100 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



LETTER XXXVIII. To T. PENNANT, ESQ. 



DEAR SIR, Selborne, March 15, 1773. 



BY my journal for last autumn it appears that the house-martins 

 bred very late, and staid very late in these parts ; for, on the first 

 of October, I saw young martins in their nest nearly fledged ; 

 and again, on the twenty-first of October, we had at the next 

 house a nest full of young martins just ready to fly ; and the old 

 ones were hawking for insects with great alertness. The next 

 morning the brood forsook their nest, and were flying round the 

 village. From this day I never saw one of the swallow kind till 

 November the third ; when twenty, or perhaps thirty, house- 

 martins were playing all day long by the side of the hanging 

 wood, and over my fields. Did these small weak birds, some of 

 which were nestlings twelve days ago, shift their quarters at 

 this late season of the year to the other side of the northern 

 tropic ? Or rather, is it not more probable that the next church, 

 ruin, chalk-cliff, steep covert, or perhaps sandbank, lake or pool 

 (as a more northern naturalist would say), may become their 

 hybernaculum, and afford them a ready and obvious retreat ?* 



We now begin to expect our vernal migration of ring-ousels 

 every week. Persons worthy of credit assure me that ring-ousels 

 were seen at Christmas 1770 in the forest of Bere, on the 

 southern verge of this county. Hence we may conclude that 

 their migrations are only internal, and not extended to the con- 

 tinent southward, if they do at first come at all from the north- 

 ern parts of this island only, and not from the north of Europe. 

 Come from whence they will, it is plain, from the fearless dis- 

 regard that they show for men or guns, that they have been little 

 accustomed to places of much resort.f Navigators mention that 

 in the Isle of Ascension, and other such desolate districts, birds 

 are so little acquainted with the human form that they settle on 

 mens' shudders ; and have no more dread of a sailor than they 

 would have of a goat that was grazing. A young man at Lewes, 



* On this subject naturalists have not sufficiently discriminated between torpidity and hyberna- 

 /ion. Swallows have been found torpid, but only in the earlier winter months ; there has been 

 no instance of their being thus observed in the spring, and we do not find that any make their 

 appearance before the usual time of their coming, however warm and fine the weather maybe- 

 The contrary would be of course the case if any hybernated. ED. 



t The few that I have occasionally observed in Surrey have been rather wild than otherwiie. 

 No other instance has been recorded of their wintering in England. ED. 



