NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 61 



LETTER XXI. 



TO THE SAME. 



SELBORNE, Nov. 2%th, 1768. 



DEAR SIR, With regard to the oedicnemus, or stone-curlew, I 

 intend to write very soon to my friend near Chichester, in whose 

 neighbourhood these birds seem most to abound ; and shall urge him 

 to take particular notice when they begin to congregate, and after- 

 wards to watch them most narrowly whether they do not withdraw 

 themselves during the dead of the winter. 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 gentle- 

 man, as he occupies 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 extraordinary, 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 monedula) 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 impost stones of that 

 amazing work of antiquity : which circumstance 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. 



