The Natural History of Selborne

Red-breasts feed on elder-berries, enter rooms, & spoil the furniture.  Bror. T. & M. came to Selborne.  Timothy, whose appetite is now on the decline, weighs only 7 pounds & 3/4 of an ounce:  at Midsummer he wighed 7 ae 1 oun.

Red-breasts whistle agreeably on the tops of hop-poles, &c., but are prognostic of autumn.  Young fern-owl.

Dines at Bramshot-place.

Gathered one bunch of black grapes, which was ripe & well-flavoured.  It grew close to the wall, pressed down by a bough.

We have caught about 20 hornets with bird-lime.

Began to use endive, which is large & well-blanched. No swifts. We seached the eaves to no purpose. In searching the eaves for the young swifts, we found in a nest two callow dead swifts, on which had been formed a second nest. These nests were full of the black shining cases of the hippoboscae hirundinis.

Between nine & ten at night a thunder-storm whith much vivd lightening began to grow up from the N.W. & W.: but it took a circuit round to the S. & E. & so missed us.  We had only the skirts of the tempest, & a little heavy rain for a short time.  Ten miles off the the southward there were vast rains.

Tho’ white butterflies abound, & lay many eggs on the cabbages; yet thro’ over-heat, & want of moisture, they do not hatch and turn to palmers; but dry & shrivel to nothing.  One swift still frequents the eaves of the church; & moreover has, I discover, two young nearly fledged, which show their white chins at the mouth of the crevice.  This incident of so late a brood of swifts is an exception to the whole of my observations ever since I have bestowed any attention on that species of hirundines!

Caught 8 hornets with a twig tipped with bird-lime.  No wasps in my garden, nor at the grocer’s, or butcher’s shop.  Five or six hornets will carry off a whole nectarine in the space of a day.

No wasps; but several hornets, which devour the nectarines.  The wasps are probably kept down by the numbers of breeders that the boys destroyed for me in the spring.