are peculiar to America, viz. how they came there, and whence? is too
puzzling for me to answer; and yet so obvious as often to have struck
me with wonder. If one looks into the writers on that subject little
satisfaction is to be found. Ingenious men will readily advance
plausible arguments to support whatever theory they shall choose to
maintain; but then the misfortune is, every one’s hypothesis is each as
good as another’s, since they are all founded on conjecture. The late
writers of this sort, in whom may be seen all the arguments of those
that have gone before, as I remember, stock America from the western
coast of Africa and the south of Europe; and then break down the
Isthmus that bridged over the Atlantic. But this is making use of a
violent piece of machinery: it is a difficulty worthy of the
interposition of a god! ‘Incredulus odi.’
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
The Naturalist’s Summer-evening Walk
… equidem credo, quia sit divinitus illis
Ingenium.
VIRG. GEORG.
When day declining sheds a milder gleam,
What time the may-fly[1] haunts the pool or stream;
When the still owl skims round the grassy mead,
What time the timorous hare limps forth to feed;
Then be the time to steal adown the vale,
And listen to the vagrant[2] cuckoo’s tale,
To hear the clamorous[3] curlew call his mate,
Or the soft quail his tender pain relate;
To see the swallow sweep the dark’ning plain
Belated, to support her infant train;
To mark the swift in rapid giddy ring
Dash round the steeple, unsubdu’d of wing:
Amusive birds!—say where your hid retreat
When the frost rages and the tempests beat;
Whence your return, by such nice instinct led,
When spring, soft season, lifts her bloomy head ?
Such baffled searches mock man’s prying pride,
The God of Nature is your secret guide!
While deep’ning shades obscure the face of day
To yonder bench, leaf-shelter’d, let us stray,
Till blended objects fail the swimming sight,
And all the fading landscape sinks in night;
To hear the drowsy dor come brushing by
With buzzing wing, or the shrill[4] cricket cry;
To see the feeding bat glance through the wood;
To catch the distant falling of the flood;
While o’er the cliff th’ awakened churn-owl hung
Through the still gloom protracts his chattering song;
While high in air, and pois’d upon his wings,
Unseen, the soft enamour’d woodlark[5] sings:
These, Nature’s works, the curious mind employ,
Inspire a soothing melancholy joy:
As fancy warms, a pleasing kind of pain
Steals o’er the cheek, and thrills the creeping vein!
Each rural sight, each sound, each smell combine;
The tinkling sheep-bell, or the breath of kine;
The new-mown hay that scents the swelling breeze,
Or cottage-chimney smoking through the trees.
The chilling night-dews fall: away, retire;
For see, the glow-worm lights her amorous fire![6]
Thus, ere night’s veil had half obscured the sky,
Th’ impatient damsel hung her lamp on high:
True to the signal, by love’s meteor led,
Leander hasten’d to his Hero’s bed.[7]
I am, etc.
[1] The angler’s may-fly, the ephemera vulgata Linn., comes forth from
its aurelia state, and emerges out of the water about six in the
evening, and dies about eleven at night, determining the date of its
fly state in about five or six hours. They usually begin to appear
about the 4th of June, and continue in succession for near a fortnight.
See Swammerdam, Derham, Scopoli, etc.
[2] Vagrant cuckoo; so called because, being tied down by no incubation
or attendance about the nutrition of its young, it wanders without
control.
[3] Charadrius aedicnemus.
[4] Gryllus campetris.
[5] In hot summer nights woodlarks soar to a prodigious height, and
hang singing in the air
[6] The light of the female glow-worm (as she often crawls up the stalk
of a grass to make herself more conspicuous) is a signal to the male,
which is a slender dusky scarabaeus.
[7] See the story of Hero and Leander.)
Letter XXV
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
Selborne, Aug. 30, 1769.
Dear Sir,
It gives me satisfaction to find that my account of the ousel migration
pleases you. You put a very shrewd question when you ask me how I know
that their autumnal migration is southward? Was not candour and
openness the very life of natural history, I should pass over this
query just as the sly commentator does over a crabbed passage in a
classic; but common ingenuousness obliges me to confess, not without
some degree of shame, that I only reasoned in that case from analogy.
For as all other autumnal birds migrate from the northward to us, to
partake of our milder winters, and return to the northward again when
the rigorous cold abates, so I concluded that the ring-ousels did the
same, as well as their congeners the fieldfares; and especially as
ring-ousels are known to haunt cold mountainous countries: but I have
good reason to suspect since that they may come to us from westward;
because I hear, from very good authority, that they breed on Dartmoor;
and that they forsake that wild district about the time that our
visitors appear, and do not return till late in the spring.
I have taken a great deal of pains about your salicaria and mine, with
a white stroke over its eye, and a tawny rump. I have surveyed it alive
and dead, and have procured several specimens; and am perfectly
persuaded myself (and trust you will soon be convinced of the same)
that it is no more nor less than the passer arundinaceus minor of Ray.
This bird, by some means or other, seems to be entirely omitted in the
British Zoology; and one reason probably was because it is so strangely
classed in Ray, who ranges it among his picis affines. It ought no
doubt to have gone among his aviculae cauda unicolore, and among your
slender-billed small birds of the same division. Linnaeus might with
great propriety have put it into his genus of motacilla; and the
motacilla salicaria of his Fauna Suecica seems to come the nearest to
it. It is no uncommon bird, haunting the sides of ponds and rivers
where there is covert, and the reeds and sedges of moors. The country
people in some places call it the sedge-bird. It sings incessantly
night and day during the breeding-time, imitating the note of a
sparrow, a swallow, a sky-lark; and has a strange hurrying manner in
its song. My specimens correspond most minutely to the description of
your fen salicaria, shot near Revesby. Mr. Ray has given an excellent
characteristic of it when he says, ‘Rostrum & pedes in hac avicula
multo majores sunt quam pro corporis ratione.’ See letter May 29, 1769.
I have got you the egg of an oedicnemus, or stone curlew, which was
picked up in a fallow on the naked ground: There were two; but the
finder inadvertently crushed one with his foot before he saw them.
When I wrote to you last year on reptiles, I wish I had not forgot to
mention the faculty that snakes have of stinking se defendendo. I knew
a gentleman who kept a tame snake, which was in its person as sweet as
any animal while in a good humour and unalarmed; but as soon as a
stranger or a dog or cat, came in, it fell to hissing, and filled the
room with such nauseous effluvia as rendered it hardly supportable.
Thus the squnck, or stonck, of Ray’s Synop. Ouadr. is an innocuous and
sweet animal; but, when pressed hard by dogs and men, it can eject such
a pestilent and fetid smell and excrement, that nothing can be more
horrible.
A gentleman sent me lately a fine specimen of the lanius minor
cinerascens cum macula in scapulis alba Raii; which is a bird that, at
the time of your publishing your two first volumes of British Zoology,
I find you had not seen. You have described it well from Edwards’s
drawing.
Letter XXVI
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
Selborne, December 8, 1769.
Dear Sir,
I was much gratified by your communicative letter on your return from
Scotland, where you spent, I find, some considerable time, and gave
yourself good room to examine the natural curiosities of that extensive
kingdom, both those of the islands, as well as those of the highlands.
The usual bane of such expeditions is hurry; because men seldom allot
themselves half the time they should do: but, fixing on a day for their
return, post from place to place, rather as if they were on a journey
that required dispatch, than as philosophers investigating the works of
nature. You must have made, no doubt, many discoveries, and laid up a
good fund of materials for a future edition of the British Zoology; and
will have no reason to repent that you have bestowed so much pains on a
part of Great Britain that perhaps was never so well examined before.
It has always been matter of wonder to me that field-fares, which are
so congenerous to thrushes and blackbirds, should never choose to breed
in England: but that they should not think even the highlands cold and
northerly, and sequestered enough, is a circumstance still more strange
and wonderful. The ring-ousel, you find, stays in Scotland the whole
year round; so that we have reason to conclude that those migrators
that visit us for a short space every autumn do not come from thence.
And here, I think, will be the proper place to mention that those birds
were most punctual again in their migration this autumn, appearing, as
before, about the 30th of September: but their flocks were larger than
common, and their stay protracted somewhat beyond the usual time. If
they came to spend the whole winter with us, as some of their congeners
do, and then left us, as they do, in spring, I should not be so much
struck with the occurrence, since it would be similar to that of the
other winter birds of passage; but when I see them for a fortnight at
Michaelmas, and again for about a week in the middle of April, I am
seized with wonder, and long to be informed whence these travellers
come, and whither they go, since they seem to use our hills merely as
an inn or baiting place.
Your account of the greater brambling, or snow-fleck, is very amusing;
and strange it is that such a short-winged bird should delight in such
perilous voyages over the northern ocean! Some country people in the
winter time have every now and then told me that they have seen two or
three white larks on our downs; but on considering the matter, I begin
to suspect that these are some stragglers of the birds we are talking
of, which sometimes perhaps may rove so far to the southward.
It pleases me to find that white hares are so frequent on the Scottish
mountains, and especially as you inform me that it is a distinct
species; for the quadrupeds of Britain are so few, that every new
species is a great acquisition.
The eagle-owl, could it be proved to belong to us, is so majestic a
bird that it would grace our fauna much. I never was informed before
where wild-geese are known to breed.
You admit, I find, that I have proved your fen salicaria to be the
lesser reed-sparrow of Ray; and I think that you may be secure that I
am right; for I took very particular pains to clear up that matter, and
had some fair specimens; but, as they were not well preserved, they are
decayed already. You will, no doubt, insert it in its proper place in
your next edition. Your additional plates will much improve your work.
De Buffon, I know, has described the water shrew-mouse: but still I am
pleased to find you have discovered it in Lincolnshire, for the reason
I have given in the article on the white hare.
As a neighbour was lately ploughing in a dry chalky field, far removed
from any water, he turned out a water rat, that was curiously laid up
in an hybernaculum artificially formed of grass and leaves. At one end
of the burrow lay above a gallon of potatoes regularly stowed, on which
it was to have supported itself for the winter. But the difficulty with
me is how this amphibius mus came to fix its winter station at such a
distance from the water. Was it determined in its choice of that place
by the mere accident of finding the potatoes which were planted there;
or is it the constant practice of the aquatic rat to forsake the
neighbourhood of the water in the colder months?
Though I delight very little in analogous reasoning, knowing how
fallacious it is with respect to natural history; yet, in the following
instance, I cannot help being inclined to think it may conduce towards
the explanation of a difficulty that I have mentioned before, with
respect to the invariable early retreat of the hirundo apus, or swift,
so many weeks before its congeners; and that not only with us, but also
in Andalusia, where they also begin to retire about the beginning of
August.
The great large bat* (which by the by is at present a nondescript in
England, and what I have never been able yet to procure) retires and
migrates very early in the summer: it also ranges very high for its
food, feeding in a different region of the air; and that is the reason
I never could procure one. Now this is exactly the case with the
swifts; for they take their food in a more exalted region than the
other species, and are very seldom seen hawking for flies near the
ground, or over the surface of the water. From hence I would conclude
that these hirundines, and the larger bats, are supported by some sorts
of high-flying gnats, scarabs, or phalaenae, that are of short
continuance; and that the short stay of these strangers is regulated by
the defect of their food.
* The little bat appears almost every month in the year; but I have
never seen the large ones till the end of April, nor after July. They
are most common in June, but never in any plenty; are a rare species
with us.
By my journal it appears that curlews clamoured on to October the
thirty-first; since which I have not seen or heard any. Swallows were
observed on to November the third.
Letter XXVII
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
Selborne, Feb. 22, 1770.
Dear Sir,
Hedge-hogs abound in my gardens and fields. The manner in which they
eat their roots of the plantain in my grass-walks is very curious: with
their upper mandible, which is much longer than their lower, they bore
under the plant, and so eat the root off upwards, leaving the tuft of
leaves untouched. In this respect they are serviceable, as they destroy
a very troublesome weed; but they deface the waffles in some measure by
digging little round holes. It appears, by the dung that they drop upon
the turf, that beetles are no inconsiderable part of their food. In
June last I procured a litter of four or five young hedge-hogs, which
appeared to be about five or six days old; they, I find, like puppies,
are born blind, and could not see when they came to my hands. No doubt
their spines are soft and flexible at the time of their birth, or else
the poor dam would have but a bad time of it in the critical moment of
parturition: but it is plain that they soon harden; for these little
pigs had such stiff prickles on their backs and sides as would easily
have fetched blood, had they not been handled with caution. Their
spines are quite white at this age; and they have little hanging ears,
which I do not remember to be discernible in the old ones. They can, in
part, at this age draw their skin down over their faces; but are not
able to contract themselves into a ball as they do, for the sake of
defence, when full grown. The reason, I suppose, is, because the
curious muscle that enables the creature to roll itself up into a ball
was not then arrived at its full tone and firmness. Hedge-hogs make a
deep and warm hybernaculum with leaves and moss, in which they conceal
themselves for the winter: but I never could find that they stored in
any winter provision, as some quadrupeds certainly do.
I have discovered an anecdote with respect to the field-fare (turdus
pilaris), which I think is particular enough: this bird, though it sits
on trees in the day-time, and procures the greatest part of its food
from white-thorn hedges; yea, moreover, builds on very high trees; as
may be seen by the Fauna Suecica; yet always appears with us to roost
on the ground. They are seen to come in flocks just before it is dark,
and to settle and nestle among the heath on our forest. And besides,
the larkers, in dragging their nets by night, frequently catch them in
the wheat-stubbles; while the bat-fowlers, who take many red-wings in
the hedges, never entangle any of this species. Why these birds, in the
matter of roosting, should differ from all their congeners, and from
themselves also with respect to their proceedings by day, is a fact for
which I am by no means able to account.
I have somewhat to inform you of concerning the moose-deer; but in
general foreign animals fall seldom in my way; my little intelligence
is confined to the narrow sphere of my own observations at home.
Letter XXVIII
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
Selborne, March, 1770.
On Michaelmas-day 1768 I managed to get a sight of the female moose
belonging to the Duke of Richmond, at Goodwood; but was greatly
disappointed, when I arrived at the spot, to find that it died, after
having appeared in a languishing way for some time, on the morning
before. However, understanding that it was not stripped, I proceeded to
examine this rare quadruped: I found it in an old green-house, slung
under the belly and chin by ropes, and in a standing posture; but,
though it had been dead for so short a time, it was in so putrid a
state that the stench was hardly supportable. The grand distinction
between this deer, and any other species that I have ever met with,
consisted in the strange length of its legs; on which it was tilted up
much in the manner of birds of the grallae order. I measured it, as
they do an horse, and found that, from the ground to the wither, it was
just five feet four inches; which height answers exactly to sixteen
hands, a growth that few horses arrive at: but then, with this length
of legs, its neck was remarkably short, no more than twelve inches; so
that, by straddling with one foot forward and the other backward, it
grazed on the plain ground, with the greatest difficulty, between its
legs: the ears were vast and lopping, and as long as the neck; the head
was about twenty inches long, and ass-like; and had such a redundancy
of upper lip as I never saw before, with huge nostrils. This lip,
travellers say, is esteemed a dainty dish in North America. It is very
reasonable to suppose that this creature supports itself chiefly by
browsing of trees, and by wading after water-plants; towards which way
of livelihood the length of leg and great lip must contribute much. I
have read somewhere that it delights in eating the nymphaea, or
water-lily. From the fore-feet to the belly behind the shoulder it
measured three feet and eight inches: the length of the legs before and
behind consisted a great deal in the tibia, which was strangely long;
but in my haste to get out of the stench, I forgot to measure that
joint exactly. Its scut seemed to be about an inch long; the colour was
a grizzly black; the mane about four inches long; the fore-hoofs were
upright and shapely, the hind flat and splayed. The spring before it
was only two years old, so that most probably it was not then come to
its growth. What a vast tall beast must a full-grown stag be! I have
been told some arrive at ten feet and an half! This poor creature had
at first a female companion of the same species, which died the spring
before. In the same garden was a young stag, or red deer, between whom
and this moose it was hoped that there might have been a breed; but
their inequality of height must have always been a bar to any commerce
of the amorous kind. I should have been glad to have examined the
teeth, tongue, lips, hoofs, etc., minutely; but the putrefaction
precluded all further curiosity. This animal, the keeper told me,
seemed to enjoy itself best in the extreme frost of the former winter.
In the house they showed me the horn of a male moose, which had no
front-antlers, but only a broad palm with some snags on the edge. The
noble owner of the dead moose proposed to make a skeleton of her bones.
Please to let me hear if my female moose corresponds with that you saw;
and whether you think still that the American moose and European elk
are the same creature.
I am,
With the greatest esteem. etc.
Letter XXIX
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
Selborne, May 12, 1770.
Dear Sir,
Last month we had such a series of cold turbulent weather, such a
constant succession of frost, and snow, and hail, and tempest, that the
regular migration or appearance of the summer birds was much
interrupted. Some did not show themselves (at least were not heard)
till weeks after their usual time; as the black-cap and white-throat;
and some have not been heard yet, as the grasshopper-lark and largest
willow-wren. As to the fly-catcher, I have not seen it; it is indeed
one of the latest, but should appear about this time: and yet, amidst
all this meteorous strife and war of the elements, two swallows
discovered themselves as long ago as the eleventh of April, in frost
and snow; but they withdrew quickly, and were not visible again for
many days. House-martins, which are always more backward than swallows,
were not observed till May came in.
Among the monogamous birds several are to be found, after pairing-time,
single, and of each sex: but whether this state of celibacy is matter
of choice or necessity, is not so easily discoverable. When the
house-sparrows deprive my martins of their nests, as soon as I cause
one to be shot, the other, be it cock or hen, presently procures a
mate, and so for several times following.
I have known a dove-house infested by a pair of white owls, which made
great havoc among the young pigeons: one of the owls was shot as soon
as possible; but the survivor readily found a mate, and the mischief
went on. After some time the new pair were both destroyed, and the
annoyance ceased.
Another instance I remember of a sportsman, whose zeal for the increase
of his game being greater than his humanity, after pairing-time he
always shot the cock-bird of every couple of partridges upon his
grounds; supposing that the rivalry of many males interrupted the
breed: he used to say, that, though he had widowed the same hen several
times, yet he found she was still provided with a fresh paramour, that
did not take her away from her usual haunt.
Again; I knew a lover of setting, an old sportsman, who has often told
me that soon after harvest he has frequently taken small coveys of
partridges, consisting of cock-birds alone; these he pleasantly used to
call old bachelors.
There is a propensity belonging to common house-cats that is very
remarkable; I mean their violent fondness for fish, which appears to be
their most favourite food: and yet nature in this instance seems to
have planted in them an appetite that, unassisted, they know not how to
gratify: for of all quadrupeds cats are the least disposed towards
water; and will not, when they can avoid it, deign to wet a foot, much
less to plunge into that element.
Quadrupeds that prey on fish are amphibious: such is the otter, which
by nature is so well formed for diving, that it makes great havoc among
the inhabitants of the waters. Not supposing that we had any of those
beasts in our shadow brooks, I was much pleased to see a male otter
brought to me, weighing twenty-one pounds, that had been shot on the
bank of our stream below the Priory, where the rivulet divides the
parish of Selborne from Harteley-wood.
Letter XXX
To Thomas Pennant, Esquire
Selborne, Aug. 1, 1770.
Dear Sir,
The French, I think, in general, are strangely prolix in their natural
history. What Linnaeus says with respect to insects holds good in every
other branch: ‘Verbositas praesentis saeculi, calamitas artis.’
Pray how do you approve of Scopoli’s new work? As I admire his
Entomologia, I long to see it.
I forgot to mention in my last letter (and had not room to insert in
the former) that the male moose, in rutting time, swims from island to
island, in the lakes and rivers of North America, in pursuit of the
females. My friend, the chaplain, saw one killed in the water as it was
on that errand in the river St. Lawrence: it was a monstrous beast, he
told me; but he did not take the dimensions.
When I was last in town our friend Mr. Barrington most obligingly
carried me to see many curious sights. As you were then writing to him
about horns, he carried me to see many strange and wonderful specimens.
There is, I remember, at Lord Pembroke’s, at Wilton, an horn room
furnished with more than thirty different pairs; but I have not seen
that house lately.