66 THE CARRION CROW 
time that most other birds are laying their eggs, and when the 
lambing season is at its height. Then, too, its habits are most 
fully developed. Its young are clamorous for food, and will not 
be satisfied with a little. So the old bird sallies forth to scour the 
districts least frequented by man, and makes every living thing 
its prey, provided that by force or cunning it can overpower it. 
If Grouse are plentiful, it is said that one pair, what with stealing 
the eggs and carrying off the young, will in a season destroy more 
of them than the keenest sportsman. It will pounce on the leveret 
and bear it screaming from the side of its mother. It watches 
sheep which have strayed from the fold, and mangles the newly- 
born or weakly lambs, carrying them piece-meal to the young 
ones at home. If mowers are at work, the wary birds alight 
on some lofty tree, taking care to keep at a sate distance, and 
when a nest has been laid bare by the scythe, their incredibly 
sharp eye discerns the prize which, whether it consist of eggs or 
callow young, is borne off in triumph. Lest their depredations 
should be discovered by the accumulation of egg-shells, feathers 
and bones, which are the natural consequence of these raids, they. 
carefully carry to some distance everything that would tend to 
betray them, so that one might pass directly beneath the scene of 
these enormities unsuspicious of the evil existing overhead. Keen 
as this bird is in pursuit of such delicate fare, he can be, when occa- 
sion serves, as unclean a feeder as the Vulture, and he can, on the 
other hand, make a meal off corn. Mr. Knox states that in the 
Weald of Sussex, where the Raven is common, it resorts to the brooks 
and ponds, which abound in fresh-water mussels (Anodon), and 
feeds on them most voraciously, especially after floods, when they 
lie scattered on the mud. Thesame author states that in winter it 
resorts to the sea-shore, and feeds on the oysters, mussels, small 
crabs, marine insects, worms, and dead fish which are cast up by 
the waves during the prevalent south-westerly storms. It has been 
frequently observed, he adds, to ascend to a great height in the 
air with an oyster in its claws, and after letting it fall on the beach, 
to descend rapidly with closed pinions and devour the contents. 
A similar instance of apparent reasoning is recorded of the same bird 
by Pliny, but with the substitution of walnuts for oysters. 
With such wandering habits, it seems at first sight strange that 
the phrase ‘as the Crow flies ’ should be adopted to mark distances 
in a straight line across the open country ; yet when it is borne in 
mind how many persons confound the Crow with the Rook, and 
even talk of the ‘ Crows in a rookery’, the suggestion will at once 
occur to the mind that the term owed its origin to its far gentler 
and more respectable relation, the Rook, whose evening flights 
from the feeding-ground are among the most familiar sights of the 
country, and are invariably performed in a line so straight, that 
if a whole flock could be tracked through the air on any one evening 
