The Natural History of Selborne

Some workmen, reapers, are made sick by the heat.  Much wheat bound. Some housed by John Carpenter.

Two swifts sipping the surface of Bin’s pond.  The bed of Oakhanger pond covered with large muscle shells.  The stint, or summer snipe.  Large flock of lapwings in the Forest.

We have had a few chilly mornings & evenings, which have sent off the swifts.  I have remarked before, many times, how early they are in their retreat. Surely they must be influenced by the failure of some particular insect, which ceases to fly thus early, being checked by the first cool autumnal sensations; since their congeners will not depart yet thses eight or nine weeks.

The fields are now finely diversfyed with ripe corn, hay & harvest scenes, & hops. The whole country round is a charming land-scape,& puts me in mind of the following lovely lines in the first book of the Cyder of John Phillips.

“Nor are the hills unamiable, whose tops/
To heaven aspire, affording prospect sweet/
To human ken; nor at their feet the vales/
Descending gently, where the lowing herd/
Chews verdurous pasture; nor the yellow fields/
Gaily interchang’d, with rich variety/
Pleasing; as when an Emerald green enchas’d/
In flamy gold, from the bright mass acquires/
A nobler hue, more delicate to sight.”

An other wasps nest.  Wheat blited at Oakhanger.  Oakhanger-ponds empty: they were sewed in the spring.

Began to cut my meadow-grass.  Farmer Parsons begins wheat-harvest in the Ewel; farmer Hewet at the forest-side.  A young man brings a large waps nest, found in my meadow.

Poultry begin to moult.

Fly-catcher feeds his sitting hen, Mrs H.W., Bessy, & Lucy came.

Bull-finch eats the berries of the honey-suckle.  Bror Tho. came.

Piped many shoots of elegant pinks.  There are some buntings in the N. field: a very rare bird at Selborne.  They love open fields, without enclosures.  Jennetings, apples so called, come in to be eaten.  Potatoes come in.