'72 BRITISH BIRDS. WITH THEIR NESTS AND EGGS. 



she takes, though she has been amply proved to be one of his most valuable 

 servants." 



The note of the Rook is usually carr, but sometimes caw, and one of the 

 birds in a neighbour's rookery, born and reared during incessant rains, seems to 

 have contracted a chronic cold, for his note is like that of a Golden Eagle, 

 ar-ee-o. 



The food in summer consists of grain, worms, snails, insects and their larvae, 

 and in dry-seasons or arid localities, of mice, fish, mollusca, young birds, eggs, 

 the maggots in carrion and possibly the flesh itself. Later in the year fruits, 

 beech-nuts, acorns, and berries ; but in winter, when all these are gone, it has 

 to get what it can from refuse heaps or from the scraps cast out from houses ; 

 though, when opportunity offers, it does not scruple to destroy sparrows and 

 other small birds. 



The Rook is not suitable either for cage or aviary ; my brother had one for 

 some time, but it was anything but an interesting pet. Mr. J. Lewis Bonhote 

 writes : " The Rook is harmless ; but, like the Carrion-Crow, very sluggish in 

 its movements ; scarcely ever uttering a sound. It is also very wild and never 

 attempts to talk, at least that is my experience." * 



FAMILY ALAUDID^. 



THB position in which Howard Saunders has placed this family does not 

 strike one as natural : it would certainly have fitted in better with one's 

 sense of order in Nature, to have seen it placed next to the Motacillidce, as in 

 Seebohm's " History of British Birds," and as evidently advocated by Dr. Sharpe, 

 to judge by his remarks on the family in the " Catalogue of Birds." 



It is difficult to imagine that the Larks can be more nearly related to the 

 Crows than to the Pipits, and one wishes that the author of the Manual had in 

 his arrangement borne out Seebohm's opinion " The Larks appear to bear the 

 same relation to the Pipits that the Thrushes do to the Warblers," or Jerdon's 



* In the ' Zoologist ' for 1887, p. 268, is an account by Mr. C. R. Gawen of a hand-reared Rook (which 

 was allowed its freedom) building two nests in a rookery, near the house, and feeding two hens, partly on raw 

 meat and bread and milk from the outhouse where he was fed. Good living had made a bigamist of him ! 



