JACKDAW. 105 



The botanic garden there has three of its four sides enclosed 

 by thickly built parts of the town, and has five parish 

 churches and five colleges within a short flight of it. The 

 Jackdaws inhabiting these, and other churches and col- 

 leges, had discovered that the wooden labels placed near 

 the plants, whose names they bore, in the botanic garden 

 would serve well enough for their nests instead of twigs 

 from trees, and that they possessed the greater convenience 

 of being prepared ready for use, and placed very near home. 

 A large proportion of the labels used in this garden were 

 made out of deal laths, being about nine inches long and 

 one inch broad. To these the Jackdaws would help 

 themselves freely whenever they could do so without mo- 

 lestation, and the extent of the garden made this a matter 

 of no great difficulty. Those who are aware how closely 

 some species of the grasses, umbelliferous plants, &c. re- 

 semble each other, and who, consequently, know how 

 necessary it is to prefix labels to them indicating their 

 names, will readily perceive how much inconvenience arose 

 from the Jackdaws' appropriation of the labels ; and this 

 especially when they removed them, as they sometimes 

 did, from sown seeds, as the plants arising from these seeds 

 must, in some species, grow for a year or more before their 

 names could be ascertained. I cannot give a probable 

 idea of the number of labels which the Jackdaws annually 

 removed ; but from the shaft of one chimney in Free School 

 Lane, which was close beside the botanic garden, no less 

 than eighteen dozen of these labels were taken out and 

 brought to Mr. Arthur Biggs, the curator of the botanic 

 garden, who received and counted them. Of the mass of ma- 

 terials sometimes collected for the nest by this species, I 

 have evidence in a letter from Charles Anderson, Esq. of 

 Lea, near Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, who says, that a 



