40 
NATURAL HISTOBY 
from a great river, and therefore see but little of seabirds. 
As to wild fowls, we have a few teams 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. 
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. 
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 twenty-first of 
August ; it was a straggler. 
Eed- starts, fly-catchers, white-throats and ReguU non 
cristati, still appear ;^ but I have seen no blackcaps lately. 
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 
parapets, so late as the twentieth of November. 
At present I know only two species of bats, the common 
Vespertilio murinus^ and the Vespertilio auritus.^ 
I was much entertained last summer with a tame bat, 
which would take flies out of a person^s hand. If you gave 
it any thing to eat, it brought its wings round before the 
mouth, hovering and hiding its head in the manner of birds 
^ By Reguli non cristati are intended the three species of " willow- 
wrens," as they are generally called, and to which allusion has been 
already made. — Ed. 
^ The common pipistrelle and the long-eared bat. In giving to the 
former, however, the specific name murinus White fell into a mistake 
which miiny others have since made. V. mwinus being the common 
bat of the Continent, it was assumed that the common bat of this country 
must be the same species, and Pennant having once stated such to be 
the case, every subsequent writer on bats copied the mistake. It was 
left to the Rev. Leonard Jenyns to correct this long established error, 
and he has done so most satisfactorily in a paper published in the 16th 
vol. of the " Linnean Society's Transactions." — Ed. 
