172 London Birds, 



ghostly intentions. The most noted of all the City rookeries 

 was the plane tree at the corner of Wood Street, Cheapside. 

 It is a rookery no longer ; when the rooks finally quitted it 

 no man can tell. I tried to discover when the rooks were last 

 seen there by a query on the subject printed in the City Press, 

 but there was no response. Mr. Alfred Smee, in his volume 

 on Instinct and Reason, says there were four nests there in 

 1850. I saw birds there in 1858, but have never seen them 

 since ; but yet at the present time one nest remains, and it is, 

 I believe, annually occupied by sparrows. 



The transition from rooks to daws is easy enough, for they 

 are boon companions. Yet daws are nowhere seen in the 

 heart of London, except at the Tower, where there are always 

 a few. In the immediate suburbs, however, daws are tole- 

 rably plentiful wherever there is an old architectural pile, be it 

 church, mansion, or what else, for them to nest upon. Our 

 pretty old village church, at Stoke Newiugton, has a few daws 

 for inhabitants, and, from the noise and fuss they make in the 

 early part of summer, one might think the very atmosphere to be 

 made of daws, so clamourous are they, and so active in rush- 

 ing to and fro. I know that they watch for my small annual 

 crop of walnuts — I have but one walnut tree — and generally 

 manage to carry off all the nuts just at that critical moment 

 when they are ripe enough to be. eatable, yet not ripe enough 

 for use. It is the same with my neighbour, Mr. Dobinson. 

 He has a fine tree that bears plentifully, and the daws gather 

 the produce as regularly as a landlord comes for his rent. I 

 expect the folks at Kensington are equally unfortunate in wal- 

 nut culture, for, last summer, I saw a lot of daws sailing along 

 over the houses in High Street in the direction of the church ; 

 and I remember that, when a ■ boy, at Stepney, we used to 

 throw cricket balls at the church clock, and now and then get 

 a daw's nest by climbing up the old flint buttresses, saying 

 the Lord's Prayer backwards, at the same time, to raise the 

 Devil, a sort of killing two birds with one stone, though the 

 " killing" was,. in one case, a quickening, and we used always 

 to drop the nest with fright as soon as we had made a clutch at 

 it, fancying we heard the footsteps and smelt the sulphur of 

 the darker party as we finished the incantation. The jackdaw 

 is, in fact, a common London bird, though a stranger to the 

 City. 



Now that we have got to the suburbs, birds abound. In 

 all the gardens, especially on the south, west, and north, the 

 song thrush is one of the most plentiful of birds. On the 

 eastern side of London song birds are rather scarce, though in 

 a few favoured spots, as at Bromley by Bow, and in the more 

 rural parts of Homerton and Hackney, the thrush is still a 



