The Natural History of Selborne

The race of field-crickets, which burrowed in the short Lythe, & used to make such an agreeable, shrilling noise the summer long,  seems to be extinct.  The boys, I believe, found the method of probing their holes with the stalks of grasses, & so fetched them out, & destroyed them.

Field-crickets shrill on the verge of the forest.  Cockoos abound there. Thinned the apricots, & took off many hundreds.

Timothy the tortoise has been missing for more than a week. He got out of the garden at the wicket, we suppose; & may be in the fields among the grass.  Timothy found in the little bean-field short of the pound-field.  The nightingale, fern-owl, cuckow, & grass-hopper lark may be heard at the same time in my outlet.  Gryllo-talpa curs in the moist meadows.

Field cricket sings:  sings all night.

Field-cricket makes its shrilling noise.

Ephemera vulgata Meridie choreas aireas instituit, sursum recte tendens, rediensque eadem fere via: Scopoli.  A mole-cricket’s nest full of small eggs was discovered just under the turf in the garden near the pond.  They were of a dirty yellow colour, & of an oval shape, surrounded with a tough skin, & too small to have any rudiments of young withim them, being full of a viscous substance.  There might be an hundred eggs in this one nest; they lay very shallow just under a little fresh-moved mould in an hollow formed for that purpose.