THE ROOK'S BILL. 



and even the jackdaw, are all birds of ruined character. Their nu*- 

 fortunes make them shy ; and thus you are prevented from having 

 much intercourse with them. The gardener and the henwife can 

 never be brought to look upon them with the least appearance of 

 kind feeling ; while the gamekeeper, that cholera morbus to the 

 feathered race, foolishly imagines that he proves his attention to his 

 master's interests, by producing a disgusting exhibition of impaled 

 birds on the kennel walls. Nay, show me, if you can, a young 

 squire, idling from college, who does not try to persuade the keeper 

 that it is his bounden duty to exterminate all manner of owls, ravens, 

 carrion crows, hawks, herons, magpies, jays, daws, woodpeckers, 

 ringdoves, and such like vermin, from his father's estate. With this 

 destroying force to contend with, in the shape of keeper, squire, and 

 henwife, it is not to be wondered at that naturalists have so few 

 opportunities of watching individuals of the Pie tribe through the 

 entire course of their incubation; which individuals, if persecution 

 did not exist, would be seen in the breeding season, perpetually 

 passing to and fro, with their mouths full of food for their young. 



In my little peaceful valley, where the report of the keeper's gun 

 is never heard, and where the birds are safe from the depredations 

 of man, the ornithologist has free access to pursue his favourite 

 study. Towards the middle of May, he can see here the carrion 

 crow, the jay, the magpie, and the jackdaw, filling their mouths with 

 grubs and worms, the weight of which forces the pliant skin under 

 the bill into the shape of a little round ball, just of the same appear- 

 ance as that which is observed in the rook, with this trifling differ- 

 ence, that the lump is feathered in the first, and bare of feathers in 

 the last 



While I am writing this, there may be seen here a wild duck 

 hatching her eggs in a nest upon a sloping wooded bank ; while a 

 carrion crow is hatching hers in a fir tree ten yards from the spot, 

 and a windhover hawk is performing the same function in a fir tree 

 about six yards on the other side of the duck. Forty yards from 

 where the carrion crow is hatching, may be seen a barn owl sitting 

 on her eggs in the hollow of an oak tree ; and, at twenty yards' dis- 

 tance from the windhover, another white or barn owl has formed her 

 nest in the decayed recesses of a tremendous oak. Though all these 



