94 THE JACKDAW. 



listening at the mouths of the holes, and if they heard the young 

 ones cry, they twisted the nest out with a forked stick.' ' Ano- 

 ther very unlikely spot,' he adds, ' 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 annoy- 

 ance of shepherd boys, who are always idling round that place." 

 Much curious matter might be added respecting the situations 

 in which the nests of the Jackdaws are sometimes built, and tho 

 substances of which they are composed, wool and other soft sub- 

 stances being used for the lining, and sticks loosely put together 

 forming the exterior. Mr. J. BENSON relates, in the Magazine 

 of Natural History, " that at Cambridge, where the Jackdaws 

 are very numerous, they appropriated the wooden labels attached 

 to the plants in the Botanic Gardens to the purposes of building 

 to such an extent as to cause great perplexity and serious incon- 

 venience ; as many as eighteen dozen of these labels, which were 

 principally of fir, and about nine inches long and one broad, were 

 taken out of a single chimney shaft, in which the birds were in 

 the habit of forming their nests." Of the extraordinary mass of 

 materials sometimes collected by this bird, we have an instance 

 quoted by YAEEELL, from a letter addressed to him by C. ANDEE- 

 SON, Esq., of Lea, near Gainsborough, who states, that a Jack- 

 daw began its nest hi the steep and narrow steps of a spiral 

 stone staircase in Saunby Church, Lea, and finding that it could 

 not get a base sufficiently flat and broad for its purpose, con- 

 tinued to pile up sticks to the height of five or six steps, until a 

 landing was reached where the structure was finished off securely, 

 if not very neatly. An instance, giving evidence of still greater 

 perseverance and sagacity, not to say intelligence, on the part of 

 the bird, is recorded by JESSE, in his Scenes and Tales of Coun- 

 try Life; this was in the bell tower or turret of the chapel of 

 Eton College ; and the most remarkable circumstance connected 

 with it was, that the feathered architects having to bring the 

 timber which they employed through a narrow aperture in the 

 wall, broke, or cracked, each of them exactly in the middle, so 

 that they could be doubled up, and thus drawn through more 

 easily. In The Dumfries Courier, a few years back, it was re- 

 lated that a clumj) of trees in Cully Park, in which a flock of 

 Daws had long built, having been completely wrecked by a fear- 

 ful storm, the birds betook themselves, for the purposes of breed- 

 ing, to some rabbit burrows close by, which henceforth had both 

 furred and feathered inhabitants, who lived amicably together, 

 and formed one " happy family." In BEOWN'S Anecdotes may 



