OF SELBOENE. 
73 
as you observe^ that a bird so common with us should never 
straggle to you/ 
And here will be the proper est place to mcntioa^ while 
I think of it^an anecdote which the above mentioned gentle- 
man told me when I was last at his house ; which was that, 
in a warren joining to his outlet, many daws [Gorvi mone- 
dulce) 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 the nest 
out with a forked stick. Some waterfowls (viz. the puffins) 
JACKDAVi^. 
breed, I know, in that manner ; but I should never have 
suspected the daws of building in holes on the flat ground.^ 
^ The Hon, and Rev. W . Herbert has observed tliat this bird is met 
with only on the chalk. He used to find it and its two eggs on the bare 
ground in September, at Highclere, in Hampshire, but only where there 
was a chalk subsoU. It never strayed to the sand or gravel, and con- 
sequently was not upon the heaths; but in the chalky turnip fields. 
This statement, though it may be true enough of the locality to which 
it refers, is not of universal application. See Stevenson's " Birds (jf 
Norfolk," vol. ii. pp. 51-64.— Ed. 
2 The stock-dove and the shell-drake may also be mentioned as 
species which make use of deserted rabbit -burrows to nest in. — Ed. 
