LETTER XXXVIII 



TO THE SAME 



SELBORNE, March \$th t 1773. 



DEAR SIR, By my journal for last autumn it appears 

 that the house-martins bred very late, and stayed 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 field. 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 hyber- 

 naculum, and afford them a ready and obvious retreat ? 1 



1 In this letter we have the strongest evidence that Gilbert White could 

 not rid himself of the idea that it was possible for Swallows to hibernate in 

 this country. The discovery, if possible, could not have escaped the Selborne 

 naturalist, for either he, or some of his neighbours, would have unearthed a 

 sleeping swallow in the course of his long life. No practical evidence of hiber- 

 nation ever came to his hand, and he would probably have cast aside the theory 

 once and for all, had he known that after their absence from England, the 

 swallows moult, a function not likely to be performed with a chance of survival 

 in a "hybernaculum," either above or beneath water. [R. B. S.] 



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