158 
NATURAL HISTORY NOTES AND QUERIES. 
The Squirrel. — Mr. Rooper in Nature Notes for June speaks of the 
squirrel eating birds’ eggs. That it does so occasionally is unquestionable, 
but I am satisfied by a long experience with squirrels, both tamed and wild, 
that they will only eat eggs when in a state approaching starvation. I have con- 
tinually offered eggs to them of difterent species (having had five species in cages 
at one time), and when purposely kept moderately hungry they refused to eat the 
eggs, raw or cooked, even when broken for them. Squirrels abound all around 
my house, but except in one case, in which starlings attempted to drive them 
out of a box I had put up for the squirrels, and were defeated, I have never seen 
a conflict between a biped and a quadruped. I have wild squirrels living in 
bird’s nest-boxes under the eaves of my house, but being always fed they do no 
damage to anything, and though they often get into the cages of my nesting 
doves they never attempt to disturb the nests. Some of the little creatures which 
find the way' to the nests exposed on my window benches are in such a miserable 
state from want of food that they can hardly climb, but I have never found a 
tree or a plant injured by them : my firs and larches, as well as deciduous trees, 
are absolutely untouched. 
Deepde 7 ie, Frimley Great, \V. C. STILLMAN. 
Surrey. 
Crow Counting.— The inquiry in Nature Notes as to the capacity of 
the crow to count must be answered in the affirmative. I have no close acquain- 
tance with the European crow, but when a boy I had a great fancy for crow-quills 
for drawing, and I tried in vain to approach the American crow with a gun in 
my’ hands to within gun-shot range, though if I carried only a stick they were 
contemptuously indifferent to me. Therefore on several occasions 1 induced two 
of my boy friends to go with me into a copse on the border of the feeding ground 
of the crows, and when the two companions left the cover and walked out of 
sight the crows came down fearlessly within range. 
They had another singular faculty which I have not observed in the Euro- 
pean crow. They used to gather in immense numbers in the pine woods near 
my father’s house in the winter afternoons and carry on a disorderly cawing for 
half a hour, more or less, and then disperse in every direction, gathering again at 
nightfall in some particular pine wood of the region, never two successive days 
in the same locality, but occasionally in the same wood where the council had 
been held. We used to say that they had been debating about their roosting- 
place for the night. As we lived on the border line where the cultivated valley 
of the Mohawk marched with an immense pine forest, and the crows fed in the 
former and slept and nested in the latter, we had abundant opportunity to study 
their habits. I have seen the long lines of the crows from various directions 
converging at sunset on the chosen roosting-place in aggregated number of 
thousands, and have been able to listen to the deafening din of their council 
cawing too often to be mistaken. 
Deepdene, Frimley Green, Surrey. W. C. STILLMAN. 
fuly 3. 
Magpie Counting. — The correspondent who had not heard of George le 
Roy nor his story of the counting-test being applied to magpies, will find it given 
on p. 178 of J. G. Wood’s “ Boys’ Own Book of Natural History.” 
Fylton Rectory, Bristol. A. C. Mackie. 
Mimicry in Wild Starlings. — With reference to i\Ir. Percival Westell’s 
note on mimicry in starlings in July Nature Notes, he says he has not noticed 
any mimicry “other than when the bird has been kept in captivity.” Mr. 
Westell may be interested to hear that I have often heard wild starlings about the 
house mimic curlews — this was in Northumberland. In Shropshire, in 1896, i 
heard one mimicking the call of the partridge. On this occasion Mr. Meade- 
Waldo, whose name is well known to ornithologists, was with me, and pointed 
out the starling to me. 
The Gables, Wirksworth, 
July 4, 1900. 
C. E. Meade- Waldo. 
