30 
NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
pellets, after the manner of liawks. When full, like 
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 v/ill 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 reguU non cr 
still appear ; but I have seen no black caps lately. 
I forgot to mention that I once saw, in Christ -church-y 
quadrangle in Oxford, on a very sunny warm morning, a 
martin flying about, and settling on the parapet, so late 
twentieth of November. 
house- 
as the 
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) ^ which 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 rreal, scraping up the 
ground with its claws; and I have known 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. 1. 
t Reguli noil a-istati- 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 of 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-fauvet, swift, 
and most other species which are backward in their arrivals. The circumstance appears expli- 
cable from the nature of its food, winged insects being much more abundant at the close of 
autumn than in the spring. — Ed. 
§ Mr. \^"hite here means the pepistrelle-bat by the term murinus, a mistake into whicli almost 
every British naturalist has fallen. The true V. murinus is a very largt species, fifteen in inche s 
