The casual detail of the writing, not always correct by today's knowledge, makes of the Rev Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne a fascinating book to keep near you and now and again dip into. Richard Mabey conveys in his introduction to a paperback edition of the book something of this. He writes: "On June 1793, he [White] cut five cucumbers and read the funeral service over `Mary Burbey, aged 16'. On 12th June it was, `Bright, sunny, golden even. Cut eight cucumbers .... Many swifts'. The next day he `cut ten cucumbers ... Provence roses blow against a wall...' By the end of the month, in the middle of a desperate drought, Gilbert White's name had joined Mary Burbey's in Selborne's parish register."
He is remembered by many as the naturalist who found it impossible to believe in bird migration, notably of swallows. They hid away in crevices and holes until the next spring. But he and his friend Marwick, with whom he swapped observations, have given us a book to last. There are many quirky little stories. Thus, the cat which raised young squirrels which a boy had taken from their dray or nest. He put them under the care of a cat which had lost her kittens and found that she suckled her charges as if they were her own. "This circumstance corroborates my suspicion that the mention of exposed and deserted children being nurtured by female beasts of prey who had lost their young, may not be so improbable an incident as many have supposed." White notes that hens when they have hatched ducklings "are equally attached to them as if they were their own chickens."
And then there's the nightjar, of which a few may still be found in Ireland. Chiefly in the Burren and West Mayo, according to Cabot's Ireland in the New Naturalist series. White calls them also fern owl and goatsucker. No evidence in England of the bird sucking the teats of goats, as it is alleged in Italy, where it is called caprimulgus, apparently meaning just that.
If a person approaches their haunts in the evening, they fly round the heads of the intruders and clap their wings above their backs with a threatening crack. The land rail or, to us, more familiarly the corncrake, tastes, White tells us, "like woodcock. The liver was very large and delicate." Sign of the times: "The twigs which the rooks drop in (nest) building supply the poor with brushwood to light their fires." Y