The Natural History of Selborne

Vast rain.  This rain must occasion great floods.  The trufle-hunter came this morning, & took a few trufles: he complains that those fungi never abound in wet winters, & springs.

Rooks are very much engaged in the business of nidification: but they do not roost on the their nest-trees ’til some eggs are lain.  Rooks are continually fighting & pulling each other’s nests to pieces: these proceedings are inconsistent with living in such close community.  And yet if a pair offers to build on a single tree, the nest is plundered & demolished at once.  Some rooks roost on their nest-trees.

Bror Harry’s strong beer, which was brewed last Easter monday with the hordeum nudum, is now tapped, & incomparably good: it is somewhat deeper-coloured than beer usually is in this country, not from the mat’s being higher dryed, but perhaps from the natural colour of the grain.  The barrel was by no means new, but old &  seasoned.  Wheat, it seems, makes also high-coloured beer.  Sad season for the sowing of spring-corn.  Just such weather this time twelvemonths.

Rooks begin to build.  They began the same day at Fyfield.  Swine & sheep, for such large quadrupeds, become prolific very early; since a sow at four months old requires the boar: & ram-lambs, which fall in Jan. & Feb. if well kept, will supply the wants of their own dams by the following Octobr, & beget lambs for the next year.  Horses & kine seldom procreate ’til they are two years old.

Spiders shoot their webs from clod to clod.

Crocuss in great splendor.

Viola odorata.  Ivy-berries begin to turn black.

Honey-bees, & many dipterous insects abound.  Frogs croak in ponds.  A pair of house-pigeons, which were hatched at Mich: last, now have eggs, & sit.  An instance of early fecundity!

Appleshaw river runs.

Flocks of hen chaffinches, with some bramblings among them.  Saw several empty nutshells with a hole in one side, fix’d in the chinks on the head of a gate-post, as it were in a vice, & pierced as I suppose, by a nuthatch, sitta europaea.  Vid: Wllughby’s Ornithol::