|90jmlar JButtonarg of ftntmatctt Mature. 161 



carries something disgusting with it, and no 

 one ever shows him any kindness. Though 

 he certainly has his vices, still he has his 

 virtues too ; and it would be a pity if the 

 general odium in which he is held should be 

 the means, one day or other, of blotting out 

 his name from the page of our British orni- 

 thology. With great propriety he might be 

 styled the lesser raven in our catalogue of 

 native birds ; for, to all appearance, he is a 

 raven ; and I should wish to see his name 

 changed, were I not devoutly attached to the 

 nomenclature established by the wisdom of 

 our ancestors. 



" The Carrion Crow is a very early riser ; 

 and, long before the rook is on the wing, you 

 hear this bird announcing the approach of 

 morn, with his loud hollow croaking, from 

 the oak to which lie had resorted the night 

 before. He retires to rest later than the 

 rook : indeed, as far as I have been able to 

 observe his motions, I consider Ixim the first 

 bird on wing in the morning, and the last 

 at night, of all our non-migrating diurnal 

 British birds. When the genial voice of 

 spring calls upon him for the continuation 

 of his species, the Carrion Crow, which up 

 to this period has been wary, shy, and cau- 

 tious, now, all of a sudden, seems to lose 

 these qualities ; and, regardless of personal 

 danger, sometimes makes his nest within a 

 hundred yards of the habitation of man, 

 upon a tree, at once the most conspicuous 

 and exposed. To us, who know so little of 

 the economy of birds, this seems a strange 

 phenomenon ; nor can any penetration of 

 which we may be possessed enable us to 

 comprehend the true meaning of this change 

 from timidity to boldness, from distance to 

 proximity, from wariness to heedlessness, in 

 so many different species of birds. One 

 would suppose that they would be more shy 

 and distant at this interesting period ; and, 

 in imitation of the cat, the rabbit, and the 

 fox, conceal as much as possible the place 

 of their retirement. The rook will some- 

 times build a poor and slovenly nest, but 

 this is never the case with the Carrion Crow; 

 this bird invariably makes its nest firm and 

 compact ; it never builds it in hedges, but 

 will construct it in any of our forest trees ; 

 and, with me, it seems to give the preference, 

 in general, to the oak, the spruce fir, and the 

 Scotch pine. The young are hatched naked 

 and blind, and remain blind for some days. 



" Our ancestors, no doubt, bestowed the 

 epithet carrion upon this bird, in order to 

 make a clear and decided distinction between 

 it (whose flesh they probably supposed was 

 rank and bad) and the rook, the flesh of 

 which was well known to be good and whole- 

 some food. Perhaps, too, in those days of 

 plenty, and of less trade, the Carrion Crow 

 had more opportunities of tasting flesh than 

 it has in these our enviable times of divers 

 kinds of improvement. Were a Carrion 

 Crow of the present day to depend upon the 

 finding of a dead cow or horse for its dinner, 

 it would soon become an adept in the art of 

 fasting by actual experiment ; for no sooner 

 is one of these animals, in our neighbourhood, 

 struck by the hand of death, than its hide is 

 sent to the tan-pit, and its remains are either 



made into soup for the hunt, or carefully 

 buried in the dunghill, to increase the 

 farmer's tillage. The poor Crow, in the 

 mean time, despised and persecuted for 

 having an inclination to feed upon that of 

 which, by-the-by, the occupier of the soil 

 takes good care that he shall scarcely have 

 a transient view, is obliged to look out for 

 other kinds of food. Hence you see it re- 

 gularly examining the meadows, the pas- 

 tures, and the corn-fields, with an assiduity 

 not even surpassed by that of the rook itself. 



" The Carrion Crow will feed voraciously 

 on ripe cherries ; and, in the autumn, he 

 will be seen in the walnut-trees, carrying off 

 from time to time, a few of the nuts. With 

 the exception of these two petty acts of de- 

 predation, he does very little injury to man 

 during nine or ten mouths of the year ; and 

 if, in this period, he is to be called over the 

 coals for occasionally throttling an unpro- 

 tected leveret or a stray partridge, he may 

 fairly meet the accusation by a set-off in his 

 account of millions of noxious insects de- 

 stroyed by him. However, in the spring of 

 the year, when he has a nest full of young 

 to provide for, and when those young begin 

 to give him broad hints that their stomachs 

 would like something of a more solid and 

 substantial nature than mere worms and 

 caterpillars, his attention to game and 

 poultry is enough to alarm the stoutest- 

 hearted squire and henwife. These per- 

 sonages have long sworn an eternal enmity 

 to him ; and he now, in his turn, visits, to 

 their sorrow, the rising hopes of the manor 

 with ominous aspect ; and he assaults the 

 broods of the duck-pond, in revenge, as it 

 were, for the many attempts which both 

 squire and henwife have made to rob and 

 strangle him. 



" In 1815, I fully satisfied myself of his 

 inordinate partiality for young aquatic 

 poultry. The cook had in her custody a 

 brood of ten ducklings, which had been 

 hatched about a fortnight. Unobserved by 

 any body, I put the old duck and her young 

 ones in a pond, nearly 300 yards from a high 

 fir-tree in which a Carrion Crow had built 

 its nest : it contained five young ones almost 

 fledged. I took my station on the bridge, 

 about 100 yards from the tree. Nine times 

 the parent crows flew to the pond, and 

 brought back a duckling each time to their 

 young. I saved a tenth victim by timely 

 interference. When a young brood is at- 

 tacked by an enemy, the old duck does 

 nothing to defend it. In lieu of putting 

 herself betwixt it and danger, as the dung- 

 hill fowl would do, she opens her mouth, 

 and shoots obliquely through the water, 

 beating it with her wings. During these 

 useless movements the invader secures his 

 prey with impunity. 



" Let us now examine if the attacks of this 

 bird on domestic poultry cannot be easily 

 counteracted ; and whether its assiduous 

 attention to the nests of pheasants and of 

 partridges is of so alarming and so important 

 a nature as to call for its utter extermina- 

 tion from the land. For my own part, I 

 acknowledge that I should lament his final 

 absence from our meadows and our woods. 



