MAY 99 



hallowed hankering for newly hatched rooklets. I have 

 not been able to verify the suspicion, but some such 

 ground probably exists for the inveterate antipathy enter- 

 tained by the population of the rookery for that of the 

 heronry. It is a common thing at this season to see a 

 heron closely pursued and evidently much annoyed, if not 

 alarmed, by one pair or several pairs of rooks. The rook, 

 although his wing is round and the primaries are set very 

 open at the points, is very powerful and active in flight, 

 and when excited by the presence of a heron performs 

 daring feats of wingmanship. 



XV 



Some authorities have pronounced that long, pointed 

 wings are essential to great powers of flight, but 

 there is another bird, the lapwing, whose wing 

 is designed on the same plan as the rook, and is no mean 

 aeronaut. Not only can lapwings, like rooks, undertake 

 exceedingly long flights, but they often remain at great 

 heights for a long period — an hour or more — for no con- 

 ceivable reason but for the pleasurable exercise of their 

 pinions. The lapwing, too, a gentle, inoffensive creature 

 by nature, carries a warlike front against creatures which 

 it suspects of designs upon its eggs or young. Arms it 

 has none, for its soft bill and feeble feet are impotent to 

 wound ; yet have I seen a pair of lapwings drive a pair of 

 marauding black-backed gulls clean off the bit of moor- 

 land where the lapwings had their nest. The gulls, six 

 times the bulk of the lapwings (a full-grown blackback 

 covers six feet in span of wing), can have had nothing to 

 fear; their powerful beaks would have made very short 



