The Natural History of Selborne, 1879/Letter 11
LETTER XI.
Selborne, September 9th, 1767.
The Hoopoe.
It will not be without impatience that I shall wait for your thoughts with regard to falco; as to its weight, breadth, etc., I wish I had set them down at the time; but, to the best of my remembrance, it weighed two pounds and eight ounces, and measured, from wing to wing, thirty-eight inches. Its cere and feet were yellow, and the circle of its eyelids a bright yellow. As it had been killed some days, and the eyes were sunk, I could make no good observation on the colour of the pupils and the irides.
The most unusual birds I ever observed in these parts were a pair of hoopoes (upupa),[e1] which came several years ago in the summer, and frequented an ornamented piece of ground, which joins to my garden, for some weeks. They used to march about in a stately manner, feeding in the walks, many times in the day; and seemed disposed to breed in my outlet; but were frighted and persecuted by idle boys, who would never let them be at rest.
The Grossbeak.
Three grossbeaks[e2] (loxia coccothraustes) appeared some years ago in my fields, in the winter; one of which I shot. Since that, now and then, one is occasionally seen in the same dead season.
A crossbill[e3] (loxia curvirostra) was killed last year in this neighbourhood.
Our streams, which are small, and rise only at the end of the village, yield nothing but the bull's head or miller's thumb[e4] (gobius fluviatilis capitatus), the trout (trutta fluviatilis), the eel[e5] (anguilla), the lampern[e6] (lampætra parva et fluviatilis) and the stickle-back[e7] (pisciculus aculeatus).
We are twenty miles from the sea, and almost as many from a great river, and therefore see but little of sea birds. As to wild fowls, we have a few teems of ducks bred in the moors where the snipes breed; and multitudes of widgeons and teals in hard weather frequent our lakes in the forest.
The Common Crossbill.
Having some acquaintance with a tame brown owl, I find that it casts up the fur of mice, and the feathers of birds in pellets, after the manner of hawks; when full, like a dog, it hides what it cannot eat.
Miller's Thumb, or Bull's Head
The young of the barn-owl are not easily raised, as they want a constant supply of fresh mice; whereas the young of the brown owl will eat indiscriminately all that is brought; snails, rats, kittens, puppies, magpies, and any kind of carrion or offal.
The house-martins have eggs still, and squab young. The last swift I observed was about the 21st August: it was a straggler.
Red-starts, fly-catchers, white-throats, and reguli non cristati, still appear: but I have seen no black-caps lately.
The House-Martin.
I forgot to mention that I once saw, in Christ Church College quadrangle in Oxford, on a very sunny warm morning, a house-martin flying about, and settling on the parapet, so late as the 20th November.
At present I know only two species of bats, the common vespertilio murinus and the vespertilio auribus.[e8]
I was much entertained last summer with a tame bat, which would take flies out of a person's hand. If you gave it anything to eat, it brought its wings round before the mouth, hovering and hiding its head in the manner of birds of prey when they feed. The adroitness it showed in shearing off the wings of the flies, which were always rejected, was worthy of observation, and pleased me much. Insects seemed to be most acceptable, though it did not refuse raw flesh when offered; so that the notion, that
Pipistrelle.
bats go down chimneys and gnaw men's bacon, seems no improbable story. While I amused myself with this wonderful quadruped, I saw it several times confute the vulgar opinion, that bats when down upon a flat surface cannot get on the wing again, by rising with great ease from the floor. It ran, I observed, with more dispatch than I was aware of; but in a most ridiculous and grotesque manner.
Bats drink on the wing, like swallows, by sipping the surface, as they play over pools and streams. They love to frequent waters, not only for the sake of drinking, but on account of insects, which are found over them in the greatest plenty. As I was going some years ago, pretty late, in a boat from Richmond to Sunbury, on a warm summer's evening, I think I saw myriads of bats between the two places; the air swarmed with them all along the Thames, so that hundreds were in sight at a time.
I am, etc.
NOTES TO LETTER XI.
e1 ↑ One occasionally sees mention made in the scientific and natural history periodicals of the occurrence of the hoopoe (upupa epops). Of course it is generally shot, and no chance is given it of breeding. Its nest has only rarely been found in England.
e2 ↑ The grossbeak (coccothraustes vulgaris), or as it is more commonly called, the hawfinch, is not so rare as is generally supposed. Its shyness prevents its being easily observed.
e3 ↑ The crossbill may occasionally be seen, in small flocks, in districts where the larch is plentiful. With its peculiar curved mandibles, it extracts the seeds from the fir-cones. The birds vary greatly in size and colour, according to age and sex. They are yellow, green, red, or brown at different times, so if it were not for their crossed bills, it would be rather hard to distinguish them. They breed in Norway and Sweden, and very occasionally in England.
e4 ↑ We used, when I was a boy, to catch great numbers of bull-heads to bait our eel lines with. They were found under every flat stone in the Shropshire streams, in company with the loach, also an excellent bait.
e5 ↑ It is now well known that there are three kinds of eels which inhabit our rivers and pools,—the snig, and the broad-nosed and sharp-nosed species. The habits of eels are very peculiar. Nothing certain is known about their breeding, but it is believed that the young are born alive. In the autumn the eels descend the rivers in vast numbers, and go either to sea or to the brackish waters, where they breed. In the spring the little eels, or elvers, ascend the rivers in columns so dense that they may be scooped out by the bucketful.
e6 ↑ In the Dee at Llangollen, lamperns were very numerous. They hold on to stones by means of their round sucker-like mouths, and can move very heavy ones.
e7 ↑ There are six kinds of sticklebacks. Everyone knows the common three-finned one. One kind builds a nest among the weeds, and guards it with the utmost vigilance.
e8 ↑ There seem to be about twenty species of British bats. Four or five species are tolerably common. The squeak made by the bat is so very fine, that while to some ears it is loud, by others it cannot be heard. I once, when a boy, was exploring a hollow tree after owls' nests, when the smell from one particular hole was so dreadful that we put some lighted paper down to see what would come out; and to our astonishment dozens of large, reddish bats flew out, and dashed madly about in the bright sunlight. The bat has more vermin upon it than any other creature of its size. It seems needless to state that the bat is an animal, and not a bird or an insect; but I saw it gravely stated in the columns of a local journal by two correspondents that it was either of the two latter.