The Natural History of Selborne

The shortest day: a truly black, & dismal one.

Missel thrush sings merrily every morning.  Song thrush very loud.  A new magpie’s nest, near finished was found in a coppice: this soft season reminds birds of nidification.

Baromr 30.  Still, dark, & spitting, deep fog.  When the baromr gets very high, it is often attended with black spitting weather.

Summer-like: the air is full of gossamer, & insects.

Few worms lie-out on the common.

Vat condensations on walls & wainscot, which run in streams; these things are colder than the warm wet air.

Worms lie-out very thick on the walks, & grass-plot; many in copulation.  They are very venereous, & seem to engender all the year.

When the thermr is at 50 flies & phalaenae come-out, & bats are often stirring.  Beetles flie.

The nuthatch hunts for nuts in the hedges, & brings them to the forked bough of a certain plum-tree, where it opens them by picking a ragged irregular hole in the small end of the shell.  It throws the empty shell on the walk.

A man brought me a common sea-gull alive: three crows had got it down in a field, & were endeavouring to demolish it.