THE DAW SENTIMENT 259 



THE DAW SENTIMENT 



I HAVE spoken of the wood adjacent to the villages 

 of Hayle and Lelant where the rooks, daws, and 

 starlings of the neighbourhood have their winter 

 roosting-place. This is at Trevelloe, the ancient 

 estate of the Praeds, who now call themselves 

 Tyringham. Here the daws congregate each evening 

 in such numbers that a stranger to the district and 

 to the local habits of the bird might imagine that all 

 the chff-breeding jackdaws in West Cornwall had 

 come to roost at that spot. Yet the cliff-breeders, 

 albeit abundant enough, are but a minority of the 

 daw population of this district. The majority of 

 these birds live and breed in the neighbouring 

 villages and hamlets — St. Ives, Carbis Bay, Towad- 

 neck, Lelant, Phillack, Hayle, and others further 

 away. It is a jackdaw metropolis and, as we have 

 seen, every village receives its own quota of birds 

 each morning, and there they spend the daylight 

 hours and subsist on the waste food and on what 

 they can steal, just as the semi-domestic raven and 

 the kite did in former ages, from Roman times 

 down to the eighteenth century. 



