which they use in their nocturnal excursions by way of watchword, that they may not stray and lose their companions.
Thus, we see, that retire whithersoever they may in the winter, they return again early in the spring, and are, as it now appears, the first summer birds that come back. Perhaps the mildness of the season may have quickened the migration of the curlews this year.
They spend the day in high elevated fields and sheepwalks; but seem to descend in the night to streams and meadows, perhaps for water, which their upland haunts do not afford them. — Odservations on Nature. |
I make no doubt but there are three species of the willow- wrens ; two I know perfectly, but have not been able yet to procure the third. No two birds can differ more in their notes, and that constantly, than those two that I am acquainted with; for the one has a joyous, easy, laughing note, the other a harsh, loud chirp. The former is every way larger, and three-quarters of an inch longer, and weighs two drams and a half, while the latter weighs but two; so the songster is one-fifth heavier than the chirper. The chirper (being the first summer bird of passage that is heard, the wryneck sometimes excepted) begins his two notes in the middle of March, and continues them through the spring and summer till the end of August, as
_ appears by my journals. The legs of the larger of these two
are flesh-colored; of the less, black.
The grasshopper-lark began his sibilous note in my fields last Saturday. Nothing can be more amusing than the whisper of this little bird, which seems to be close by though at a hundred yards distance ; and when close at your ear, is scarce any louder than when a great way off. Had I not been a little acquainted with insects, and known that the grasshopper
_kind is not yet hatched, I should have hardly believed but
that it had been a J/ocusta whispering in the bushes. The
country people laugh when you tell them that it is the note of
- A2 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
a bird. It is a most artful creature, skulking in the thickest part of a bush; and will sing at a yard distance, provided it be concealed. I was obliged to get a person to go on the other side of the hedge where it haunted, and then it would run, creeping like a mouse, before us for a hundred yards together, through the bottom of the thorns; yet it would not come into fair sight ; but in a morning early, and when undis- turbed, it sings on the top of a twig, gaping and shivering with its wings. Mr. Ray himself had no knowledge of this bird, but received his account from Mr. Johnson, who apparently confounds it with the Aeguli non cristatt, from which it is very distinct. |
The fly-catcher has not yet appeared ; it usually breeds in my vine. The redstart begins to sing: its note is short and imperfect, but is continued till about the middle of June. ‘The willow-wrens (the smaller sort) are horrid pests in a garden, destroying the peas, cherries, currants, etc.; and are so tame that a gun will not ‘scare them.
My countrymen talk much of a bird that makes a clatter with its bill against a dead bough, or some old pales, calling it a jar-bird. I procured one to be shot in the very fact ; it proved to be the nuthatch. Mr. Ray says that the less spotted woodpecker does the same. This noise may be heard a furlong or more off.
Now is the-only time to ascertain the short-winged summer birds; for, when the leaf is out, there is no making any remarks on such a restless tribe; and when once the young begin to appear it is all confusion: there is no distinction of genus, species, or sex.}
1 A list of the summer birds of passage discovered in this neighborhood, ranged somewhat in the order in which they appear: smallest willow-wren, wryneck, house-swallow, martin, sand-martin, cuckoo, nightingale, black- cap, white-throat, middle willow-wren, swift, stone-curlew (?), turtle-dove (?), grasshopper-lark, landrail, largest willow-wren, redstart, goat-sucker, or fern-owl, fly-catcher.
-
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ae 5
In breeding-time snipes play over the moors, piping and humming; they always hum as they are descending. Is not their hum ventriloquous like that of the turkey? Some sus- pect it is made by their wings.
This morning I saw the golden-crowned wren, whose crown glitters like burnished gold. It often hangs like a titmouse, with its back downwards.
LETTER XVII.
SELBORNE, June 18th, 1768.
On Wednesday last arrived your agreeable letter of June 1oth. It gives me great satisfaction to find that you pursue these studies still with such vigor, and are in such forward- ness with regard to reptiles and fishes.
The reptiles, few as they are, I am not acquainted with, so well as I could wish, with regard to their natural history. There is a degree of dubiousness and obscurity attending the propagation of this class of animals, something analogous to that of the cryp/ogamia in the sexual system of plants : and the case is the same with regard to some of the fishes ; as the eel, etc.
It is strange that the matter with regard to the venom of toads has not been yet settled. ‘That they are not noxious to some animals is plain : for ducks, buzzards, owls, stone-curlews, and snakes eat them, to my knowledge, with impunity. And I well remember the time, but was not eye-witness to the fact (though numbers of persons were), when a quack at this village ate a toad to make the country people stare ; afterwards he drank oil.
I have been informed also, from undoubted authority, that some ladies (ladies you will say of peculiar taste) took a fancy to a toad, which they nourished summer after summer, for
44 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
many years, till he grew to a monstrous size, with the maggots which turn to flesh-flies. The reptile used to come forth every evening from a hole under the garden-steps ; and was taken up, after supper, on the table to be fed. But at last a tame raven, kenning him as he put forth his head, gave him such a severe stroke with his horny beak as put out one eye. After this accident the creature languished for some time and died.
I need not remind a gentleman of your extensive reading of the excellent account there is from Mr. Derham, in Ray’s Wisdom of God in the Creation, concerning the migration of frogs from their breeding-ponds. In this account he at once subverts that foolish opinion of their dropping from the clouds in rain; showing that it is from the grateful coolness and moisture of those showers that they are tempted to set out on their travels, which they defer till those fall. Frogs are as yet in their tadpole state ; but, in a few weeks, our lanes, paths, fields, will swarm for a few days with myriads of those emigrants, no larger than my finger nail. How wonderful is the economy of Providence with regard to the limbs of so vile a reptile ! While it is an aquatic it has a fish-like tail, and no legs ; as soon as the legs sprout, the tail drops off as useless, and the animal betakes itself to the land.’
Merret, I trust, is widely mistaken when he advances that the tree-frog is an English reptile ; it abounds in Germany and Switzerland.
It is to be remembered that the water-newt or eft will frequently bite at the angler’s bait, and is often caught on his hook. I used to take it for granted that the eft was hatched, lived, and died, in the water. But John Ellis, Esq., F.R.S. (the coralline Ellis), asserts, in a letter to the Royal Society, dated June 5th, 1766, in his account of the mud inguana, an amphibious biped from South Carolina, that the water-eft, or
1 White was mistaken here: the tail of the tadpole does not drop off, but is transformed.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. VAG
newt, is only the larva of the land-eft, as tadpoles are of frogs. Lest I should be suspected to misunderstand his meaning, I shall give it in his own words. Speaking of the coverings to the gills of the mud inguana, he proceeds to say that, “ The form of these pennated coverings approaches very near to what I have some time ago observed in the larva or aquatic state of our English eft, or newt ; which serve them for coverings to their gills, and for fins to swim with while in this state ; and which they lose, as well as the fins of their tails, when they change their state and become land animals, as I have observed, by keeping them alive for some time myself.”
Linneus, in his System of Nature, hints more than once at what Mr. Ellis advances.
Providence has been so indulgent to us as to allow of but one venomous reptile of the serpent kind in these kingdoms, and that is the viper. As you propose the good of mankind to be an object of your publications, you will not omit to mention common salad-oil as a sovereign remedy against the bite of the viper. As to the blindworm (Anguis fragilis, so-called because it snaps in sunder with a small blow), I have found, on examination, that it is perfectly innocuous. A neigh- boring yeoman (to whom I am indebted for some good hints) killed and opened a female viper about the 27th May: he found her filled with a chain of eleven eggs, about the size of those of a blackbird ; but none of them were advanced so far towards a state of maturity as to contain any rudiments of young. Though they are oviparous, yet they are viviparous also, hatching their young within their bellies, and then bring- ing them forth. Whereas snakes lay chains of eggs every summer in my melon beds, in spite of all that my people can do to prevent them ; which eggs do not hatch till the spring following, as I have often experienced. Several intelligent
_ folks assure me that they have seen the viper open her mouth _ and admit her helpless young down her throat on sudden sur-
46 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
prises, just as the female opossum does her brood into the pouch under her belly, upon the like emergencies ; and yet the London viper-catchers insist on it, to Mr. Barrington, that no such thing ever happens. The serpent kind eat, I believe, but once in a year ; or rather, but only just at one season of the year. Country people talk much of a water-snake, but, I am pretty sure, without any reason ; for the common snake delights much to sport in the water, perhaps with a view to procure frogs and other food.
I cannot well guess how you are to make out your twelve species of reptiles, unless it be by the various species, or rather varieties, of our /acerti,’ of which Ray enumerates five. I have not had opportunity of ascertaining these, but remember well to have seen, formerly, several beautiful green lizards on the sunny sand-banks near Farnham, in Surrey;? and Ray admits there are such in Ireland. ‘
[In his Odservations White has the following notes on a snake’s slough: — “ About the middle of this month (September) we found in a field near a hedge the slough of a large snake, which seemed to have been newly cast. From circumstances it appeared as if turned wrong side outward, and as drawn off backward, like a stocking or woman’s glove. Not only the whole skin, but scales from the very eyes are peeled off, and appear in the head of the slough like a pair of spectacles. The reptile, at the time of changing his coat, had entangled himself intricately in the grass and weeds, so that the friction of the stalks and blades might promote this curious shifting of his exuvie.
‘The slippery snake rids itself of its coat with a thorn.’
“It would be a most entertaining sight could a person be an eye-witness to such a feat, and see the snake in the act of changing his garment. As the convexity of the scales of the
1 Lizards. 2 See Letter XXII.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. apy. Od
eyes in the slough is now inward, that circumstance alone is a proof that the skin has been turned ; not to mention that now the present inside is much darker than the outer. If you look through the scales of the snake’s eyes from the concave side, viz., as the reptile used them, they lessen objects much. Thus it appears from what has been said, that snakes crawl out of the mouth of their own sloughs, and quit the tail part last, just as eels are skinned by a cook maid. While the scales of the eyes are growing loose, and a new skin is forming, the creature in appearance must be blind, and feel itself in an awkward, uneasy situation.” |
LETTER XVIII.
SELBORNE, /uly 27th, 1768.
I received your obliging and communicative letter of June 28th while I was on a visit at a gentleman’s house, where I had neither books to turn to, nor leisure to sit down to return you an answer to many queries, which I wanted to resolve in the best manner that I am able.
A person, by my order, has searched our brooks, but could find no such fish as the nine-spined stickleback ; he found the two-spined stickleback in plenty. ‘This morning, in a basket, I packed a little earthen pot full of wet moss, and in it some sticklebacks, male and female, the females big with spawn : some lamperns; some bull’s heads; but I could procure no minnows. ‘This basket will be in Fleet Street by eight this evening ; so I hope Mazel will have them fresh and fair to- morrow morning. I gave some directions, in a letter, to what particulars the engraver should be attentive.
Finding, while I was on a visit, that I was within a reason- able distance of Ambresbury, I sent a servant over to that
48 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE,
town, and procured several living specimens of loaches, which he brought, safe and brisk, in a glass decanter. They were taken in the gullies that were cut for watering the meadows. From these fishes (which measured from two to four inches in length) I took the following description : “The loach, in its general aspect, has a pellucid appearance ; its back is mottled with irregular collections of small black dots, not reaching much below the lateral line, as are the back and tail fins; a black line runs from each eye down to the nose; its belly is of a silvery white ; the upper jaw projects beyond the lower, and is surrounded with six feelers, three on each side; its pectoral fins are large, its ventral much smaller; its dorsal fin large, containing eight spines; its tail, where it joins to the tail-fin, remarkably broad, without any taperness, so as to be charac- teristic of this genus; the tail-fin is broad, and square at the end. From the breadth and muscular strength of the tail it appears to be an active, nimble fish.”
In my visit I was not very far from Hungerford, and did not forget to make some inquiries concerning the wonderful method of curing cancers by means of toads. Several intelli- gent persons, both gentry and clergy, do, I find, give a great deal of credit to what is asserted in the papers, and I myself dined with a clergyman who seemed to be persuaded that what is related is matter of fact; but, when I came to attend to his account, I thought I discerned circumstances which did not a little invalidate the woman’s story of the manner in which she came by her skill. She says of herself “that, laboring under a virulent cancer, she went to some church where there was a vast crowd; on going into a pew she was accosted by a strange clergyman, who, after expressing compassion for her situation, told her that if she would make such an application of living toads as is mentioned she would be well.” Now is it likely that this unknown gentleman should express so much .tender- ness for this single sufferer, and not feel any for the many
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. - 49
thousands that daily languish under this terrible disorder ? Would he not have made use of this invaluable nostrum for his own emolument ; or at least, by some means of publication or other, have found a method of making it public for the good of mankind? In short, this woman (as it appears to me) having set up for a cancer-doctress, finds it expedient to amuse the country with this dark and mysterious relation.
The water-eft has not, that I can discern, the least appear- ance of any gills; for want of which it is continually rising to the surface of the water to take in fresh air. I opened a big- bellied one indeed, and found it full of spawn. Not that this circumstance at all invalidates the assertion that they are larve ; for the /arve of insects are full of eggs, which they ex- clude the instant they enter their last state. The water-eft is continually climbing over the brims of the vessel, within which we keep it in water, and wandering away; and people every summer see numbers crawling out of the pools where they are hatched, up the dry banks. There are varieties of them, differing in color ; and some have fins up their tail and back, and some have not.
LETTER XIX. SELBORNE, August r7th, 1768.
I have now, past dispute, made out three distinct species of the willow-wrens 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 18th, I had 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 willow-wren, 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
50 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
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- colored 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, shiver- ing a little with its wings when it sings; and is, I make no doubt now, the Regulus non cristatus of Ray, which he says “sings with the stridulous voice of a grasshopper.” Yet this great ornithologist never suspected that there were three species.
LETTER XX. SELBORNE, October 8th, 1768.
It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany; all nature is so full that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined. Several birds, which are said to belong to the north only, are it seems often in the south. I have discovered this summer three species of birds with us, which writers men- tion as only to_be seen in the northern counties. ‘The first that was brought me (on the 14th May), was the sandpiper: it was a cockbird, and haunted the banks of some ponds near the village ; and, as it had a companion, doubtless intended to have bred near that water. Besides, the owner has told me since, that on recollection, he has seen some of the same birds round his ponds in former summers.
The next bird that I procured (on the 21st May) was a male red-backed butcher bird. My neighbor, who shot it, says that
! Doubtless the wood-wren.
ates aah Ps ee
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ° 51
it might easily have escaped his notice, had not the outcries and chattering of the whitethroats and other small birds drawn his attention to the bush where it was; its craw was filled with the legs and wings of beetles.
The next rare birds (which were procured for me last week) were some ring-ousels.
This week twelve months a gentleman from London, being with us, was amusing himself with a gun, and found, he told us, on an old yew hedge where there were berries, some birds like blackbirds, with rings of white round their necks ; a neigh- boring farmer also at the same time observed the same ; but as no specimens were procured, little notice was taken. I mentioned this circumstance to you in my letter of November 4th, 1767 (you, however, paid but small regard to what [ said,
_ as I had not seen these birds myself); but last week the afore- said farmer, seeing a large flock, twenty or thirty, of these
birds, shot two cocks and two hens ; and says, on recollection, that he remembers to have observed these birds again last spring, about Lady-day, as it were on their return to the north. Now perhaps these ousels are not the ousels of the north of England, but belong to the more northern parts of Europe ; and may retire before the excessive rigor of the frosts in those parts, and return to breed in the spring, when the cold abates. If this be the case, here is discovered a new bird of winter passage, concerning whose migrations the writers are silent; but if these birds should prove the ousels of the north of England, then here is a migration disclosed within our own kingdom never before remarked. It does not yet appear whether they retire beyond the bounds of our island to the
_ south : but it is most probable that they usually do, or else one
cannot suppose that they would have continued so long unnoticed in the southern countries. The ousel is larger than a blackbird, and feeds on haws ; but last autumn (when there were no haws) it fed on yew-berries: in the spring it feeds on
G2 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
ivy-berries, which ripen only at that season, in March and April.
I must not omit to tell you (as you have been so lately on the study of reptiles) that my people, every now and then of late, draw up with a bucket of water from my well, which is sixty-three feet deep, a large black warty lizard’ with a fin-taii and yellow belly. How they first came down at that depth, and how they were ever to have got out thence without help, is more than I am able to say.
My thanks are due to you for your trouble and care in the examination of a buck’s head. As far as your discoveries reach at present, they seem much to corroborate my suspicions ; and I hope Mr. may find reason to give his decision in my favor; and then, I think, we may advance this extraordi- nary provision of nature as a new instance of the wisdom of | God in the creation.
As yet I have not quite done with my history of the stone- curlew; for I shall desire a gentleman in Sussex (near whose house these birds congregate in vast flocks in the autumn) to observe nicely when they leave him (if they do leave him), and when they return again in the spring: I was with this gentle- man lately, and saw several single birds.
LETTER XXI. SELBORNE, WVov. 28th, 1768.
With regard to the stone-curlew, I intend to write very soon to my friend near Chichester, in whose neighborhood these birds seem most to abound : and shall urge him to take par- ticular notice when they begin to congregate, and afterwards to watch them most narrowly whether they do not withdraw themselves during the dead of the winter. When I have
, 1 Salamander.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE, ~ 53
obtained information with respect to this circumstance, I shall have finished my history of the stone-curlew, which I hope will prove to your satisfaction, as it will be, I trust, very near the truth. This gentleman, as he occupies a large farm of his own, and is abroad early and late, will be a very proper spy upon the motions of these birds ; and besides, as I have prevailed on him to buy the Naturalist’s Journal (with which he is much delighted), I shall expect that he will be very exact in his dates. It is very extraordinary, as you observe, that a bird so common with us should never straggle to you.
And here will be the properest place to mention, while I think of it, an anecdote which the above-mentioned gentleman told me when I was last at his house; which was that, in a warren joining to his outlet, many daws build every year in the
. rabbit-burrows under-ground. ‘The way he and his brothers used to take their nests, while they were boys, was by listening at the mouths of the holes ; and, if they heard the young ones cry, they twisted the nest out with a forked stick. Some water-
-fowls (viz., the puffins) breed, I know, in that manner; but I should never have suspected the daws of building in holes on the flat ground.
Another very unlikely spot is made use of by daws as a place to breed in, and that is Stonehenge. These birds deposit their nests in the interstices between the upright and the impost stones of that amazing work of antiquity : which cir- cumstance alone speaks the prodigious height of the upright stones, that they should be tall enough to secure those nests from the annoyance of shepherd-boys, who are always idling round that place.
One of my neighbors last Saturday, November 26th, saw a martin in a sheltered bottom: the sun shone warm, and the bird was hawking briskly after flies. I am now perfectly satisfied that they do not all leave this island in the winter.
You judge very right, I think, in speaking with reserve and
54 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
caution concerning the cures done by toads: for, let people advance what they will on such subjects, yet there is such a propensity in mankind towards deceiving and being deceived, that one cannot safely relate anything from common report, especially in print, without expressing some degree of doubt and suspicion.
Your approbation, with regard to my new discovery of the migration of the ring-ousel, gives me satisfaction; and I find you concur with me in suspecting that they are foreign birds which visit us. You will be sure, I hope, not to omit to make inquiry whether your ring-ousels leave your rocks in the autumn. What puzzles me most, is the very short stay they make with us ; for in about three weeks they are all gone. I shall be very curious to remark whether they will call on us at their return in the spring, as they did last year.
I want to be better informed with regard to ichthyology. If fortune had settled me near the seaside, or near some great river, my natural propensity would soon have urged me to have made myself acquainted with their productions ; but as I have lived mostly in inland parts, and in an upland district, my knowledge of fishes extends little farther than to those com- mon sorts which our brooks and lakes produce.
LETTER XXII.
SELBORNE, Jan. 2nd, 1769.
As to the peculiarity of jackdaws building with us under the ground in rabbit burrows, you have, in part, hit upon the reason ; for, in reality, there are hardly any towers or steeples in all this county. And perhaps, Norfolk excepted, Hamp- shire and Sussex are as meanly furnished with churches as almost any counties in the kingdom. We have many livings
CIN tte “4 . Ml
fp THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. — : 55
of two or three hundred pounds a year, whose houses of wor- ship make little better appearance than dovecots. When I first saw Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire, and the fens of Lincolnshire, I was amazed at the number of spires which presented themselves in every point of view. As an admirer of prospects, I have reason to lament this want in my own county; for such objects are very necessary ingre- dients in an elegant landscape.
What you mention with respect to reclaimed toads raises my curiosity. An ancient author, though no naturalist, has well remarked that “every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed, of mankind.” !
It is a satisfaction to me to find that a green lizard has actually been procured for you in Devonshire; because it corroborates my discovery, which I made many years ago, of the same sort, on a sunny sandbank near Farnham, in Surrey. I am well acquainted with the South Hams of Devonshire ; and can suppose that district, from its southerly situation, to be a proper habitation for such animals in their best colors.
Since the ring-ousels of your vast mountains do certainly not forsake them against winter, our suspicions that those which visit this neighborhood about Michaelmas are not English birds, but driven from the more northern parts of Europe by the frosts, are still more reasonable; and it will be worth your pains to endeavor to trace from whence they come, and to inquire why they make so very short a stay.
In your account of your error, with regard to the two species of herons, you incidentally gave me great entertainment in
_ your description of the heronry at Cressi Hall; which is a curiosity I never could manage to see. Fourscore nests of such a bird on one tree is a rarity which I would ride half as many miles to have a sight of. Pray be sure to tell me in
1 James iii. 7.
56 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
your next whose seat Cressi Hall is, and near what town it lies. I have often thought that those vast extents of fens have never been sufficiently explored. If half-a-dozen gentlemen, furnished with a good strength of water-spaniels, were to beat ‘them over for a week, they would certainly find more species.
There is no bird, I believe, whose manners I have studied more than that of the goatsucker, as it is a wonderful and curious creature ; but I have always found that though some- times it may chatter as it flies, as I know it does, yet in general it utters its jarring note sitting on a bough; and I have for many a half-hour watched it as it sat with its under mandible quivering, and particularly this summer. It perches usually on a bare twig, with its head lower than its tail, in an attitude well expressed by your draughtsman in the folio British Zodlogy. This bird is most punctual in beginning its song exactly at the close of day; so exactly that I have known it strike up more than once or twice just at the report of the Portsmouth evening gun, which we can hear when the weather is still. It appears to me past all doubt that its notes are formed by organic im- pulse, by the powers of the parts of its windpipe, formed for sound, just as cats purr. You will credit me, I hope, when I assure you that, as my neighbors were assembled in an her- mitage on the side of a steep hill where we drink tea, one of these churn-owls came and settled on the cross of that little straw edifice and began to chatter, and continued his note for many minutes; and we were all struck with wonder to find that the organs of that little animal, when put in motion, gave a sensible vibration to the whole building! ‘This bird also some- times makes a small squeak, repeated four or five times.
It would not be at all strange if your bat, which you have procured, should prove a new one, since five species have been found in the neighboring kingdom. The great sort that I mentioned is certainly a nondescript; I saw but one this summer, and that I had no opportunity of taking.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. f 57
Your account of the Indian grass was entertaining. I am no angler myself; but inquiring of those that are, what they supposed that part of their tackle to be made of — they replied, “ Of the intestines of a silkworm.”
Though I must not pretend to great skill in entomology, yet I cannot say that I am ignorant of that kind of knowl- edge ; I may now and then perhaps be able to furnish you with a little information.
The vast rains ceased with us much about the same time as with you, and since we have had delicate weather. Mr. Barker, who has measured the rain for more than thirty years, says, in a late letter, that more has fallen this year than in any he ever attended to ; though from July, 1763, to January, 1764, more fell than in any seven months of this year.
Gerrer -X XIII. SELBORNE, fed. 28th, 1769.
It is not improbable that the Guernsey lizard and our green
lizards may be specifically the same; all that I know is that, -when some years ago many Guernsey lizards were turned loose in Pembroke College garden, in the University of Oxford, they lived a great while, and seemed to enjoy themselves very well, but never bred. Whether this circumstance will prove anything either way I shall not pretend to say. I return you thanks for your account of Cressi Hall; but recollect, not without regret, that in June, 1746, I was visiting for a week together at Spalding, without ever being told that such a curiosity was just at hand. Pray send me word in your next what sort of tree it is that contains such a quantity of herons’ nests; and whether the heronry consists of a whole grove of wood, or only of a few trees.
1 Drawn from the silk glands.
58 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
It gave me satisfaction to find we accorded so well about the goatsucker; all I contended for was to prove that it often chatters sitting as well as flying; and therefore the noise was voluntary, and from organic impulse, and not from the resist- ance of the air against the hollow of its mouth and throat.
If ever I saw anything like actual migration, it was last Michaelmas Day. I was travelling, and out early in the morn- ing ; at first there was a vast fog; but, by the time that I was got seven or eight miles from home towards the coast, the sun broke out into a delicate warm day. We were then on a large heath or common, and I could discern, as the mist began to break away, great numbers of swallows clustering on the stunted shrubs and bushes, as if they had roosted there all night. As soon as the air became clear and pleasant they were all on the wing at once; and, by a placid and easy flight, proceeded on southward towards the sea; after this I did not see any more flocks, only now and then a straggler.
I cannot agree with those persons that assert that the swal- low kind disappear gradually, as they come, for the bulk of them seem to withdraw at once; only some stragglers stay behind a long while, and do never, there is the greatest reason to believe, leave this island. Swallows seem to lay themselves up, and to come forth in a warm day, as bats do continually of a warm evening, after they have disappeared for weeks. For a very respectable gentleman assured me that, as he was walk- ing with some friends under Merton wall on a remarkably hot noon, either in the last week in December or the first week in January, he espied three or four swallows huddled together on the moulding of one of the windows of that college. I have frequently remarked that swallows are seen later at Oxford than elsewhere : is it owing to the vast massy buildings of that place, to the many waters round it, or to what else?
When I used to rise in the morning last autumn, and see the swallows and martins clustering on the chimneys and thatch of
‘
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. — 59
the neighboring cottages, I could not help being touched with a secret delight, mixed with some degree of mortification; with delight, to observe with how much ardor and punctuality those poor little birds obeyed the strong impulse towards migration or hiding, imprinted on their minds by their great Creator; and with some degree of mortification, when I reflected that, after all our pains and inquiries, we are yet not quite certain to what regions they do migrate; and are still farther embarrassed to find that some do not actually migrate at all.
These reflections made so strong an impression on my im- agination, that they became productive of a composition that may perhaps amuse you for a quarter of an hour when next I have the honor of writing to you.
LETTER XXIV. SELBORNE, May 29th, 1769.
The glow-worm (Scarabeus fullo) | know very well, having seen it in collections; but have never been able to discover one wild in its natural state. Mr. Banks told me he thought it might be found on the sea-coast.
On the 13th April I went to the sheep-down, where the ring- ousels have been observed to make their appearance at spring and fall, in their way perhaps to the north or south ; and was much pleased to see these birds about the usual spot. We shot a cock and a hen; they were plump and in high condi- tion. The hen had but very small rudiments of eggs within her, which proves they are late breeders; whereas those species of the thrush kind that remain with us the whole year have fledged young before that time. In their crops was nothing very distinguishable, but somewhat that seemed like blades of vegetables nearly digested. In autumn they feed on haws and
7
60 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
yew-berries, and in the spring on ivy-berries. I dressed one of these birds, and found it juicy and well flavored. It is re- markable that they make but a few days’ stay in their spring visit, but rest near a fortnight at Michaelmas. ‘These birds, from the observations of three springs and two autumns, are most punctual in their return; and exhibit a new migration unnoticed by the writers, who supposed they never were to be seen in any southern countries.
One of my neighbors lately brought me a new Sa/caria, which at first I suspected might have proved your willow-lark, but on a nicer examination it answered much better to the description of that species which you shot at Revesby, in Lin- colnshire. My bird I describe thus: “It is a size less than the erasshopper-lark ; the head, back, and coverts of the wings of a dusky brown, without those dark spots of the grasshopper- lark; over each eye is a milk-white stroke; the chin and throat are white, and the under parts of a yellowish white; the rump | is tawny, and the feathers of the tail sharp pointed; the bill is dusky and sharp, and the legs are dusky; the hinder claw long and crooked.” ‘The person that shot it says that it sung so like a reed-sparrow that he took it for one; and that it sings all night : but this account merits farther inquiry. For my part, I suspect it is a second sort of Locustel/a, hinted at by Dr. Derham in Ray’s Letters. He also procured me a grass- hopper-lark.
The question that you put with regard to those genera of animals that are peculiar to America, viz., how they came there, and whence? is too puzzling for me to answer ; and yet — so obvious as often to have struck me with wonder. If one looks into the writers on that subject, little satisfaction is to be found. Ingenious men will readily advance plausible argu- ments to support whatever theory they shall choose to main- tain; but then the misfortune is, every one’s hypothesis is each as good as another’s, since they are all founded on conjecture.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ° 61
The late writers of this sort, in whom may be seen all the arguments of those that have gone before, as I remember, stock America from the western coast of Africa and the south of Europe ; and then break down the Isthmus that bridged over the Atlantic. But this is making use of a violent piece of machinery ; it is a difficulty worthy of the interposition of agod! “I am disgustedly incredulous.”
To THOMAS PENNANT, ESQUIRE. THE NATURALIST’S SUMMER-EVENING WALK.
When day declining sheds a milder gleam,
What time the May-fly + haunts the pool or stream ; When the still owl skims round the grassy mead, What time the timorous hare limps forth to feed ; Then be the time to steal adown the vale,
And listen to the vagrant ? cuckoo’s tale ;
To hear the clamorous curlew call his mate,
Or the soft quail his tender pain relate ;
To see the swallow sweep the dark’ning plain Belated, to support her infant train ;
To mark the swift in rapid giddy ring
Dash round the steeple, unsubdued of wing ; Amusive birds !—say where your hid retreat When the frost rages and the tempests beat ; Whence your return by such nice instinct led, When spring, soft season, lifts her bloomy head ?
1 The angler’s May-fly comes forth from its aurelia state, and emerges out of the water about six in the evening, and dies about eleven at night,
determining the date of its fly state in about five or six hours. They
usually begin to appear about the 4th June, and continue in succession for near a fortnight. See Swammerdam, Derham, Scopoli, etc. — W.
2 Vagrant cuckoo ; so called because, being tied down by no incubation or attendance about the nutrition of its young, it wanders without control. —W.
oe. y id Va
62
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
Such baffled searches mock man’s prying pride,
The Gop oF NATURE is your secret guide ! While deep’ning shades obscure the face of day,
To yonder bench leaf-shelter’d let us stray,
Till blended objects fail the swimming sight,
And all the fading landscape sinks in night ;
To hear the drowsy dorr come brushing by
With buzzing wing, or the shrill cricket cry ;
To see the feeding bat glance through the wood ;
To catch the distant falling of the flood ;
While o’er the cliff th’ awaken’d churn-owl hung
Through the still gloom protracts his chattering song ;
While high in air, and poised upon his wings,
Unseen, the soft enamor’d! woodlark sings :
These, NATURE’S works, the curious mind employ,
Inspire a soothing melancholy joy :
As fancy warms, a pleasing kind of pain
Steals o’er the cheek, and thrills the creeping vein ! Each rural sight, each sound, each smell combine ;
The tinkling sheep-bell or the breath of kine :
The new-mown hay that scents the swelling breeze,
Or cottage chimney smoking through the trees. The chilling night-dews fall : — away, retire !
For see the glow-worm lights her amorous fire ! 2
Thus, ere night’s veil had half obscured the sky,
Th’ impatient damsel hung her lamp on high !
True to the signal, by love’s meteor led,
Leander hasten’d to his Hero’s bed.
1JIn hot summer nights wood-larks soar to a prodigious height, and
hang singing in the air.— W.
2 The light of the female glow-worm (as she often crawls up the stalk of a grass to make herself more conspicuous) is a signal to the male, which is a slender dusky Scarabeus.— W. This was, and indeed is still, the gen- erally received notion, but the fact is that both sexes of the glow-worm are phosphorescent.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ~° 63
LETTER XXV.
SELBORNE, Aug. 30th, 1769.
It gives me satisfaction to find that my account of the ousel migration pleases you. You put a very shrewd question when you ask me how I know that their autumnal migration is south- ward. Was not candor and openness the very life of natural history, I should pass over this query just as a sly commenta- tor does over a crabbed passage in a classic; but common ingenuousness obliges me to confess, not without some degree of shame, that I only reasoned in that case from analogy. For as all other autumnal birds migrate from the northward to us, to partake of our milder winters, and return to the northward again when the rigorous cold abates, so I concluded that the
ting-ousels did the same, as well as their congeners the field-
fares ; and especially as ring-ousels are known to haunt cold mountainous countries: but I have good reason to suspect since that they may come to us from the westward; because I hear from very good authority, that they breed on Dartmoor ; and that they forsake that wild district about the time that our visitors appear, and do not return till late in the spring.
I have taken a great deal of pains about your sa/icaria 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 become convinced of the same) that it is no more nor less than 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 Pic? affines. It ought no doubt to have gone among his avicule caudé unicolore,, and among your slender-billed small birds of the
1 Small birds with tail of one color.
64 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
same division. 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. It sings incessantly night and day during the breeding-time, imitating the note of a sparrow, a swallow, a skylark ; and has a strange hurrying manner in its song. My specimens correspond most minutely to the description of your fen saZcaria shot near Revesby. Mr. Ray has given an
excellent characteristic of it when he says: “The beak and the feet of this little bird are much too large in proportion to its body.”
I have got you the egg of a stone-curlew, which was picked up in a fallow on the naked ground; there were two, but the finder inadvertently crushed one with his foot before he saw them.
LETTER XXVI.
SELBORNE, December 8th, 1760.
I was much gratified by your communicative letter on your return from Scotland, where you spent some considerable time and gave yourself good room to examine the natural curiosities of that extensive kingdom, both those of the islands, as well as those of the highlands. The usual bane of such expeditions is hurry, because men seldom allot themselves half the time they should do ; but, fixing on a day for their return, post from place to place, rather as if they were on a journey that required dispatch, than as philosophers investigating the works of nature. You must have made, no doubt, many dis- coveries, and laid up a good fund of materials for a future edition of the Avritish Zodlogy; and will have no reason to repent that you have bestowed so much pains on a part of Great Britain that perhaps was never so well examined before.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. AN « (
It has always been matter of wonder to me that fieldfares, which are so congenerous to thrushes and blackbirds, should never choose to breed in England; but that they should not think even the highlands cold and northerly and sequestered enough, is a circumstance still more strange and wonderful. The ring-ousel, you find, stays in Scotland the whole year round; so that we have reason to conclude that those mi- grators that visit us for a short space every autumn do not come from thence.
And here, I think, will be the proper place to mention that those birds were most punctual again in their migration this autumn, appearing, as before, about the 30th September; but their flocks were larger than common, and their stay pro- tracted somewhat beyond the usual time. If they came to spend the whole winter with us, as some of their congeners do, and then left us, as they do, in spring, I should not be so much struck with the occurrence, since it would be similar to that of the other winter birds of passage ; but when I see them for a fortnight at Michaelmas, and again for about a week in the middle of April, I am seized with wonder, and long to be informed whence these travellers come, and whither they go, since they seem to use our hills merely as an inn or baiting-place.
Your account of the greater brambling, or snow-fleck, is very amusing; and strange it is that such a short-winged bird should delight in such perilous voyages over the northern ocean! Some country people in the winter time have every now and then told me that they have seen two or three white larks on our downs; but, on considering the matter, I begin to suspect that these are some stragglers of the birds we are talking of, which sometimes perhaps may rove so far to the southward.
It pleases me to find that white hares are so frequent on the Scottish mountains, and especially as you inform me that
66 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
it is a distinct species; for the quadrupeds of Britain are so few, that every new species is a great acquisition.
The eagle-owl, could it be proved to belong to us, is so majestic a bird, that it would grace our fauna much. I never was informed before where wild-geese are known to breed.
You admit, I find, that I have proved your fen salicaria to be the lesser reed-sparrow of Ray; and I think you may be secure that I am right, for I took very particular pains to clear up that matter, and had some fair specimens ; but, as they were not well preserved, they are decayed already. You will, no doubt, insert it in its proper place in your next edition. Your additional plates will much improve your work.
De Buffon, I know, has described the water shrew-mouse: but still I am pleased to find you have discovered it in Lincolnshire, for the reason I have given in the article of the white hare.
As a neighbor was lately ploughing a dry, chalky field far removed from any water, he turned out a water-rat, that was curiously laid up in a hybernaculum’? artificially formed of grass and leaves. At one end of the burrow lay above a gallon of potatoes regularly stowed, on which it was to have supported itself for the winter. But the difficulty with me is how this water-rat came to fix its winter station at such a distance from the water. Was it determined in its choice of that place by the mere accident of finding the potatoes which were planted there: or is it the constant practice of the aquatic rat to forsake the neighborhood of the water in the colder months ?
Though I delight very little in analogous reasoning, knowing how fallacious it is with respect to natural history; yet, in the following instance, I cannot help being inclined to think it may conduce towards the explanation of a difficulty that I have men- tioned before, with respect to the invariable early retreat of the swift, so many weeks before its congeners ; and that not only
1 Hybernaculum — winter nest.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. . 67
with us, but also in Andalusia, where they also begin to retire about the beginning of August.
The great large bat* (which by-the-by is at present a non- _descript in England, and what I have never been able yet to procure) retires or migrates very early in the summer; it also ranges very high for its food, feeding in a different region of the air; and that is the reason I never could procure one. Now this is exactly the case with the swifts; for they take their food in a more exalted region than the other species, and are very seldom seen hawking for flies near the ground, or over the surface of the water. From hence I would conclude that these irundines and the larger bats are supported by some sorts of high-flying gnats, scarabs, or pha/ene, that are of short continuance; and that the short stay of these strangers is regulated by the defect of their food.
By my journal it appears that curlews clamored on to Octo- ber 31st; since which I have not seen nor heard any. Swallows were observed on to November 3rd.
LETTER XXVII. SELBORNE, Fed. 22nd, 1770.
Hedgehogs abound in my gardens and fields. The manner in which they eat the roots of the plantain in my grass-walks is very curious; with their upper mandible, which is much longer than their lower, they bore under the plant, and so eat the root off upwards, leaving the leaves untouched. In this respect they are serviceable, as they destroy a very trouble- some weed ; but they deface the walks in some measure by digging little round holes. It appears that beetles are no in-
1 The little bat appears almost every month in the year, but I have never seen the large one till the end of April, nor after July. They are most common in June, but never very plentiful. — W.
68 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
considerable part of their food. In June last I procured a litter of four or five young hedgehogs, which appeared to be about five or six days old: they, I find, like puppies, are born blind, and could not see when they came to my hands. No doubt their spines are soft and flexible at the time of their birth, but it is plain they soon harden ; for these little pigs had such stiff prickles on their backs and sides as would easily have fetched blood, had they not been handled with caution. ‘Their spines are quite white at this age: and they have little hanging ears, which I do not remember to be discernible in the old ones. They can, in part, at this age draw their skin down over their faces; but are not able to contract themselves into a ball, as they do, for the sake of defence, when full grown. The reason, I suppose, is, because the curious muscle that enables the crea- ture to roll itself up in a ball was not then arrived at its full tone and firmness. Hedgehogs make a deep and warm hyber- naculum with leaves and moss, in which they conceal them- selves for the winter: but I never could find that they stored in any winter provision, as some quadrupeds certainly do.
I have discovered an anecdote with respect to the fieldfare, which I think is particular enough ; this bird, though it sits on trees in the daytime, and procures the greatest part of its food from whitethorn hedges, yea, moreover, builds on very high trees, yet always appears with us to roost on the ground. They are seen to come in flocks just before it is dark, and to settle and nestle among the heath on our forest. And besides, the larkers in dragging their nets by night, frequently catch them in the wheat stubbles ; while the bat-fowlers, who take many redwings in the hedges, never entangle any of this species. Why these birds, in the matter of roosting, should differ from all their congeners, and from themselves also with respect to their proceedings by day, is a fact for which I am by no means able to account.
I have somewhat to inform you of concerning the moose-
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE, ; 69
deer ;. but in general, foreign animals fall seldom in my way ; my little intelligence is confined to the narrow sphere of my own observations at home.
LETTER XXVIII. SELBORNE, March, 1770.
On Michaelmas-day, 1768, I managed to get a sight of the female moose belonging to the Duke of Richmond, at Good- wood; but was greatly disappointed, when I arrived at the spot, to find that it died, after having appeared in a languish- ing way for some time on the morning before. However, understanding that it was not stripped, I proceeded to examine ‘this rare quadruped ; I found it in an old greenhouse, slung under the belly and chin by ropes, and in a standing posture. The grand distinction between this deer and any other species that I have ever met with, consisted in the strange length of its legs; on which it was tilted up much in the manner of the birds of the gra//e order. I measured it, as they do a horse, and found that, from the ground to the withers it was just five feet four inches; which height answers exactly to sixteen hands, a growth that few horses arrive at: but then, with this length of legs, its neck was remarkably short, no more than twelve inches; so that, by straddling with one foot forward and the other backward, it grazed on the plain ground, with the greatest difficulty, between its legs; the ears were vast and lopping, and as long as the neck; the head was about twenty inches long, and ass-like ; and had such a redundancy of upper lip as I never saw before, with huge nostrils. This lip, travel- lers say, is esteemed a dainty dish in North America. It is _ very reasonable to suppose that this creature supports itself
chiefly by browsing off trees, and by wading after water plants ;
70 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
towards which way of livelihood the length of its legs and great lip must contribute much. I have read somewhere that it de- lights in eating the water-lily. From the fore-feet to the belly behind the shoulder it measured three feet and eight inches ; the length of the legs before and behind consisted a great deal in the “za, which was strangely long. Its scut seemed to be about an inch long; the color was a grizzly black; the mane about four inches long; the fore-hoofs were upright and shapely, the hind flat and splayed. The spring before it was only two years old, so that most probably it was not then come to its growth. What a vast tall beast must a full-grown stag be! I have been told some arrive at ten feet and a half! This poor creature had at first a female companion. of the same species, which died the spring before. In the same garden was a young stag, or red deer, between whom and this moose it was hoped that there might have been a breed ; but their inequality of height must have always been a bar to such a hope. ‘This animal, the keeper told me, seemed to en- joy itself best in the extreme frost of the former winter. In the house they showed me the horn of a male moose, which had no front antlers, but only a broad palm with some snags on the edge. The noble owner of the dead moose proposed to make a skeleton of her bones.
Please to let me hear if my female moose corresponds with that you saw; and whether you think still that the American moose and European elk are the same creature.
LETTER XXIX. SELBORNE, Jay rath, 1770.
Last month we had such a series of cold turbulent weather, such a constant succession of frost, and snow, and hail, and tempest, that the regular migration or appearance of the
ae
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. tage) eae
summeér birds was much interrupted. Some did not show themselves (at least were not heard) till weeks after their usual time; as the black-cap and white-throat ; and some have not been heard yet, as the grasshopper-lark and largest willow- wren. As to the fly-catcher, I have not seen it; it is indeed one of the latest, but should appear about this time: and yet amidst all this meteorous strife and war of the elements, two swallows discovered themselves as long ago as April 11th, in frost and snow; but they withdrew quickly, and were not visible again for many days. House-martins, which are always more backward than swallows, were not observed till May came in. .
Among the monogamous birds several are to be found, after pairing-time, single, and of each sex; but whether this state
of celibacy is matter of choice or necessity, is not so easily
discoverable. When the house-sparrows deprive my martins of their nests, as soon as I cause one to be shot, the other presently procures a mate, and so for several times following.
I have known a dove-house infested by a pair of white owls, which made great havoc among the young pigeons: one of the owls was shot as soon as possible; but the survivor readily found a mate, and the mischief went on. After some time the new pair were both destroyed, and the annoyance ceased.
There is a propensity belonging to common house-cats that is very remarkable; I mean their violent fondness for fish, which appears to be their most favorite food: and yet nature in this instance seems to have planted in them an appetite that, unassisted, they know not how to gratify: for of all quadrupeds cats are the least disposed towards water: and will not, when they can avoid it, deign to wet a foot, much less to plunge into that element.
Quadrupeds that prey on fish are amphibious: such is the otter, which by nature is so well formed for diving, that it makes great havoc among the inhabitants of the waters. Not
72 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
supposing that we had any of those beasts in our shallow
brooks, I was much pleased to see a male otter, brought to-
me, weighing twenty-one pounds, that had been shot on the bank of our stream below the Priory, where the rivulet divides the parish of Selborne from Harteley Wood.
LETTER XXX. SELBORNE, Aug. 1st, 1770.
The French, I think, in general are strangely prolix in their natural history. What Linnzus says with respect to insects holds good in every other branch: “The verbosity of the present generation is the calamity of art.”
Pray how do you approve of Scopoli’s new work? As I admire his “ztomologia, I long to see it.
When I was last in town our friend Mr. Barrington most obligingly carried me to see many curious sights. As you were then writing to him about horns, he carried me to see many strange and wonderful specimens. ‘There is, I remem- ber, at Lord Pembroke’s at Wilton, a horn room furnished with more than thirty different pairs ; but I have not seen that house lately.
Mr. Barrington showed me many astonishing collections of stuffed and living birds from all quarters of the world. After I had studied over the latter for a time, I remarked that every species almost that came from distant regions, such as South America, the coast of Guinea, etc., were thick-billed birds of the Joxia and fringilla genera; and no motacille or muscicape were to be met with. When I came to consider, the reason was obvious enough; for the hard-billed birds subsist on seeds which are easily carried on board; while the soft-billed birds, which are supported by worms and insects, or, what is a sub-
era en Pe Turis
a
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ° 3
stitute for them, fresh raw meat, can meet with neither in long and tedious voyages. It is from this defect of food that our collections (curious as they are) are defective, and we are deprived of some of the most delicate and lively genera.
LETTER XXXI. SELBORNE, Sept. 14th, 1770. You saw, I find, the ring-ousels again among their native crags, and are further assured that, they continue resident in those cold regions the whole year. From whence then do our
ring-ousels migrate so regularly every September, and make their appearance again, as if in their return, every April?
They are more early this year than common, for some were
seen at the usual hill on the fourth of this month.
An observing Devonshire gentleman tells me that they frequent some parts of Dartmoor, and breed there; but leave those haunts about the end of September, or beginning of October, and return again about the end of March.
Another intelligent person assures me that they breed in great abundance all over the peak of Derby, and are called there tor-ousels; withdraw in October and November, and return in spring. ‘This information seems to throw some light on my new migration.
Scopoli’s new work? (which I have just procured) has its merit in ascertaining many of the birds of the Tirol and Car- niola. Monographers, come from whence they may, have, I think, fair pretence to challenge some regard and approba- tion from the lovers of natural history; for, as no man can alone investigate the works of nature, these partial writers may, each in their department, be more accurate in their discoveries,
1 Annus Primus Historico-Waturalis, —W,
74. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
and freer from errors, than more general writers; and so by degrees may pave the way to an universal correct natural history. Not that Scopoli is so circumstantial and attentive to the life and conversation of his birds as I could wish: he advances some false facts ; as when he says of the Azrundo urbica that “it does not feed its young after they leave the nest.” This assertion I know to be wrong from repeated observation this summer; for house-martins do feed their young, flying, though it must be acknowledged not so commonly as the house-swallow ; and the feat is done in so quick a man- ner as not to be perceptible to indifferent observers. He also advances some (I was going to say) improbable facts ; as when he says of the woodcock that “it carries its young in its beak as it flies from its enemies.” But candor forbids me to say absolutely that any fact is false because I have never been witness to such a fact. I have only to remark that the long unwieldy bill of the woodcock is perhaps the worst adapted of any among the winged creation for such a feat of natural affection.
LETTER XXXII. SELBORNE, October 29th, 1770.
After an ineffectual search in Linnzus, Brisson, etc., I begin to suspect that I discern my brother’s Airundo hyberna in Scopoli’s new-discovered Hirundo rupestris. His description : “Above it is of a mouse-color, below whitish; the guiding feathers have an oval white spot on the inner side; the feet are bare and black, the beak black, the wing feathers duskier than those of the back, the guiding feathers of the same color as the wings ; the tail well-defined, but undivided” — agrees very well with the bird in question; but when he comes to advance that it is “ of the size of the house-martin,” and that “the description of
. a ee
ae ee ae
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. -: 75
the bank-martin of Linnzus fits this bird also,’ he in some measure invalidates all he has said; at least he shows at once that he compares them to these species merely from memory ; for I have compared the birds themselves, and find they differ widely in every circumstance of shape, size, and color. How- ever, as you will have a specimen, I shall be glad to hear what your judgment is in the matter.
Whether my brother is forestalled in his nondescript or not, he will have the credit of first discovering that they spend their winters under the warm and sheltery shores of Gibraltar and Barbary.
Scopoli’s characters of his ordines and genera are clear, just, and expressive, and much in the spirit of Linneus. These few remarks are the result of my first perusal of Scopoli’s Annus Primus.
The bane of our science is the comparing one animal to the other by memory: for want of caution in this particular Scopoli falls into errors: he is not so full with regard to the manners of his indigenous birds as might be wished, as you justly observe: his Latin is easy, elegant, and expressive, and very superior to Kramer’s.
I am pleased to see that my description of the moose corresponds so well with yours.
LETTER XXXITI. SELBORNE, WVov. 26th, 1770.
I was much pleased to see, among the collection of birds from Gibraltar, some of those short-winged English summer birds of passage, concerning whose departure we have made so much inquiry. Now if these birds are found in Andalusia to migrate to and from Barbary, it may easily be supposed that
76 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
those that come to us may migrate back to the continent, and spend their winters in some of the warmer parts of Europe. This is certain, that many soft-billed birds that come to Gibraltar appear there only in spring and autumn, seeming to advance in pairs towards the northward, for the sake of breed- ing during the summer months, and retiring in parties and broods towards the south at the decline of the year; so that the rock of Gibraltar is the great rendezvous, and place of observation, from whence they take their departure each way towards Europe or Africa. It is therefore no mean discovery, I think, to find that our small short-winged summer birds of passage are to be seen spring and autumn on the very skirts of Europe ; it is a presumptive proof of their emigrations.
Scopoli seems to me to have found the great Gibraltar swift, in Tirol, without knowing it. For what is his Hirundo alpina but the afore-mentioned bird in other words? Says he, mean- ing the swift: “It has all the qualities of the former except that its breast is white, and it is a little larger in size.” I do not suppose this to be a new species. It is true also of the melba, that “it builds among the lofty Alpine rocks.”
My Sussex friend, a man of observation and good sense, but no naturalist, to whom I applied on account of the stone-curlew, sends me the following account : “ In looking over my WVatural ist’s Journal for the month of April, I find the stone-curlews are first mentioned on the seventeenth and eighteenth, which date seems to me rather late. They live with us all the spring and summer, and at the beginning of autumn prepare to take leave by getting together in flocks. They seem to me a bird of passage that may travel into some dry hilly country south of us, probably Spain, because of the abundance of sheep-walks in that country ; for they spend their summers with us in such districts. This conjecture I hazard, as I have never met with any one that has seen them in England in the winter. I believe they are not fond of going near the water, but feed on earth-
nyt
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. | - of
worms that are common on sheepwalks and downs. ‘They breed on fallows and lay-fields abounding with grey mossy flints, which much resemble their young in color ; among which they -skulk and conceal themselves. They make no nest, but lay their eggs on the bare ground, producing in common but two at atime. There is reason to think their young run soon after they are hatched; and that the old ones do not feed them, but only lead them about at the time of feeding, which, for the most part, is in the night.” ‘Thus far, my friend.
In the manners of this bird you see there is something very analogous to the bustard, whom it also somewhat resembles in aspect and make, and in the structure of its feet.
For a long time I have desired my relation to look out for these birds in Andalusia; and now he writes me word that, for the first time, he saw one dead in the market on the 3rd of September.
When the stone-curlew flies it stretches out its legs straight behind, like a heron.
LETTER XXXIV. SELBORNE, J/arch 30th, 17717.
There is an insect with us, especially on chalky districts, which is very troublesome and teasing all the latter end of the summer, getting into people’s skins, especially those of women and children, and raising tumors which itch intolerably. This animal (which we call a harvest bug) is very minute, scarce discernible to the naked eye; of a bright scarlet color, and of the genus of Acarus. They are to be met with in gardens on kidney-beans, or any legumens, but prevail only in the hot months of summer. Warreners, as some have assured me, are much infested by them on chalky downs, where these insects swarm sometimes to so infinite a degree as to discolor their
78 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
nets, and to give them a reddish cast, while the men are so bitten as to be thrown into fevers.
There is a small long shining fly in these parts very trouble- some to the housewife, by getting into the chimneys, and laying its eggs in the bacon while it is drying; these eggs produce maggots called jumpers, which, harboring in the gammons and best parts of the hogs, eat down to the bone, and make great waste. This fly I suspect to be a variety of the AZusca putris of Linnzus; it is to be seen in the summer in farm kitchens on the bacon-racks and about the mantel-pieces, and on the ceilings.
The insect that infests turnips and many crops in the garden (destroying often whole fields while in their seedling leaves) is an animal that wants to be better known. ‘The country people here call it the turnip-fly and black dolphin; but I know it to be one of the coleoptera; “the jumping Chrysomela with the posterior part of the thigh very thick.” In very hot summers they abound to an amazing degree, and, as you walk in a field or in a garden, make a pattering like rain, by jumping on the leaves of the turnips or cabbages.
There is an estrus, known in these parts to every plough- boy, which, because it is omitted by Linnzeus, is also passed over by late writers ; and that is the curvicauda of old Moufet, mentioned by Derham in his /hysico-Theology, p. 250; an insect worthy of remark for depositing its eggs as it flies in so dextrous a manner on the single hairs of the legs and flanks of grass-horses. But then Derham is mistaken when he advances that this @wstrus is the parent of that wonderful star-tailed maggot which he mentions afterwards; for more modern ento- mologists have discovered that singular production to be derived from the egg of the JZusca chameleon.
A full history of noxious insects hurtful in the field, garden and house, suggesting all the known and likely means of de- stroying them, would be allowed by the public to be a most
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ° 79
useful and important work. What knowledge there is of this sort lies scattered, and wants to be collected ; great improve- ments would soon follow of course. A knowledge of the pro- perties, economy, propagation, and in short of the life and conversation of these animals, is a necessary step to lead us to some method of preventing their depredations.
As far as I am a judge, nothing would recommend ento- mology more than some neat plates that should well express the generic distinctions of insects according to Linnzus; for I am well assured that many people would study insects, could they set out with a more adequate notion of those distinctions than can be conveyed at first by words alone.
LETTER XXXV. SELBORNE, /777.
Happening to make a visit to my neighbor’s peacocks, I could not help observing that the trains of those magnificent birds appear by no means to be their tails; those long feathers growing not from their rump, but all up their backs. A range of short brown stiff feathers, about six inches long, fixed in the rump, is the real tail, and serves as the fulcrum to prop the train, which is long and top-heavy, when set on end. When the train is up, nothing appears of the bird before but its head and neck; but this would not be the case were those long feathers fixed only in the rump, as may be seen by the turkey-cock when in a strutting attitude. By a strong mus- cular vibration these birds can make the shafts of their long feathers clatter like the swords of a sword-dancer ; they then trample very quick with their feet, and run backwards towards the females.
I should tell you that I have got an uncommon Calculus egogropila, taken out of the stomach of a fat ox; it is perfectly
SO THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
round, and about the size of a large Seville orange; such are, I think, usually flat.
LETTER XXXVI. Septn: LIE.
The summer through I have seen but two of that large species of bat which I call Vesfertitio altivolans, from its manner of feeding high in the air: I procured one of them, and found it to be a male ; and made no doubt, as they accompanied to- gether, that the other was a female; but happening in an evening or two to procure the other likewise, I was somewhat disappointed, when it appeared to be also of the same sex. This circumstance, and the great scarcity of this sort, at least in these parts, occasions some suspicions in my mind whether it is really a species, or whether it may not be the male part of the more known species, one of which may supply many females ; as is known to be the case in sheep and some other quadrupeds. But this doubt can only be cleared by a farther examination, and some attention to the sex, of more specimens.
In the extent of their wings they measured fourteen inches and a half; and four inches and a half from the nose to the tip of the tail; their heads were large, their nostrils bilobated, their shoulders broad and muscular; and their whole bodies fleshy and plump. Nothing could be more sleek and soft than their fur, which was of a bright chestnut color; their maws were full of food, but so macerated that the quality could not be distinguished ; their livers, kidneys, and hearts were large, and their bowels covered with fat. They weighed each, when entire, full one ounce and one drachm. Within the ear there was somewhat of a peculiar structure that I did not under- stand perfectly, but refer it to the observation of the curious anatomist.
‘THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. °- 81
LETTER XXXVII. SELBORNE, 7777.
On the r2th of July I had a fair opportunity of contemplat- ing the motions of the fern-owl, as it was playing round a large oak that swarmed with fern-chafers. The powers of its wing were wonderful, exceeding, if possible, the various evolutions and quick turns of the swallow genus. But the circumstance that pleased me most was, that I saw it distinctly, more than once, put out its short leg while on the wing, and, by a bend of the head, deliver somewhat into its mouth. If it takes any part of its prey with its foot, as I haye now the greatest reason to suppose it does these chafers, I no longer wonder at the use of its middle toe, which is curiously furnished with a serrated claw.
[ The following interesting particulars respecting the fern-owl, _ from White’s Observations on Nature, will fittingly find a place here: —
“The country people have a notion that the fern-owl, or churn-owl, or eve-jarr, which they also call a puckeridge, is very injurious to weanling calves, by inflicting as it strikes at them, the fatal distemper known to cow-leeches by the name of puckeridge. But the truth of the matter is, the malady above mentioned is occasioned by the @s¢rus dovis, a dipterous insect, which lays its eggs along the chines of kine, where the maggots, when hatched, eat their way through the hide of the beast into the flesh, and grow to a very large size. I have just talked with a man who says he has more than once stripped calves who have died of the puckeridge ; that the ail or complaint lay along the chine, where the flesh was much swelled, and filled with purulent matter. Once I myself saw a large rough maggot of this sort squeezed out of the back of a cow.
“These maggots in Essex are called wornils.
“The least observation and attention would convince men that these birds do not injure the goatherd, but are perfectly
82 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE,
harmless, and subsist alone, being night birds, on night insects, such as scarabei and phalene ; and through the month of July mostly on the Scarabeus solstitialis, which in many districts abounds at that season. ‘Those that we have opened, have always had their craws stuffed with large night-moths and their eges, and pieces of chafers; nor does it anywise appear how they can, weak and unarmed as they seem, inflict any harm upon kine, unless they possess the powers of animal magnetism and can affect them by fluttering over them.
“A fern-owl, this evening (August 27th) showed off in a very unusual and entertaining manner, by hawking round and round the circumference of my great spreading oak for twenty times following, keeping mostly close to the grass, but occasionally glancing up amidst the boughs of the tree. This amusing bird was then in pursuit of a brood of some particular moth belonging to the oak, of which there are several sorts; and exhibited on the occasion a command of wing superior, I think, to that of the swallow itself.
“When a person approaches the haunt of fern-owls in an evening, they continue flying round the head of the obtruder ; and by striking their wings together above their backs, in the manner that the pigeons called smiters are known to do, make a smart snap; perhaps at that time they are jealous for their young, and their noise and gesture are intended by way of menace.
“ Fern-owls have an attachment to oaks, no doubt on account of food; for the next evening we saw one again several times among the boughs of the same tree; but it did not skim round its stem over the grass, as on the evening before. In May these birds find the Scarabeus melolontha on the oak, and the Scarabeus solstitialis at midsummer. ‘These peculiar birds can only be watched and observed for two hours in the twenty- four; and then in dubious twilight an hour after sunset and an hour before sunrise.
~ elie
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. | 83
“On this day (July 14th, 1789), a woman brought me two eggs of a fern-owl or evening jarr, which she found on the verge of her Hanger, to the left of the hermitage under a beechen shrub. ‘This person, who lives just at the foot of the Hanger, seems well acquainted with these nocturnal swallows, and says she has often found their eggs near that place, and that they lay only two at a time on the bare ground. The eggs were oblong, dusky, and streaked somewhat in the man- ner of the plumage of the parent bird, and were equal in size at each end. The dam was sitting on the eggs when found, which contained the rudiments of young, and would have been hatched perhaps in a week. From hence we may see the time of their breeding, which corresponds pretty well with that of the swift, as does also the period of their arrival. Each species _is usually seen about the beginning of May. Each breeds but ~ once in a summer; each lays only two eggs.
“July 4th,1790. The woman who brought me two fern-owl’s eggs last year on July 14th, on this day produced me two more, one of which had been laid this morning, as appears plainly, because there was only one in the nest the evening before. They were found, as last July, on the verge of the down above the hermitage under a beechen shrub, on the naked ground. Last year those eggs were full of young, just ready to be hatched.
“These circumstances point out the exact time when these curious nocturnal migratory birds lay their eggs and hatch their young. Fern-owls, like snipes, stone-curlews, and some other birds, make no nest. Birds that build on the ground do not make much of nests.”’ |
Swallows and martins, the bulk of them I mean, have for- saken us sooner this year than usual; for on September 22d they rendezvoused in a neighbor’s walnut-tree, where it seemed probable they had taken up their lodging for the night. At the dawn of the day, which was foggy, they arose all together
84 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
in infinite numbers, occasioning such a rushing from the strokes of their wings against the hazy air, as might be heard to a considerable distance: since that no flock has appeared, only a few stragglers.
Some swifts stayed late, till the 22d of August—a rare instance! for they usually withdraw within the first week.*
On September 24th three or four ring-ousels appeared in my fields for the first time this season; how punctual are these visitors in their autumnal and spring migrations !
LETTER XXXVIII.
SELBORNE, March 15th, 1773.
By my journal for last autumn it appears that the house- martins bred very late, and stayed very late in these parts ; for, on the rst of October, I saw young martins in their nest nearly fledged; and again on the 21st of October, we had at the next house a nest full of young martins just ready to fly, and the old ones were hawking for insects with great alertness. The next morning the brood forsook their nest, and were flying round the village. From this day I never saw one of the swallow kind till November 3d, when twenty, or perhaps thirty, house-martins were playing all day long by the side of the hanging wood, and over my field. Did these small weak birds, some of which were nestling twelve days ago, shift their quarters at this late season of the year to the other side of the northern tropic? Or rather, is it not more probable that the next church, ruin, chalk-cliff, steep covert, or perhaps sand- bank, lake or pool (as a more northern naturalist would say), may become their hybernaculum, and afford them a ready and obvious retreat ?
1 See Letter LII, to Mr. Barrington.
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THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ° 85
We now begin to expect our vernal migration of ring-ousels every week. Persons worthy of credit assure me that ring- ousels were seen at Christmas, 1770, in the forest of Bere, on the southern verge of this county. Hence we may conclude that their migrations are only internal, and not extended to the continent southward, if they do at first come at all from the northern parts of this island only, and not from the north of Europe. Come from whence they will, it is plain, from the fearless disregard that they show for men or guns, that they have been little accustomed to places of much resort. Naviga- tors mention that in the isle of Ascension, and other such desolate districts, birds are so little acquainted with the human form that they settle on men’s shoulders; and have no more dread of a sailor than they would have of a goat that was grazing. A young man at Lewes, in Sussex, assured me that
about seven years ago ring-ousels abounded so about that
town in the autumn that he killed sixteen himself in one after- noon ; he added further, that some had appeared since in every autumn ; but he could not find that any had been observed before the season in which he shot so many. I myself have found these birds in little parties in the autumn cantoned all along the Sussex downs, wherever there were shrubs and bushes, from Chichester to Lewes ; particularly in the autumn of 1770.
LETTER XXXIX. SELBORNE, /Vov. gth, 1773.
As you desire me to send you such observations as may occur, I take the liberty of making the following remarks, that you may, according as you think me right or wrong, admit or reject what I here advance in your intended new edition of the British Zodvlogy.
86 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
The osprey was shot about a year ago at Frinsham Pond, a great lake at about six miles from hence, while it was sitting on the handle of a plough and devouring a fish: it used to precipitate itself into the water, and so take its prey by surprise.
A great ash-colored butcher-bird was shot’ last winter in Tisted Park, and a red-backed butcher-bird at Selborne: they are rare aves in this county.
Crows go in pairs all the year round.
Cornish choughs abound, and breed on Beechy Head, and on all the cliffs of the Sussex coast.
The common wild pigeon, or stock-dove, is a bird of passage in the south of England, seldom appearing till towards the end of November ; is usually the latest winter bird of passage. Before our beechen woods were so much destroyed we had myriads of them, reaching in strings for a mile together as they went out in a morning to feed. They leave us early in spring : where do they breed ?
The people of Hampshire and Sussex call the missel-bird the storm-cock, because it sings early in the spring, in blowing, showery weather ; its song often commences with the year: with us it builds much in orchards.
A gentleman assures me he has taken the nests of ring-ousels on Dartmoor : they build in banks on the sides of streams.
Titlarks not only sing sweetly as they sit on trees, but also as they play and toy about on the wing; and particularly while they are descending, and sometimes they stand on the ground,
Adanson’s testimony seems to me to be very poor evidence that European swallows migrate during our winter to Senegal : he does not talk at all like an ornithologist ; and probably saw only the swallows of that country, which I know build within Governor O’Hara’s hall against the roof. Had he known Euro- pean swallows, would he not have mentioned the species ?
>
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ~° 87
The house-swallow washes by dropping into the water as it flies: this species appears commonly about a week before the house-martin, and about ten or twelve days before the swift.
In 1772 there were young house-martins in their nest till October 23d. The swift appears about ten or twelve days later than the house-swallow: viz., about the 24th or 26th of April. Whinchats and stone-chatters stay with us the whole year. Some wheatears continue with us the winter through. Wagtails, all sorts, remain with us all the winter. Bullfinches, when fed on hempseed, often become wholly black. We have vast flocks of female chaffinches all the winter, with hardly any males among them. When you say that in breeding-time the male snipes make a bleating noise, and I a drumming (perhaps I should rather have said a humming), I suspect we mean the same thing. However, while they are playing about on the wing they certainly make a loud piping with their mouths: but whether that bleating or humming is ventriloquous, or proceeds from the motion of their wings, I cannot say; but this I know, that when this noise happens the bird is always descending, and his wings are violently agitated.
Soon after the lapwings have done breeding they congregate, and, leaving the moors and marshes, betake themselves to downs and sheepwalks.
L Two years ago last spring the little auk was found alive and unhurt, but fluttering and unable to rise, in a lane a few miles __ from Alresford, where there is a great lake : it was kept awhile, but died.
I saw young teals taken alive in the ponds of Wolmer Forest
in the beginning of July last, along with flappers, or young _ wild-ducks. ; _ Speaking of the swift (vol. IV, p. 15, Brit. Zod/ogy), that page says “its drink the dew”; whereas it should be “it drinks on
88 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
the wing” ; for all the swallow kind sip their water as they sweep over the face of pools or rivers: like Virgil’s bees, they drink flying. In this method. of drinking perhaps this genus may be peculiar.
The sedge-bird sings most part of the night ; its notes are hurrying, but not unpleasing, and imitative of several birds; as the sparrow, swallow, skylark. When it happens to be silent in the night, by throwing a stone or clod into the bushes where it sits you immediately set it a-singing; or in other words, though it slumbers sometimes, yet as soon as it is awakened it reassumes its song.
LETTER XL. SELBORNE, Sept. 2nd, 1774.
Before your letter arrived, and of my own accord, I had been remarking and comparing the tails of the male and female swallow, and this ere any young broods appeared; so that there was no danger of confounding the dams with their chicks: and besides, as they were then always in pairs, and busied in the employ of nidification, there could be no room for mistaking the sexes, nor the individuals of different chim- neys the one for the other. From all my observations, it constantly appeared that each sex has the long feathers in its tail that give it that forked shape ; with this difference, that they are longer in the tail of the male than in that of the female.
Nightingales, when their young first come abroad and are helpless, make a plaintive and jarring noise; and also a snap- ping or cracking, pursuing people along the hedges as they walk: these last sounds seem intended for menace and defiance,
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ; 89
The grasshopper-lark chirps all night in the height of sum- mer.
Swans turn white the second year, and breed the third.
Weasels prey on moles, as appears by their being sometimes caught in mole-traps.
Sparrow-hawks sometimes breed in old crows’ nests, and the kestril in churches and ruins.
There are supposed to be two sorts of eels in the island of Ely. The threads sometimes discovered in eels are perhaps their young: the generation of eels is very dark and myste- rious.
Hen-harriers breed on the ground, and seem never to settle on trees.
[Of this handsome bird White has the following notes in his Observations on Nature: —“ A neighboring gentleman sprung ' a pheasant in a wheat stubble, and shot at it; when, notwith- standing the report of the gun, it was immediately pursued by the blue hawk, known by the name of a hen-harrier, but escaped into some covert. He then sprung a second, and a third, in the same field, that got away in the same manner; the hawk hovering round him all the while that he was beating the field, conscious no doubt of the game that lurked in the stubble. Hence we may conclude that this bird of prey was rendered very daring and bold by hunger, and that hawks cannot always seize their game when they please. We may farther observe, that they cannot pounce their quarry on the ground where it might be able to make a stout resistance, since so large a fowl as a pheasant could not but be visible to the piercing eye of a hawk, when hovering over the field. Hence that propensity of cowering and squatting till they are almost trod on, which no doubt was intended as a mode of security, though long rendered destructive to the whole race of gallinze by the invention of nets and guns.”’ |
When redstarts shake their tails they move them horizon-
QO THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
tally, as dogs do when they fawn: the tail of a wagtail, when in motion, bobs up and down like that of a jaded horse.
Hedge-sparrows have a remarkable flirt with their wings in breeding-time ; as soon as frosty mornings come they make a very piping plaintive noise.
Many birds which become silent about midsummer reassume their notes again in September; as the thrush, blackbird, wood- lark, willow-wren, etc.; hence August is by much the most mute month, the spring, summer, and autumn through. Are birds induced to sing again because the temperament of autumn resembles that of spring?
Linneus ranges plants geographically; palms inhabit the tropics, grasses the temperate zones, and mosses and lichens the polar circles; no doubt animals may be classed in the same manner with propriety.
House-sparrows build under eaves in the spring; as the weather becomes hotter they get out for coolness, and nest in plum trees and apple trees. ‘These birds have been known sometimes to build in rooks’ nests, and sometimes in the forks of boughs under rooks’ nests.
As my neighbor was housing a rick he observed that his dogs devoured all the little red mice that they could catch, but rejected the common mice; and that his cats ate the common mice, refusing the red.
Redbreasts sing all through the spring, summer, and autumn. The reason that they are called autumn songsters is, because in the two first seasons their voices are drowned and lost in the general chorus; in the latter their song becomes distinguish- able. Many songsters of the autumn seem to be the young male redbreasts of that year: notwithstanding the prejudices in their favor, they do much mischief in gardens to the summer fruits.?
1 They eat also the berries of the ivy, the honeysuckle, and spindle tree. — W.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ; OI
The titmouse, which early in February begins to make two quaint notes, like the whetting of a saw, is the marsh titmouse: the great titmouse sings with three cheerful Tnyerus notes, and begins about the same time.
Wrens sing all the winter through, frost excepted.
House-martins came remarkably late this year both in Hampshire and Devonshire: is this circumstance for or against either hiding or migration ?
Most birds drink sipping at intervals; but pigeons take a long-continued draught, like quadrupeds.
Notwithstanding what I have said in a former letter, no gray crows were ever known to breed on Dartmoor ; it was my mis- take. ,
The appearance and flying of the fern-chafer commence with the month of July, and cease about the end of it. These scarabs are the constant food of fern-owls through that period. They abound on the chalky downs and in some sandy districts, but not in the clays.
In the garden of the Black Bear inn in the town of Reading, is a stream or canal running under the stables and out into the fields on the other side of the road: in this water are many carps, which lie rolling about in sight, being fed by travellers who amuse themselves by tossing them bread; but as soon as the weather grows at all severe these fishes are no longer seen, because they retire under the stables, where they remain till the return of spring. Do they lie in a torpid state? If they do not, how are they supported ?
The note of the white-throat, which is continually repeated and often attended with odd gesticulations on the wing, is harsh and displeasing. These birds seem of a pugnacious dis- position ; for they sing with an erected crest and attitudes of rivalry and defiance; are shy and wild in breeding-time, avoid- ing neighborhoods and haunting lonely lanes and commons ; nay, even the very tops of the Sussex Downs, where there are
Q2 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
bushes and covert; but in July and August they bring their broods into gardens and orchards, and make great havoc among the summer fruits.
The black-cap has in common a full, sweet, deep, loud, and - wild pipe; yet that strain is of short continuance, and his motions are desultory; but when that bird sits calmly and engages in song in earnest, he pours forth very sweet, but inward melody, and expresses great variety of soft and gentle modulations, superior perhaps to those of any of our warblers, the nightingale excepted.
Black-caps mostly haunt orchards and gardens; while they warble their throats are wonderfully distended.
The song of the redstart is superior, though somewhat like that of the white-throat; some birds have a few more notes than others. Sitting very placidly on the top of a tall tree in a village, the male sings from morning to night ; he affects neighborhoods, and avoids solitude, and loves to build in orchards and about houses; with us he perches on the vane of a tall maypole.
The fly-catcher is, of all our summer birds, the most mute and the most familiar; it also appears the last of any. It builds in a vine, or a sweetbriar, against the wall of a house, or in the hole of a wall, or on the end of a beam or plate, and often close to the post of a door where people are going in and out all day long. ‘This bird does not make the least pretension to song, but uses a little inward wailing note when it thinks its young in danger from cats or other annoyances; it breeds but once, and retires early.
Selborne parish alone can and has exhibited at times more than half the birds that are ever seen in all Sweden; the former has produced more than one hundred and twenty species, the latter only two hundred and twenty-one. Let me add also that it has shown near half the species that were ever known in Great Britain.?
1 Sweden 221, Great Britain 252 species. — W.
.) a oe oe _ eek 4 Y, Shae
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE, ; 93
-On.a retrospect, I observe that my long letter carries with it a quaint and magisterial air, and is very sententious; but when I recollect that you requested stricture and anecdote, I hope you will pardon the didactic manner for the sake of the information it may happen to contain.
LETTER XLI.
It is matter of curious inquiry to trace out how those species of soft-billed birds that continue with us the winter through, subsist during the dead months. The imbecility of birds seems not to be the only reason why they shun the rigor of our winters; for the robust wryneck (so much resembling the hardy
‘race of woodpeckers) migrates, while the feeble little golden-
crowned wren, that shadow of a bird, braves our severest frosts without availing himself of houses or villages, to which most of our winter birds crowd in distressful seasons, while this keeps aloof in fields and woods; but perhaps this may be the reason why they may often perish, and why they are almost as rare as any bird we know.
I have no reason to doubt but that the soft-billed birds which winter with us subsist chiefly on insects in their aurelia state. All the species of wagtails in severe weather haunt shallow streams near their spring-heads, where they never freeze ; and, by wading, pick out the aurelias of the genus of Phryganee, etc.
Hedge-sparrows frequent sinks and gutters in hard weather,
where they pick up crumbs-and other sweepings ; and in mild
weather they procure worms, which are stirring every month in the year, as any one may see that will only be at the trouble of taking a candle to a grass-plot on any mild winter’s night. Redbreasts and wrens in the winter haunt out-houses, stables,
94 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
and barns, where they find spiders and flies that have laid themselves up during the cold season. But the grand support of the soft-billed birds in winter is that infinite profusion of aurelia of the order /efidoptera, which is fastened to the twigs of trees and their trunks; to the pales and walls of gardens and buildings; and is found in every cranny and cleft of rock or rubbish, and even in the ground itself.
Every species of titmouse winters with us; they have what I call a kind of intermediate bill between the hard and the soft. One species alone spends its whole time in the woods and fields, never retreating for succor in the severest seasons to houses and neighborhoods; and that is the delicate long- tailed titmouse, which is almost as minute as the golden-crowned wren; but the blue titmouse or nun, the colemouse, the great black-headed titmouse, and the marsh titmouse, all resort at times to buildings, and in hard weather particularly. The great titmouse, driven by stress of weather, much frequents houses ; and, in deep snows, I have seen this bird, while it hung with its back downwards (to my no small delight and admiration), draw straws lengthwise from out the eaves of thatched houses, in order to pull out the flies that were con- cealed between them, and that in such numbers that they quite defaced the thatch, and gave it a ragged appearance.
The blue titmouse, or nun, is a great frequenter of houses, and a general devourer. Besides insects, it is very fond of flesh: it is a vast admirer of suet, and haunts butchers’ shops. When a boy, I have known twenty in a morning caught with snap mouse-traps, baited with tallow or suet. It will also pick holes in apples left on the ground, and be well entertained with the seeds on the head of a sunflower. The blue, marsh, and great titmice will, in very severe weather, sei? away barley and oat-straws from the sides of ricks.
How the wheatear and whinchat support themselves in winter cannot be so easily ascertained, since they spend their
dake i lalla Jkualed
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. ‘ 95
time on wild heaths and warrens; the former especially, where there are stone quarries: most probably it is that their main- tenance arises from the aureliz of the order /epidoptera, which furnish them with a plentiful table in the wilderness.
LETTER XLII. SELBORNE, March oth, 1775.
-Some future faunist, a man of fortune, will, I hope, extend his visits to the kingdom of Ireland ; a new field and a country little known to the naturalist. He will not, it is to be wished, undertake that tour unaccompanied by a botanist, because the mountains have scarcely been sufficiently examined; and the southerly counties of so mild an island may possibly afford
some plants little to be expected within the British dominions.
A person of a thinking turn of mind will draw many just remarks from the modern improvements of that country, both in arts and agriculture, where premiums obtained long before they were heard of with us. ‘The manners of the wild natives, their superstitions, their prejudices, their sordid way of life, will extort from him many useful reflections. He should also take with him an able draughtsman ; for he must by no means pass over the noble castles and seats, the extensive and pictur- esque lakes and waterfalls, and the lofty stupendous mountains
so little known, and so engaging to the imagination when
described and exhibited in a lively manner; such a work would be well received. As I have seen no modern map of Scotland, I cannot pre-
tend to say how accurate or particular any such may be; but
this I know, that the best old maps of that kingdom are very defective.
The great obvious defect that I have remarked in all maps of Scotland that have fallen in my way is a want of a colored
96 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE,
line, or stroke, that shall exactly define the just limits of that district called the Highlands. Moreover, all the great avenues to that mountainous and romantic country want to be well distinguished. The military roads formed by General Wade are so great and Roman-like an undertaking that they well merit attention. My old map, Moll’s Map, takes notice of Fort William, but could not mention the other forts that have been erected long since; therefore a good representation of the chain of forts should not be omitted.
The celebrated zigzag up the Coryarich must not be passed over. Moll takes notice of Hamilton and Drumlanrig, and such capital houses; but a new survey, no doubt, should repre- sent every seat and castle remarkable for any great event, or celebrated for its paintings, etc. Lord Breadalbane’s seat and beautiful policy are too curious and extraordinary to be omitted.
The seat of the Earl of Eglintoun, near Glasgow, is worthy of notice. The pine plantations of that nobleman are very grand and extensive indeed.
LETTER XLIITI.
A pair of honey-buzzards built them a large shallow nest, composed of twigs and lined with dead beechen leaves, upon a tall slender beech near the middle of Selborne Hanger, in the summer of 1780. In the middle of the month of June a bold boy climbed this tree, though standing on so steep and dizzy a situation, and brought down an egg, the only one in the nest, which had been sat on for some time, and contained the embryo of a young bird. The egg was smaller, and not so round as those of the common buzzard; was dotted at each end with small red spots, and surrounded in the middle with a broad bloody zone.
oa SS * “See
a Le THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. . 97 : The hen-bird was shot, and answered exactly to Mr. Ray’s description of that species; had a black cere, short thick legs, and a long tail. When on the wing this species may be easily distinguished from the common buzzard by its hawk-like appearance, small head, wings not so blunt, and longer tail. This specimen contained in its craw some limbs of frogs and many grey snails without shells. ‘The irides of the eyes of this bird were of a beautiful bright-yellow color.
About the roth July in the same summer a pair of sparrow- hawks bred in an old crow’s nest on a low beech in the same Hanger; and as their brood, which was numerous, began to grow up, became so daring and ravenous, that they were a terror to all the dames in the village that had chickens or ducklings under theircare. A boy climbed the tree, and found the young so fledged that they all escaped from him; but ' discovered that a good house had been kept: the larder was well stored with provisions; for he brought down a young blackbird, jay, and house-martin, all clean picked, and some half devoured. The old birds had been observed to make sad havoc for some days among the new-flown swallows and martins, which, being but lately out of their nests, had not acquired those powers and command of wing that enable them, when more mature, to set such enemies at defiance.
LeTrer XLIV. SELBORNE, Nov. 30th, 1780.
Every incident that occasions a renewal of our correspon- dence will ever be pleasing and agreeable to me.
As to the wild wood-pigeon, I am much of your mind ; and see no reason for making it the origin of the common house- dove ; but suppose those that have advanced that opinion may
98 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE.
have been misled by another appellation, often given to the wood-pigeon, which is that of stock-dove.
Unless the stock-dove in the winter varies greatly in manners from itself in summer, no species seems more unlikely to be domesticated, and to make a house-dove. We very rarely see the latter settle on trees at all, nor does it ever haunt the woods ; but the former as long as it stays with us—from November perhaps to February— lives the same