202 
NATURE NOTES. 
We thus find that the poets and the novelists, whom we may 
regard — especially the best of them, such as Dickens, George 
Eliot, and Thackeray— as our prose poets, are in the habit of 
treating the jackdaw on the humorous side, much as they do the 
parrot, the starling, the magpie, and the raven. Some of these 
birds have been taught to learn the language of men, and it is 
sad to know that what they take to most readily is swearing, and 
the use of bad language generally. From these instructors, too, 
they are apt to learn the arts of purloining and concealing ; and 
of this the jackdaw’s theft of the Cardinal’s ring is a notev,’orthy 
example. In St. James’s Park, I have heard an escaped parrot 
swearing soundly, to the amusement, though not to the edifica- 
tion, of some little boys that were listening. As a set off to such 
profanity, it might be well to record that once when an escaped 
parrot had got up a tree, it looked down on those that were 
seeking it beneath, and said, with great solemnity, “ Let us 
pray ! ” 
At the hands of one or two writers the jackdaw has, however, 
fared somewhat better. Vincent Bourne, who was one of the 
teachers of Cowper at Westminster School, has written on the 
jackdaw a Latin poem, in which he calls the bird a great fre- 
quenter of the Church, and fond of the speculative height of the 
weather cock, whence he securely sees the bustle that occupies 
mankind below, and wherefrom 
“ He sees that this great roundabout. 
The world, with all its motley rout. 
Church, army, physic, law, 
Its customs and its businesses, 
Are no concern at all of his. 
And says — what says he? — Caw.” 
Cowper himself puts in a plea for such a bird as the jackdaw 
when he tells us that though he should not think of putting a 
goose into a cage for the sake of his melody, yet a goose on a 
common or in a farmyard was no bad performer. Much the 
same may be said of the notes of the jackdaws, which, when 
heard in their homes, seem very clearly in perfect harmony with 
their surroundings. In the famous white cliff by Chalcombe 
Headland, the notes of the jackdaw are mingled with the scream 
of the sea-gull, the rarer cry of the kestrel, and the harsh croak 
of the raven. There I should not regard the jackdaws as at 
home, though I have often found their nests mingled with other 
cliff-breeding birds, and, aided by the strata that there underlie 
the chalk, have, as a cliff-climbing boy, mounted, with difficult}’, 
to the nest, and therefrom, unable to descend, have, with still 
greater difficulty, ascended by climbing to the summit, with one 
egg in my mouth, the only secure receptacle, amid the screams 
of many disturbed birds whose nests lay all around me. Other 
similarly tenanted cliffs I had often seen elsewhere. 
But there is one perfectly ideal bay on our south coast which 
may be well called the Home of the Jackdaws. In that lovely bay 
