154 HANDBOOK OF BRITISH INLAND BIRDS 
the parks and squares. There, as elsewhere, he 
has shown himself a terror to his respectable rela- 
tives, and London's last rookeries have suffered a 
great deal from his inroads at nesting-time. It is 
believed that he pairs for life, like any Christian — a 
surprising trait in one so abandoned ; at any rate, 
pairs of Carrion Crows may be seen very early in 
the year quartering the countryside for homes for 
the breeding-season, and filling unfamiliar places 
with their harsh, grating croak. They are not, 
however, nearly such early nesters as the Raven or 
the Rook, not beginning to build till the begin- 
ning of April at earliest. The nest is generally 
built in a tree, sometimes at a great height, but 
often not more than twenty feet from the ground, 
or even less ; in mountainous country it is often 
built on a ledge or buttress of a steep face of 
the rock. It is a large and solid structure of 
sticks, thickly lined with wool and hair ; often 
it is very conspicuously situated, but sometimes 
it is flattened against the larger limbs in a fork 
of a tree so as to be well concealed from the 
eye. Four or five is the usual number of the 
eggs ; they are greenish-white in colour, blotched, 
spotted, and speckled with various shades of green, 
greenish-brown, and paler tints of grey. They 
vary a great deal in markings ; the two eggs 
illustrated represent nearly the extremes of dark- 
