The Natural History of Selborne

Timothy the tortoise dull & torpid.

Beans heavy.

Bean-harvest & vetch harvest.

Red-breasts feed on elder-berries, enter rooms, & spoil the furniture.  Bror. T. & M. came to Selborne.  Timothy, whose appetite is now on the decline, weighs only 7 pounds & 3/4 of an ounce:  at Midsummer he wighed 7 ae 1 oun.

Red-breasts whistle agreeably on the tops of hop-poles, &c., but are prognostic of autumn.  Young fern-owl.

Dines at Bramshot-place.

Gathered one bunch of black grapes, which was ripe & well-flavoured.  It grew close to the wall, pressed down by a bough.

We have caught about 20 hornets with bird-lime.

Began to use endive, which is large & well-blanched. No swifts. We seached the eaves to no purpose. In searching the eaves for the young swifts, we found in a nest two callow dead swifts, on which had been formed a second nest. These nests were full of the black shining cases of the hippoboscae hirundinis.

Between nine & ten at night a thunder-storm whith much vivd lightening began to grow up from the N.W. & W.: but it took a circuit round to the S. & E. & so missed us.  We had only the skirts of the tempest, & a little heavy rain for a short time.  Ten miles off the the southward there were vast rains.