204 
NATURE NOTES. 
bright, whitish-grey eyes set close together, he looks somewhat 
human, though, especially in the gloaming, a little uncanny. If 
you stroll on the high over-lying downs, some 600 feet or more 
above the sea, there, as INIilton puts it, 
“ Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve. 
In wattled cotes amid the field secure,” 
you may see the jackdaws, mingled with the rooks, forming 
an harmonious conclave, in countless myriads, perching on the 
hurdles, hopping from one to the other, or to and from the 
sheep’s backs, busy and, as always, gay, happy, and jocular. 
The reason why he gets on better than any of his friends of the 
other corvus-tribe is that he is, like the sparrow, very adaptive. 
He will breed apart from his fellows, like the carrion-crow ; in 
common cities, like rooks; in hollow trees in parks; in ruins, 
and on church towers ; or, perhaps best of all, in holes and 
crevices of the cliffs, where he may sometimes live with rock- 
pigeons and puffins. Gilbert White tells of jackdaws that built 
every year in the rabbit-burrows underground ; that their nests 
were found by listening at the mouths of the holes to hear the 
young ones cry, and that the nests were then twisted out with 
a forked stick. Another spot used by these birds, which White 
thought a very unlikel}" spot, was Stonehenge, where they built 
their nests in the interstices between the upright and the impost- 
stones, though, he adds, they built so high that they were quite 
out of the reach of the shepherd-bo}'s who were then always 
idling about the place. White remarks that the jackdaw’s 
peculiarity in building at Selborne in the rabbit-burrows arose 
from the fact that there were hardl}' any towers or steeples in 
all the country ; Hampshire and Sussex being then, as he 
states, more meanly furnished with churches than almost any 
counties in the kingdom. This he contrasts with the shires 
of Cambridge, Northampton, Huntingdon, and the fens of 
Lincoln, where he had been amazed at the number of spires 
that presented themselves in every point of view. As an 
admirer of prospects, he lamented the want in his own country 
of what he considers very necessary elements in an elegant 
landscape. Since that time the want has been fairly met, as 
■we can see by looking over the New Forest at the elegant spire 
of L5'ndhurst Church, or at the towers and spires of the churches 
in the fine town of Bournemouth. We generallj^ find that, like 
monks of old, jackdaws continue to live on the fat of the land, 
though often without ostensible means of living. They are apt 
at levying blackmail on sillier birds, such as guillemots, whose 
prey, brought for the young ones, they often carry off. 
Playing around churches, the ecclesiastical daws secure a 
certain immunity, and justly so, too. You may find a pair 
building for years just under the single bell of some church, 
caring nothing for the frequent and loud sound ; and apparently 
training their offspring in good church principles, and sending 
