CORNISH CHOUGHS. 103 



from draughts and rain, and impregnable to cats and other foes ; 

 and had never been at a loss for a meal, which is probably- 

 more than their wild congenors could say, in a hard frost. 



The only adventures, so far as I know, that my own birds 

 have experienced, are the following. When I lived at 

 Perranarworthal, one of them — then a young bird, which had 

 been caught wild, and not reared by hand — was somewhat 

 lawless, and would not always come home to roost, though 

 usually it would follow its elder comrade home from the fields. 

 And one night a poor old woman was going up to bed, who, 

 when she reached her room, just caught a glimpse of some 

 black object perched on her bedstead, which dashed past her with 

 an unearthly scream, and vanished out of the open window, 

 leaving her in a state of trepidation and astonishment, easier to 

 imagine than to describe. Shortly after, the same bird managed 

 to entangle some worsted thread round its legs, the ends of 

 which thread got caught in a thorn bush overhanging a small 

 pond, so that the bird was nearly "killed and drowned"; it 

 was luckily rescued by a native, who chanced to pass by, carried 

 to his home, and put in durance vile in a dark outhouse. Thanks, 

 however, to that publicity which is one of the features of 

 village life, whereby the most trivial circumstance befalling 

 anyone is immediately known to every other member of the 

 cornimmity, the following day I received news of the where- 

 abouts of the captive ; and on going to bring it back, was 

 gravely informed by the captor, with a sweet simplicity in things 

 ornithological, that he thought it was a moorhen. Since then, 

 this bird has grown older and wiser, and is now as tame and 

 shrewd, and canny, as his companion. 



In the British Isles these birds are almost always found 

 exclusively along lofty and precipitous cliffs. Yet this rule is 

 not without exception, seeing that some have recently nested in 

 a quarry on a mountain side in "Wales ; in this instance resembling 

 their foreign allies, thousands of the red-legged, and also 

 yellow-legged kinds, being met with in the mountains of Spain, 

 far from the sea-coast, and vast quantities being also found, it 

 is said, in Egypt. Though scarce in Cornwall the Cornish 

 chough is not by any means an uncommon bird in certain parts 

 of the coasts of Great Britain ; a large and flourishing colony, 



