Superstitions about Birds 123 



to see these birds in the nesting season carrying up long 

 straws — towing their burden through the air with evident 

 labour — or feathers. These they sometimes drop just as 

 they arrive at their destination. Eager to utter a chirp to 

 their mates, they open their beaks, and away floats the 

 feather, but they catch it again before it reaches the 

 ground. Fluffy feathers are great favourites. The fowls, 

 as they fly up to roost on the beams in the sheds, beat out 

 feathers from their clumsy wings ; these lie scattered on 

 the ground, marking the spot. These roosting-places are 

 magazines from which the small birds draw their supplies 

 for domestic purposes. The sparrows have their nests in 

 lesser holes in the thatch ; sometimes they use a swallow's 

 nest built of mortar under the eaves, to which the owners 

 have not returned. 



The older folk still retain some faint superstitions about 

 swallows, looking upon them as semi-consecrated and not 

 to be killed or interfered with. They will not have their 

 nests knocked down. If they do not return to the eaves 

 but desert their nests, it is a sign of misfortune impending 

 over the household. So, too, if the rooks quit the rookery, 

 or the colonies of bees in the hives on the sunny side of the 

 orchard decay and do not swarm, but seem to die off, it is 

 an evil omen. If at night a bird flutters against the win- 

 dow-pane in the darkness — as they will sometimes in a 

 great storm of wind, driven, perhaps, from their roosting- 

 places by the breaking of the boughs, and attracted by a 

 light within — the knocking of their wings betokens that 

 something sad is about to happen. If an invalid asks for 

 a pigeon — taking a fancy to a dish of pigeons to eat — it 

 is a sign either of coming dissolution or of extreme illness. 



But the swallows rarely fail to come in the spring, and 

 soon begin to repair their nests or build new ones with 



