THE JACKDAW. 
325 
mind their buffetings in the air, this time, but held on his course: 
— such, I have remarked to be the usual proceeding of grey crows 
when driven by magpies from the vicinity of their nests. Though 
they will return again and again after being beaten off, I have 
never seen them offer the least violence to the parent-birds, thus 
always seeming as if they were too much conscience-stricken to do 
so. To-day, the crow could hardly be doing any harm, as a number 
of the young jackdaws were able to fly about ; there may however 
have been some young broods. When walking along Carnlough 
bay, on the 25th of May, I remarked several jackdaws flying 
singly towards the cliff in which they build, each of them 
displaying beneath the bill a well filled pouch of food for their 
mates or young. How singularly these and other species of the 
Corvidae, sometimes drop down the perpendicular face of a precipice 
as if they were shot ! 
A pair of these birds built annually for a number of years in 
the same hole of a wall about twelve feet from the ground, at 
Castle Warren. Jackdaws caused great annoyance for some years 
by building in the chimneys of this castle, and filling them up 
with sticks ; — of which, a few nearly six feet in length, were used. 
Eventually a wire-grating was placed across the top of the chim- 
neys to prevent their access, which it did effectually. They 
continued, however, to re-visit them every season, with the view 
of resuming occupation. 
Church towers * and steeples, as well as chimneys,t are com- 
monly resorted to for nesting-places. They are generally described 
as late breeding birds ; but a most accurate observer once observed 
them on the 22nd of March, carrying building materials to a 
chimney in Belfast; as he did to other chimneys on the 20th of 
that month : on the 7 th of April, he saw them conveying food, as 
* In the tower of a country church near Belfast, jackdaws had in the course of 
time accumulated such quantities of sticks, that cart-loads of them had to be removed 
before some repairs on the building could be commenced. 
fThe burning of Shane’s Castle (the mansion of Earl 0‘Neil, situated on the 
borders of Lough Neagh), which happened about thirty years ago, was believed to 
have been caused by the dry sticks forming the nests of jackdaws in one of the chim- 
neys, having caught fire. One of the fires at York Minster has been attributed to the 
same cause. 
