62 NATURAL HISTORY 



gregate, and afterwards to watch them most narrowly whether 

 they do not withdraw themselves during the dead of the win- 

 ter. When I have obtained information with respect to this 

 circumstance, I shall have finished my history of the stone- 

 curlew ; which I hope will prove to your satisfaction , as it will 

 be, I trust, very near the truth. This gentleman, as he occu- 

 pies a large farm of his own, and is abroad early and late, will 

 be a very proper spy upon the motions of these birds : and 

 besides, as I have prevailed on him to buy the Naturalist's 

 Journal (with which he is much delighted,) I shall expect 

 that he will be very exact in his dates. It is very extraor- 

 dinary, as you observe, that a bird so common with us should 

 never straggle to you. 



And here will be the properest place to mention, while I 

 think of it, an anecdote which the above-mentioned gentleman 

 told me when I was last at his house ; which was that, in a 

 warren joining to his outlet, many daws (corvi monedulce) 

 build every year in the rabbit-burrows under ground. The 

 way he and his brothers used to take their nests, while they 

 were boys, was by listening at the mouths of the holes ; and, if 

 they heard the young ones cry, they twisted the nest out with 

 a forked stick. Some water-fowls (viz. the puffins) breed, I 

 know, in that manner ; but I should never have suspected the 

 daws of building in holes on the flat ground. 



Another very unlikely spot is made use of by daws as a 

 place to breed in, and that is Stonehenge. These birds deposit 

 their nests in the interstices between the upright and the im- 

 post stones of that amazing work of antiquity : which circum- 

 stance alone speaks the prodigious height of the upright stones, 

 that they should be tall enough to secure those nests from the 

 annoyance of shepherd-boys, who are always idling round that 

 place. 



One of my neighbours last Saturday, November the 26th, 

 saw a martin in a sheltered bottom : the sun shone warm, and 

 the bird was hawking briskly after flies. I am now perfectly 

 satisfied that they do not all leave this island in the winter. 



You judge very right, I think, in speaking with reserve 

 and caution concerning the cures done by toads : for, let 



