The Natural History of Selborne

My garden is in high beauty, glowing with a variety of solstitial flowers.  A person lately found a young cuckow in a small nest built in a beechen shrub at the upper end of the bostal.  By watching in a morning, he soon saw the young bird fed by a pair of hedge-sparrows.  The cuckow is but half-fledge; yet the nest will hardly contain him: for his wings hang out, & his tail & body are much compressed, & streightened.  When looked at he opens a very red, wide mouth, & heaves himself up; using contorsions with his neck by way of menace, & picking at a person’s finger, if he advances it towards him.

Ticked the hay of the great meadow in lovely order: six jobbs. The little meadow is hardly made. The country people look with a kind of superstitious awe at the red louring aspect of the sun thro’ the fog… “Cum caput obscura nitidum ferrugine texit.”

Nose-flies, & stouts make the horses very troublesome.

Tedded the hay, & put it in a small cock.  Sun looks all day like the moon, & shed a rusty red light.  Mr & Mrs Brown, & niece Anna Barker came from the county of Rutland.

Turned the swarths, but did not ted the hay.  Much honey-dew on the honey-suckles, laurels, great oak.

Vast dew, sun, sultry, misty, & hot.  This is the weather that men think is injurious to hops.  The sun “shorn of his beams” appears thro’ the haze like the full moon.

Vast honey-dew; hot & hazey; misty. The blades of wheat in several fields are turned yellow, & look as if scorched with the frost. Wheat comes into ear. Red even: thro’ the haze. Sheep are shorn.

Corn-flags, fraxinella, martagons, pinks, & dark-leaved ornage-lilies begin to blow.  Bees swarm. Cherries look finely, but are not yet highly ripened.

The late ten dripping days have done infinite service to the grass, & spring-corn.

Vast crops of cherlock among the spring-corn.