a party comes and demolishes the whole. As soon 

 as rooks have finished their nests, and before they 

 lay, the cocks begin to feed the hens, who receive 

 their bounty with a fondling tremulous voice and 

 fluttering wings, and all the little blandishments that 

 are expressed by the young while in a helpless 

 state. This gallant deportment of the males is con- 

 tinued through the whole season of incubation. 

 These birds do not copulate on trees, nor in their 

 nests, but on the ground in the open fields.] - 



A shepherd saw, as he thought, some white larks 

 on a down above my house this winter: were not 

 these the Emberiza nivalis, the snow-flake of the Brit. 

 Zool.? No doubt they were. 



A few years ago I saw a cock bullfinch in a cage, 

 which had been caught in the fields after it was 

 come to its full colours. In about a year it began to 

 look dingy ; and blackening every succeeding year, 

 it became coal-black at the end of four. Its chief 

 food was hempseed. Such influence has food on the 

 colour of animals ! The pied and mottled colours of 

 domesticated animals are supposed to be owing to 

 high, various, and unusual food. 



I had remarked for years that the root of the 



* After the first brood of rooks are sufficiently fledged, they all resort 

 to some distant place in search of food, but return regularly every even- 

 ing, in vast flights, to their nest trees, where, after flying round with 

 much noise and clamour, till they are all assembled together, they take 

 up their abode for the night. — ]\Iarkwick. 



59 



