210 Habits of the Carrion Crow. 



sooner is one of these animals, in our neighbourhood, struck 

 by the hand of death, than its hide is sent to the tan-pit, and 

 its remains either made into soup for the hunt, or carefully 

 buried in the dunghill, to increase the farmer's tillage. The 

 poor crow, in the meantime, despised and persecuted for 

 having an inclination to feed upon that of which, by the by, 

 the occupier of the soil takes good care that he shall scarcely 

 have a transient view, is obliged to look out for other kinds 

 of food. Hence you see it regularly examining the meadows, 

 the pastures, and the corn fields, with an assiduity not even 

 surpassed by that of the rook itself. 



We labour under a mistake in supposing that the flesh of 

 the young carrion crow is rank and unpalatable. It is fully 

 as good as that of the rook ; and, I believe that nobody who 

 is accustomed to eat rook-pie will deny that rook-pie is 

 nearly, if not quite, as good as pigeon-pie. Having fully 

 satisfied myself of the delicacy of the flesh of young carrion 

 crows, I once caused a pie of these birds to be served up to 

 two convalescent friends, whose stomachs would have yearned 

 spasmodically had they known the nature of the dish. I had 

 the satisfaction of seeing them make a hearty meal upon 

 what they considered pigeon-pie. 



The carrion crow will feed voraciously on ripe cherries ; 

 and, in the autumn, he will be seen in the walnut trees, car- 

 rying off, from time to time, a few of the nuts. With the 

 exception of these two petty acts of depredation, he does very 

 little injury to man during nine or ten months of the year ; 

 and if, in this period, he is to be called over the coals for 

 occasionally throttling an unprotected leveret or a stray par- 

 tridge, he may fairly meet the accusation by a set-off against 

 it in his account of millions of noxious insects destroyed by 

 him. However, in the spring of the year, when he has a 

 nest full of young to provide for, and when those young 

 begin to give him broad hints that their stomachs would like 

 something of a more solid and substantial nature than mere 

 worms and caterpillars, his attention to game and poultry is 

 enough to alarm the stoutest-hearted squire and henwife. 

 These personages have long sworn an eternal enmity to him; 

 and he now, in his turn, visits, to their sorrow, the rising 

 hopes of the manor with ominous aspect ; and assaults the 

 broods of the duck-pond, in revenge, as it were, for the many 

 attempts which both squire and henwife have made to rob 

 and strangle him. 



In 1815, I fully satisfied myself of his inordinate partiality 

 for young aquatic poultry. The cook had in her custody a 

 brood of ten ducklings, which had been hatched about a 



