205 
THE HOME OF THE JACKDAWS. 
them off to inhabit church-tower or belfrey elsewhere. In their 
exercises you may see them circle about in the air, pursue and 
playfully buffet one another, mount aloft and then tumble down- 
wards, renew work, and then chase and battle again. They are 
loquacious birds ; they call loudly on each other when perched 
or in flight, and their voice has a clear, sharp, querulous sound, 
somewhat like the bark of a small dog. 
Amid such pleasant surroundings, we may well watch the 
habits of these interesting birds, while enjoying to the full the 
much-needed delights of the dolce. far niente. Here, surely, you 
may be content to do nothing, and to enjoy such needed rest. 
And here, more than anywhere, the jackdaws are thoroughly at 
home. The cliff-breeding gulls abound here, as on all the seas 
around our coasts, but they have their homes in neighbouring 
cliffs. An ancient pair of ravens may, now and then, be seen here ; 
but these wary birds, too, breed with the gulls, and live on terms 
of amity with the jackdaws here, although at the Devonian 
Headland I have seen another pair of long-lived ravens mobbed 
by a mingled flock of rooks and jackdaws till they were glad to 
find a refuge from their persecutors in some wood or cave. 
Thus the jackdaws have these cliffs entirely to themselves. 
In winter there flock in from Norway the hooded-crows, with 
whom the jackdaws do not amalgamate so peaceably as they do 
with the rooks. Seeking to appropriate to themselves the best 
lioles, the crows come at times into conflict with the smaller and 
less powerful jackdaws, and a temporary dispossession sometimes 
takes place ; but the holes in the cliffs are many and deep, and 
there is room enough for all ; thus the birds live on, under occa- 
sionally strained relations, till, as spring comes in, the crows fly off 
to their breeding places in Norway, and the jackdaws are again 
left sole tenants of the cliffs. And whether Hobbes of Malmes- 
bury w'as right or not in his philosophic maxim that the normal 
state of niankmd is a state of warfare, it seems to be certainly 
the normal state of birds ; thus we may regard the winter stage 
of warfare as a period of enjoyment in conflict for both daws and 
crows. Besides the ecclesiastical daws that frequent churches, 
we may find some archaeological daws in old ruins like those of 
Corfe Castle ; but they get sadly interrupted by visitors who 
take luncheon on the grass underneath, and they do not form 
there so numerous a colony as they do in this bay. 
Ravens are not, as to offspring, like the jackdaws. The 
young ravens are said to send off their parents to seek a home 
elsewhere. An intelligent old workman, who was engaged in 
some work just under the jackdaws’ home, said he should not 
have liked his children to send him off as the young ravens do. 
And as he was working with his son, while a little grandson was 
playing on the beach close at hand, he had presumably fared 
better than the old ravens are thouglit to do. 
With these daws and crows it is pleasant to connect the 
.greatest of all poets, for the jackdaw is no doubt Shakspere’s 
