Skinny palms

Every year around this time I notice this phenomenon, house flies clustering under the window panes, some dead some dying. Especially on the south-facing windows so I reckoned they're seeking the last vestiges of the sun's warmth. If you open the window the still-living flies blunder about in a moribund fashion or just lie there feebly kicking their legs.

I've never seen it mentioned anywhere (perhaps not being a conventional topic of conversation) but I was delighted to discover recently that it was noticed  by one of my very favourite 'nature writers' as they are now called. Gilbert White was a rural clergyman who lived his life in the Hampshire village of Selborne across the second half of the 18th century. He loved gardening and the countryside around him and while he delivered the requisite Sunday sermon ,he spent most of his time observing and noticing: the weather, the cycle of the seasons,  the progress of his fruit and vegetable crops and his bees, the minutiae of the plant and animal life that abounded all around  (including his tortoise Timothy),  and occasionally the oddities of his parishioners. All these observations Gilbert White recorded in diaries, notebooks and letters to friends: a treasury of information about a world that has all-but gone. 

(He singlehandly invented the science of Phenology,  recording the dates of natural events  and sightings year on year -  flowerings and fruitings, migrations and hibernations, the first cuckoo, the last butterfly.)

Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne  would without a doubt be my Desert Island Book (and I find that I'm not the only one to think that.)

For those of us with internet access Gilbert White's journals can be found here and you can even put in a specific date and bring up what he wrote on that day.

And the flies? On October 10th 1795 Gilbert White made the following note  in his Naturalist's Calendar:

"In the decline of the year, when the mornings and evenings become chilly, many species of flies (muscæ) retire into houses, and swarm in the windows.
At first they are very brisk and alert; but, as they grow more torpid, one cannot help observing that they move with difficulty, and are scarce able to lift their legs, which seem as if glued to the glass; and by degrees, many do actually stick on till they die in the place.
It has been observed that divers flies, besides their sharp, hooked nails, have also skinny palms, or flaps to their feet, whereby they are enabled to stick on glass and other smooth bodies, and to walk on ceilings with their backs downward, by means of the pressure of the atmosphere on those flaps; the weight of which they easily overcome in warm weather, when they are brisk and alert. But, in the decline of the year, this resistance becomes too mighty for their diminished strength; and we see flies labouring along, and lugging their feet in windows, as if they stuck fast to the glass, and it is with the utmost difficulty they can draw one foot after another, and disengage their hollow caps from the slippery surface."