The Natural History of Selborne

Grey, windy, soft & agreeable.  Now my grapes are delicate notwithstanding the summer was so wet & shady.

Nuts fall very fast from the hedges.

Gathered some keeping-apples.  The intercourse between tups and ewes seems pretty well over.  Ewes go, I think, 22 weeks.

Numbers of swallows & martins playing about at Faringdon, & settling on the trees.  If hirundines hide in rocks & caverns, how do they, while torpid, avoid being eaten by weasels & other vermin?

Black snails are more sluggish than in the summer; but in sight all day at this season of the year.  Saw one hornet.

Beautiful wheat season for the wet fallows.  The buzzard is a dastardly bird, & beaten not only by the raven, but even by the carrion-crow.  Gathered baking-pears.

Swallows & martins, before they withdraw, not only forsake houses, but do not frequent the villages at all: so that their intercourse with houses is only for the sake of breeding.

Nothing left abroad but seed-clover, & a few beans.

Fine young clover & fine turneps about the country.  * The quantities of haws, & sloes this year are prodigious.  Those hives of bees that have been taken have proved deficient in wax, & honey.  In shady wet summers bees can scarce procure a store sufficient to carry them thro’ the winter: if not fed they perish.

Wasps still go into the hives.  Gathered-in some of the early pippins: fine baking apples.