The Natural History of Selborne

Thomas saw a polecat run across the garden.

The Bramshot hounds kill a leash of hares on the hill.

Few woodcocks; & few pheasants left.  Many hares have been found on our hill: the wetness of the season, it is supposed, induces them to leave the vales, & to retreat to the uplands.  Reb. & Hannah White came from Newton.

The breed of hares is great: last year there were few.  Some have remarked that hared abound most in wet summers.

Two young men killed a large male otter, weighing 21 pounds, on the bank of our rivulte, below Priory longmead, on the Hartely-wood side, where the two parishes are divided by the stream.  This is the first of the kind ever remembered to have been found in this parish.

A hare frequents the garden, & eats the celeri-tops, the spinage, young cabbages, pinks, scabious’s, &c.

Fierce frost. Rime hangs all day on the hanger.  The hares, press’d by hunger, haunt the gardens & devour the pinks, cabbages, parsley, &c.  Cats catch the red-breasts.  Timothy the tortoise sleeps in the fruit-border under the wall, covered with a hen-coop, in which is a good armfull of straw.  Here he will lie warm, secure, & dry.  His back is partly covered with mould.

Hares eat down the pinks, & cloves in the the garden: & yet sportsmen complain that the breed this year is very small; alleging that dry summers, tho’ kindly for partridges, are detrimental to hares.

Hares eat all the pinks.

Moles live in the middle of the hanger.