The Natural History of Selborne

Spiders shoot their webs from clod to clod.

Crocuss in great splendor.

Viola odorata.  Ivy-berries begin to turn black.

Honey-bees, & many dipterous insects abound.  Frogs croak in ponds.  A pair of house-pigeons, which were hatched at Mich: last, now have eggs, & sit.  An instance of early fecundity!

Appleshaw river runs.

Flocks of hen chaffinches, with some bramblings among them.  Saw several empty nutshells with a hole in one side, fix’d in the chinks on the head of a gate-post, as it were in a vice, & pierced as I suppose, by a nuthatch, sitta europaea.  Vid: Wllughby’s Ornithol::

Turnep greens run very fast: forward turneps rot.

Vast flocks of hen-chaffinches.  Honey-bees come forth, & gather on the Crocuss.

Sad accounts from various parts of devastations by storms & inundations. A spoon-bill platalea leucorodia Linn: was shot near Yarmouth in Norfolk: it is pretty common in Holland, but very rare indeed in this island.  There were several in a flock.  They build Willughby says, like Herons in tall trees.  Their feet are semipalmated.  Those birds in Norfolk must have crossed the German ocean.

Mezereon in fine bloom.  Peter Wells’s well runs over.  Spiders, woodlice, lepismae in cupboards, & among sugar, some empedes, gnats, flies of several species, some phalenae in hedges, earth-worms, &c., are stirring at all times when winters are mild; & are of great service to those soft-billed birds that never leave us.