258 COKVID^E. 



resort is pretty evident. Where there is a church there is 

 at least also a village, and where men and domestic animals 

 congregate, there the Jackdaw fails not to find food ; grubs 

 in the fields, fruit in the orchards, and garbage of all 

 kinds in the waste ground. Here, too, it has a field for 

 exercising its singular acquisitiveness. Wonderful is the 

 variety of objects which it accumulates in its museum of 

 a nest, which, professedly a complication of sticks, may 

 comprise also a few dozen labels stolen from a Botanic 

 Garden, an old tooth-brush, a child's cap, part of a 

 worsted stocking, a frill, &c. Waterton,* who strongly 

 defends it from the charge of molesting either the eggs 

 or young of pigeons, professes himself unable to account 

 for its pertinacious habit of collecting sticks for a nest 

 placed where no such support is seemingly necessary, and, 

 cunning though it is, comments on its want of adroitness 

 in introducing sticks into its hole : " You may see the 

 Jackdaw," he says, "trying for a quarter of an hour to 

 get a stick into the hole, while every attempt will be 

 futile, because, the bird having laid hold of it by the 

 middle, it is necessarily thrown at right angles with the 

 body, and the Daw cannot perceive that the stick ought 

 to be nearly parallel with its body before it can be 

 conveyed into the hole. Fatigued at length with repeated 

 efforts, and completely foiled in its numberless attempts 

 to introduce the stick, it lets it fall to the ground, and 

 immediately goes in quest of another, probably to ex- 

 perience another disappointment on its return. When 

 time and chance have enabled it to place a quantity of 

 sticks at the bottom of the hole, it then goes to seek for 

 materials of a more pliant and a softer nature." These 

 are usually straw, wool, and feathers ; but, as we have 

 seen, nothing comes amiss that catches its fancy. In 

 addition to rocks, towers, and hollow trees, it sometimes 

 places its nest in chimneys or in rabbit-burrows, but 



* " Essays on Natural History," First Series, p. 109. 



