The Natural History of Selborne

Martins hover at the mouth of their nests, & feed their young without settling.

Martins build nests & forsake them, & now build again.  Much hay spoiled: much not cut.

Young swifts helpless squabs still. Young martins not out.

*  I procured a bricklayer to open the tiles in several places of my Bro.s brewhouse in order to examine the state of swift’s nests at that season, & the number of their young.  This enquiry confirmed my suspicions that they never lay more than two eggs at a time: for in several nests which we discovered, there were only two squab young apiece.  As swifts breed but once in a summer, & the other hirundines twice: the latter, who lay from four to six eggs, encrease five times as fast as the former: & therefore it is not to be wondered that swifts are very numerous.

Bees gather much from the bloom of the buck-thorn, rhanmus catharticus & somewhat from the new shoots of the laurel.

Bees swarm & sheep are shorn.  My firs did not blow this year.

Farmer Canning plows with two teams of asses, one in the morning, & one in the afternoon: at night these asses are folded on the fallows; & in the winter they are kept in a straw-yard where they make dung.

Swallows feed their young in the air.  Martins, & swallows, that have numerous families, are continually feeding them: while swifts that have but two young to maintain, seem much at their leisure, & do not attend on their nests for hours together, nor appear at all in blowing wet days.  Swifts retire to their nests in very heavy showers.

Fern-owls breed but two young at a time: but breed, I think, twice in a summer.

Swifts, I have just discovered, lay but two eggs.  They have now naked squab young, & some near half-fledged: so that their broods cannot be out ’til toward the middle or end of July, & therefor can never breed again before the 20th of August.  In laying but two eggs, & breeding but once they differ from all our other hirundines.  Scarabaeus solstitialis.  The appearance of this insect commences with this month, & ceases at the end of it.  These scarabs are the constant food of caprimulgi the month thro’.

* When Oaks are quite stripped of their leaves by cahfers, they are cloathed again soon after mid-summer with a beatiful foliage: but beeches, horse-chest-nuts, & maples, once defaced by those insects, never recover their beauty again for the whole season.