In Forest and Copse. 143 



many of them mere shells of bark, yet outwardly 

 presenting a green and vigorous appearance and 

 bearing their heavy crops of acorns in the autumn — 

 which for a thousand years or more have stood in 

 sunshine and storm upon ground made classic by 

 Robin Hood. Indeed, it requires little stretch of 

 the imagination to repeople these forest glades with 

 the sturdy outlaws that tradition says dwelt amongst 

 them once upon a time, in open defiance of the 

 authorities, and fed sumptuously upon the deer and 

 other game with which the Forest abounded. Then 

 the oak trees w^ere in their prime; now they are 

 gnarled and knotted and wrinkled, loaded with dead 

 branches, and full of hollows and crevices, the result 

 of countless storms and tempests. The adaptive 

 Jackdaw has not been slow to seize upon such an 

 advantageous spot, and has multiplied apace. Many 

 hundreds of nests may be counted in one compara- 

 tively small area of the forest, and some of the tree- 

 trunks are literally choked with sticks from root to 

 summit, the accumulation of more years than any of 

 us can remember. Scattered amongst these Jack- 

 daws is an almost equally extensive colony of 

 Starlings, many of these latter birds nesting in the 

 same holes as them. We have repeatedly found 

 that some of the largest piles of sticks contained no 

 nest at the top — as if the original owners had finally 

 succumbed to old age, yet not before they had 



