1 82 The Avifauna of the Solway Area. [Sess. 



native avifauna, has been slowly withdrawing from inland 

 localities, and at present is to be found hardly anywhere else 

 than along the cliffs of the shore-line. This bird never was 

 to be reckoned as common with us, and was hardly so subject 

 as the other owls to the attentions of the keeper, owing to its 

 semi-domesticated habits which gave it a certain amount of 

 immunity, but it is now gone from the precincts of most of 

 the old mansions that it formerly frequented. An analogous 

 change is that of the house martin, which has behaved in a 

 precisely similar way. Formerly it was no uncommon sight 

 to see from 2 to 30 pairs nesting on the walls of a single 

 farmhouse and its adjacent steading, and that at the most 

 remote inland localities. Nowadays, many such farm walls 

 are tenantless, or at most have one or two pairs only. The 

 diminution at places situated near the coast is not so marked, 

 and at the great rock colony on the precipices of the Burrow 

 Head the martins seem to be as numerous as ever. Perhaps 

 some slow and obscure change of climatic conditions may be 

 the reason for the withdrawal of the barn owl and the 

 house martin shorewards. The chough, once comparatively 

 numerous on the G-alloway coast, has now, with perhaps a 

 solitary exception now and again towards the Portpatrick 

 direction, entirely disappeared. At one time I believed that 

 the gun was the cause, but later and riper information in- 

 duces me rather to lean to the opinion that here again we 

 have some climatic reason at work. The jackdaw has been 

 blamed, but so far I do not see the connection. In my own 

 experience there has been an enormous extension of the 

 jackdaw population along-shore. Numbers of them breed in 

 rabbit-burrows, on hillsides, in hedgerow banks, and even on 

 the flattest of merse fields, so that here again game-preserving 

 comes in, by having provided lodgings for the jackdaws in 

 the unfettered increase of the rabbit. Here might be 

 mentioned some curious, and now well known, facts in the 

 latterday life -history of the jackdaw's congener — the rook. 

 We are all aware that the rook has come under the ban of 

 the game - preserver. Formerly the rook was a staid and 

 respected, if not respectable, member of the bird community. 

 The rook used to attack grain- and root-crops, but these were 

 the days of craw-herdin', and it was only by the exercise of 



