NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 61 
LE TRE Roa 
TO THE SAME. 
SELBORNE, WVov, 28¢h, 1768. 
DEAR SIR,—With regard to the wdicnemus, or stone-curlew, I 
intend to write very soon to my friend near Chichester, in whose 
neighbourhood these birds seem most to abound ; and shall urge him 
to take particular notice when they begin to congregate, and after- 
wards to watch them most narrowly whether they do not withdraw 
themselves during the dead of the winter. When I have obtained 
information with respect to this circumstance, I shall have finished 
my history of the stone-curlew ; which I hope will prove to your 
satisfaction, as it will be, I trust, very near the truth. This gentle- 
man, as he occupies a large farm of his own, and is abroad early 
and late, will be a very proper spy upon the motions of these birds ; 
and besides, as I have prevailed on him to buy the Naturalist’s 
Journal (with which he is much delighted), I shall expect that he 
will be very exact in his dates. It is very extraordinary, as you 
observe, that a bird so common with us should never straggle 
to you. 
And here will be the properest place to mention, while I think of 
it, an anecdote which the above-mentioned gentleman told me 
when I was last at his house; which was that, in a warren joining 
to his outlet, many daws (corvd monuedule) build every year in the 
rabbit-burrows under-ground. The way he and his brothers used 
to take their nests, while they were boys, was by listening at the 
mouths of the holes; and, if they heard the young ones cry, they 
twisted the nest out with a forked stick. Some water-fowls (viz. the 
puffins) breed, I know, in that manner ; but I should never have 
suspected the daws of building in holes on the flat ground. 
Another very unlikely spot is made use of by daws as a place to 
breed in, and that is Stonehenge. These birds deposit their nests in 
‘the interstices between the upright and the impost stones of that 
amazing work of antiquity : which circumstance alone speaks the 
prodigious height of the upright stones, that they should be tall 
enough to secure those nests from the annoyance of shepherd-boys, 
who are always idling round that place. 
