The Natural History of Selborne

Blackcaps eat the berries of the honey-suckles. Mrs J. White, after long & severe campaign carried on against the Blattae molendinariae, which have of late invaded my house, & of which she has destroyed many thousands, finds that at intervals a fresh detachment of old ones arrives; & particularly during the hot season: for the windows being left open in the evenings, the males come flying in at the casements from the neighbouring houses, which swarm with them. How the females, that seem to have no perfect wings that they can use, can contrive to get form house to house, does not so readily appear. These, like many insects, when they find their present abodes over-stocked, have powers of migrating to fresh quarters. Since the Blattae have been so much kept under, the Crickets have greatly encreased in number.

Glow-worms abound on Baker’s hill.

Thunder, & hail.  A sad midsumr day.  When the Blattae seem to be subdued, & got under; all at once several large ones appear: no doubt they migrate from the houses of neighbours, which swarm with them.

It has been observed that divers flies, besides their sharp, hooked nails, have also skinny palms or flaps to their feet, whereby they are enabled to stick on glass & other smooth bodies, & to walk on ceilings with their backs downward, by means of the pressure of the atmosphere on those flaps.  The weight of which they easily overcome in cold weather when they are brisk and alert.  But in the decline of the year, this resistance becomes too mighty for their diminished strength; & we see flies labouring along, & lugging their feet in windows as if they stuck fast to the glass, & it is with the utmost difficulty they can draw one foot after another, & disengage their hollow caps from the slippery surface.  Upon the same principle that flies stick, & support themselves, do boys, by way of play, carry heavy weights by only a piece of wet leather at the end of a string clapped close on the surface of a stone.  Tho’ the Virgoloeuse pears always rot before they ripen, & are eatble, yet when baked dry on  a tin, they become an excellent sweet-meat.

Boys bring wasp’s nest.  Codlings, & stewed cucumber come in.  Housed, & piled 8 cords of beechen billet in fine order.  Watered the cucumbers; well very low.

Hardly here and there a wasp to be seen.

Young Hirundines cluster on the trees.  Harvest-bugs bite the ladies.

After the servants are gone to bed the kitchen-hearth swarms with minute crickets not so large as fleas, which must have been lately hatched.  So that these domestic insects, cherished by the influence of a constant large fire, regard not the season of the year; but produce their young at a time when their congeners are either dead, or laid up for the winter, to pass away the uncomfortable months in the profoundest slumbers, & a state of torpidity.

Myriads of Insects sporting in the sunbeams.

Ophrys spiralis, ladies traces, in bloom the long Lythe, & on top of the short Lythe.  Wasps seize on butter-flies, &, shearing off their wings, carry their bodies home as food for their young: they prey much on flies.