216 Corvidoe. 



long, slender, and considerably curved. It is said never to perch 

 on trees, but always on rocks ; and Montagu (who gives a full 

 account of one of these birds which had been tamed) says its 

 inquisitive habits are equal to those of any Crow. Its food 

 principally consists of insects, for reaching which in the crevices 

 of rocks its long sharp-pointed slender bill is admirably adapted. 

 Its true habitat is among the lofty precipices on the sea-coast, or 

 amid the rocks of inland counties ; and the only place where I 

 have seen it in its native haunts was in the rocky heights above 

 Cintra, looking down on the broad Atlantic, and the mouth of 

 the Tagus, and there, day after day, I met with several parties, 

 consisting of six or seven, of this elegant and very interesting 

 bird. The Chough which is found in the Swiss Alps and the 

 Tyrol is of another species (F. Alpinus), and lacks the red bealt 

 and legs so conspicuous in our bird, and may be seen among the 

 loftier and more desolate regions of those countries far up among 

 the glaciers. But it is our British species (F. graculus*) that is 

 found in the desert of Northern Africa, and is known to the 

 Arabs by the name of Oyreeb Hamraid, or the ' Red Crow,' 

 though it is strange that one of our northern coast birds should 

 be found in a scene so widely different, as Canon Tristram has 

 observed.* There is an old Cornish legend that King Arthur is 

 still alive in the form of a Chough, and certain superstitious 

 persons refuse to shoot these birds, from a fear that they might 

 inadvertently destroy the mystic warrior : 



' And mark yon bird of sable wing, 



Talons and beak all red with blood, 

 The spirit of the long-lost king 



Passed in that shape from Camhm's flood. 

 And still when loudliest howls the storm, 



And darkliest lowers his native sky, 

 The king's fierce soul is in that form, 



The warrior spirit threatens nigh.'f 



In England it is sparingly found on some of our rocky coasts, 

 and is often styled the Cornish Chough, from an erroneous im- 

 pression that it was peculiar to that county, though Shakespeare, 

 * Jbis for 1859, p. 292. f Hawker's ' Echoes from Cornwall.' 



