The Natural History of Selborne

When old beech-trees are cleared away, the naked ground in a year or two becomes covered with straw-berry plants, the seed of which must have lain in the ground for an age at lest.  One of the slidders or trenches down the middle of the hanger, close covered over with lofty beeches near a century old, is still called strawberry slidder, though no strawberries have grown there in the memory of man.  That sort of fruit, no doubt, did once abound there, & will again when the obstruction is removed.

Wall-cherries are excellent.  Lime-trees blossom, & smell very sweet.  Mr & Mrs Sam Barker, & Miss Elizabeth Barker, came from the county of Rutland.

We have planted-out vast quantities of annuals, but none of them thrive.  Grapes do not blow, nor make any progress.  The wet season has continued just a month this day.  Dismal weather!

Benham skims the horse-fields. Rasps come in: not well flavoured. On this day a woman brought me two eggs of a fern-owl or eve-jarr, which she found on the verge of the hanger to the left of the hermitage, under a beechen shrubb. This person, who lives just at the foot of the hanger, seems well acquainted with these nocturnal swallows, & says she has often found their eggs in that place, & that they lay only two at a time on the bare ground. The eggs were oblong, dusky, & streaked somewhat in the manner of the plumage of the parent-bird, & were equal in size at each end. The dam was sitting on the eggs when found, which contained the rudiments of young, & would have hatched perhaps in a week. From hence we may see the time of their breeding, which corresponds pretty well with that of the Swift, as does also the period of their arrival. Each species is usually seen about the beginning of May. Each breeds but once in a summer; each lays only two eggs.

Wag-tails bring their young to the grass-plots, where they catch insects to feed them.

The fly-catchers in the vine bring out their young.

My scarlet straw-berries are good: what we eat at S. Lambeth were stale, & bad.  A peat-cutter brought me lately from Cranmoor a couple of snipe’s eggs which are beautifully marbled.  They are rather large, & long for the size of the bird, & not bigger at one end than the other.  The parent birds had not sat on them.

* These eggs, I find since, were the eggs of a Churn-owl: the eggs of Snpies, differ much from the former in size, shape, & colour.  The peat-cutter was led into the mistake by finding his eggs in a bog, or moor.

A cock red-backed butcher-bird, or flusher, was shot in Hartley-gardens, where it had built a nest.  My garden is in high beauty, abounding with solstitial flowers, such as roses, corn-flags, late orange-lillies, pinks, scarlet lychnises, &c. &c.  The early honey-suckles were in their day full of blossoms, & so fragrant, that they perfumed the street with their odour: the late yellow honey-suckle is still in high perfection, & is a most lovely shrub; the only objection is that having a limber stem, & branches, it does not make a good standard.

Alton

Young swallows on the top of a chimney.  The western sun almost roasted us between Guilford & Farnham, shining directly into our chaise.

S. Lambeth

Cherries sold in the streets, but very bad.  Young fly-catchers come out at Selborne.