48 THE CROW FAMILY 



by no means averse to procuring it at the expense of a neighbour. 

 They are devoted husbands and wives, and devoted parents, both 

 sexes sharing in incubation and in the feeding of the young. 1 



They differ, however, from the rooks in preferring to place their 

 nests in holes, whether in the walls of cathedrals, ruined and other 

 buildings, or in cliffs, rabbit-warrens, and the trunks of trees. Like 

 rooks again, they display an occasional liking for chimney-pots ; but 

 whereas the former is usually content to place its nest on the stack 

 between the pots, the daw goes one better and builds in the pot 

 itself, being deterred neither by the smoke coming up the flue nor 

 by the fact that if the pot offers no hold for the sticks, they merely 

 drop down into the room below. One pair is known to have used 

 six hundred sticks in trying to fill up one flue, and it was only after 

 three days of this unprofitable exercise, that the birds consented to 

 abandon the undertaking, much to the relief of the occupiers. If a 

 stick gets caught in the flue, the untiring energy of the little builders 

 is finally rewarded, and the eggs are laid on the top of a structure that 

 may measure ten or twelve feet in depth. As the presence, however, 

 of several feet of sticks in a chimney-flue does not promote the 

 original object it was constructed to serve, this form of building enter- 

 prise on the part of the daw receives scant encouragement. A 

 usual method of protecting the pots is to wire them, a broad hint 

 that the jackdaws do not always receive in the spirit in which it is 

 intended. Instead of building in the pot, they build over it, on the 

 wire. One owner found an egg laid simply on the bare wire itself. 

 He removed it, and, in order to keep his hands free for the descent, 

 put it in his mouth. An injudicious proceeding, as the event showed. 

 Fortunately the egg had only just been laid. 



It has been more than once pointed out as a remarkable fact 

 that the jackdaw should use sticks at all. They can serve no neces- 

 sary purpose. The correct explanation is perhaps to be found in the 

 hypothesis that, before resorting to holes, the species habitually made 



1 For the notice of the jackdaw's song, see V. Fatio, Oiseaux de la Siiisse, 1899-1900. 



