The Natural History of Selborne

Many moor-hens on Comb-wood pond.

Mrs H. White, & Lucy left us.  Two dobchicks in Combwood pond.  Young martins, & swallows cluster on the tower, & on trees, for the first time.  A pleasing circumstance, mixed with some degree of regret for the decline of summer!

On this day Lord Stawell sent me a rare & curious water-fowl, taken alive a few days before by a boy at Basing, near Basingstoke, & sent to the Duke of Bolton at Hackwood park, where it was put into the bason before the house, in which it soon dyed.  This bird proved to be the Procellaria Puffinus of Linnaeus, the Manks puffin, or Shear-water of Ray.  Shear-waters breed in the Calf of Man, & as Ray supposes, in the Scilly Isles, & also in the Orkines: but quit our rocks & shores about the latter end of August; & from accounts lately given by navigators, are dispersed over the whole Atlantic.  By what chance or accident this bird was impelled to visit Hants is a question that can not easily be answered.

Many wild fowls haunt Wolmer pond: in the evenings they come forth and feed in the barley-stubbles.

Finished shovelling the zigzag, & bostal.  Wildfowl on Wolmer-pond.

Many gulls, & wildfowls on Wolmer pond.  Whitings brought.

A sand-piper shot at Hawkley.

Several herons at Wolmer-pond, & a tringa octrophus, or white-rumped sand-piper, Cranmer-pond in Wolmer-forest is quite dry.

Mr Pink’s turnips are infested with black caterpillars; he turned 80 ducks into the field, hoping they would have destroyed them; but they did not seem much to relish this sort of food.  I have known whole broods of ducks destroyed by their eating too freely of hairy caterpillars.

Just at the close of day several teams of ducks fly over the common from the forest: they go probably to the streams about Alresford.