66 
THE NATURAL HISTORY 
[LETT. 
of the season may have quickened the emigration of the curlews 
this year. 
They spend the day in high elevated fields and sheep-walks ; 
but seem to descend in the night to streams and meadows, 
perhaps for water, which their upland haunts do not afford 
them.] — Observations on Nature. 
And here will be the properest place to mention, while I 
think of it, an anecdote which the above-mentioned gentleman 
told me when I was last at his house ; which was that, in a 
warren joining to his outlet, many daws {Corvi monedulce) build 
every year in the rabbit-burrows under ground. The way he 
and his brothers used to take their nests, while they were boys, 
was by listening at the mouths of the holes; and if they heard 
the young ones cry, they twisted tlie nest out with a forked 
stick. Some water-fowls (viz. the puffins) breed, I know, in 
that manner ; but I should never have suspected the daws of 
building in holes on the flat ground. 
Another very unlikely spot is made use of by daws as a place 
to breed in, and that is Stonehenge. These birds deposit their 
nests in tlie interstices between the upright and the impost 
stones of that amazing work of antiquity : which circumstance 
alone speaks the prodigious height of the upriglit stones, that 
they should be tall enough to secure those nests from the 
annoyance of shepherd boys, who are always idling round 
that place. 
One of my neighbours last Saturday, i^ovember the 26th, saw 
a martin in a sheltered bottom : the sun shone warm, and the 
bird was hawking briskly after flies. I am now perfectly satisfied 
that they do not all leave this island in the winter. 
You judge very right, I think, in speaking with reserve and 
caution concerning the cures done by toads ; for, let people advance 
what they will on such subjects, yet there is such a propensity in 
mankind towards deceiving and being deceived, that one cannot 
safely relate anything from common report, especially in print, 
without expressing some degree of doubt and suspicion 
Your approbation, with regard to my new discovery of the 
migration of the ring-ousel, gives me satisfaction ; and I find 
you concur with me in suspecting that they are foreign birds 
