30 
NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
pellets, after the manner of hawks. When full, like a dog, it 
hides what it cannot eat. 
The young of the harn-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. f 
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. 
Red starts, fly catchers, white throats, and reguli non cristati.X 
still appear ; biit I have seen no black caps 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 parapet, so late as the 
twentieth of November. 
Common Bat. Long Eared Bat. 
At present I know only two species of bats, the common 
vespertilio murinus and the vespertilio auribus.§ 
I was much entertained last summer with a tame bat, which 
* This fact in the economy of the tawny-hooter, or brown-owl {aluco stridula) t v,hich is not 
mentioned in any of the histories of it that I have seen, I am enabled to corroborate from re- 
peated observation. It always, when at liberty, buries the superfluity of a meal, scraping up the 
ground with its claws ; and I have kn^wn it when hungry to return to its hoard, and avail itself 
of its instinctive foresight. — Ed. 
t Barn-owls are easily enough raised, if taken sufficiently young. The wild adults of this 
species are by no means such general feeders as the brown-owls. — Ed. 
t Reguli non cristati- The different " willow-wrens," as they are often called, or species of 
the pettychaps-genus (sylvia, as now restricted), are here intended. It is remarkable that the 
common gray fly-catcher, one of the very latest ®f our migrant birds to appear in spring, is also 
one of the last to depart in autumn; the contrary being the case with the garden-faiivet, swift, 
and most other species which are backward in their arrivals. The circumstance appears expli- 
cable from the nature cf its food, winged insects being much more abundant at the close of 
autumn than in the spring. — Ed. 
^ Mr. White here means the pepistrelle-bat by the term murinusf a mistake into which almost 
every British naturalist has fallen. The true V. murinus is a very large species, fifteen inches in 
