The Natural History of Selborne

Adoxa moschatellina.  The twigs which the rooks drop in building supply the poor with brush-wood to light their fires*.  Some unhappy pairs are not permitted to finish any nest ’til the rest have compleated yir building; as soon as they get a few sticks together a party comes & demolishes the whole.  As soon as rooks have finished their nests, & before they lay, the cocks begin the feed the hens, who receive their bounty with a fondling tremulous voice & fluttering wings, & all the little blandishments that are expressed by the young while in a helpless state.  This gallant deportment of the males is continued thro’ the whole season of incubation.  Theses birds do not copulate on trees, nor in their nests, but on the ground in open fields.

*Thus did the ravens supply the prophet with necessaries in the wilderness.

Nuthatch brings out & cracks her nuts, & strews the garden-walks with shells.  They fix them in a fork of a tree where two boughs meet: on the Orleans plum tree.

Ephemerae bistae come forth.

Hard frost, hot sun.  Sheltered the fruit-wall bloom with boughs of ivy & yew.

Vast rain.  This rain must occasion great floods.  The trufle-hunter came this morning, & took a few trufles: he complains that those fungi never abound in wet winters, & springs.

Rooks are very much engaged in the business of nidification: but they do not roost on the their nest-trees ’til some eggs are lain.  Rooks are continually fighting & pulling each other’s nests to pieces: these proceedings are inconsistent with living in such close community.  And yet if a pair offers to build on a single tree, the nest is plundered & demolished at once.  Some rooks roost on their nest-trees.

Bror Harry’s strong beer, which was brewed last Easter monday with the hordeum nudum, is now tapped, & incomparably good: it is somewhat deeper-coloured than beer usually is in this country, not from the mat’s being higher dryed, but perhaps from the natural colour of the grain.  The barrel was by no means new, but old &  seasoned.  Wheat, it seems, makes also high-coloured beer.  Sad season for the sowing of spring-corn.  Just such weather this time twelvemonths.

Rooks begin to build.  They began the same day at Fyfield.  Swine & sheep, for such large quadrupeds, become prolific very early; since a sow at four months old requires the boar: & ram-lambs, which fall in Jan. & Feb. if well kept, will supply the wants of their own dams by the following Octobr, & beget lambs for the next year.  Horses & kine seldom procreate ’til they are two years old.

Spiders shoot their webs from clod to clod.

Crocuss in great splendor.