THE JACKDAW. 259 



never, or in the rarest instances, among the open boughs 

 of a tree. It lays from four to six eggs, and feeds its 

 young on worms and insects, which it brings home in the 

 pouch formed 'by the loose skin at the base of its beak. 

 When domesticated, its droll trickeries and capability of 

 imitating the human voice and other sounds are well 

 known. By turns affectionate, quarrelsome, impudent, 

 confiding, it is always inquisitive, destructive, and given 

 to purloining ; so that however popular at first as a pet, 

 it usually terminates its career by some unregretted acci- 

 dent, or is consigned to captivity in a wicker cage. 



THE MAGPIE. 



PICA CAUDATA. 



Head, throat, neck, and back velvet-black ; scapulars and under plumage white ; 

 tail much graduated and, as well as the wings, black, with lustrous blue and 

 bronze reflections ; beak, iris, and feet black. Length eighteen inches ; breadth 

 twenty-three inches. Eggs pale dirty green, spotted all over with ash-grey 

 and olive-brown. 



THE Magpie, like the Crow, labours under the dis- 

 advantage of an ill name, and in consequence incurs no 

 small amount of persecution. Owing to the dispro- 

 portionate length of its tail and shortness of its wings 

 its flight is somewhat heavy, so that if it were not 

 cunning and wary to a remarkable degree, it would pro- 

 bably well-nigh disappear from the catalogue of British 

 Birds. Yet though it is spared by none except avowed 

 preservers of all birds (like Waterton, who protects it "on 

 account of its having nobody to stand up for it"), it con- 

 tinues to be a bird of general occurrence, and there seems 

 indeed to be but little if any diminution of its numbers. 

 Its nest is usually constructed among the upper branches 

 of a lofty tree, either in a hedge-row or deep in a wood ; or 

 if it has fixed its abode in an un wooded district, it selects 

 the thickest thorn-bush in the neighbourhood and there 



