AN ARCADIAN CALENDAR 



Crooning They respond to the mild weather with the 

 to the same whole heart as the primroses now 



Moon sheeting Sussex copses. Not only have the 



pigeons been crooning their husky refrain 

 about " Tak' two coos, Davey," since Christmas, but 

 nests with eggs have been recorded in many parts 

 through the past two months. Some naturalists believe 

 that, as with common pigeons, it is the male wood- 

 pigeon that sits by day on the two eggs, while his mate 

 takes the night watch. The song is sometimes heard by 

 moonlight: the writer, by passing a roadside nest, 

 recently set a wood-pigeon crooning at one o'clock in 

 the morning. 



AN amusing half-hour may always be spent at the 

 rookery to-day, if only in watching the 

 The birds in their nests, as Washington Irving 



Rookery says, " quarrelling for a corner of the 

 Police blanket." One may pick out practised 



housekeepers; amateurs, who bungle their 

 building, and have their work pulled to pieces by their 

 seniors; honest builders, who fetch their own rafters; 

 bachelors, rapscallions and thieves. But the rooks have 

 an efficient police force, and now and then some in- 

 corrigible rogue is proclaimed an outlaw, and is driven 

 from the colony, neck and crop. Then his one hope of 

 salvation is that the police will forget about him, in the 

 stress of their own affairs . 



ROOKS are conservatives, with aristocratic tendencies, 



if we may judge from their habit of nesting 



Bachelor in the trees of lordly domains. When a new 



Rooks rookery is founded, the experiment is 



32 



