SOME CHANGES IN THE COUNTY ORNIS, 
NOTICED PARTICULARLY IN THE SOUTH HAMS. 
BY EH, A. 8. ELLIOT, MEM. BRIT. ORNITHOL. UNION. 
(Read at Ashburton, July, 1896.) 
[Reprinted from the Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advance- 
ment of Science, Literature, and Art. 1896.—xxviii. pp. 503-506. ] 
CHANGES in the habits and haunts of birds in so small a 
sphere as a county are generally determined by some local 
influence, and are necessarily limited ; but some obvious fact 
usually stands prominently forward. 
For instance, the starling, to all of us familiar, has only 
within the last five and thirty years bred in the south-west 
of the county. When youngsters, we were accustomed 
only to see these birds in vast flocks in winter-time. Now, 
as well as having these countless numbers (they are, no 
doubt, migrants from higher latitudes), we may any day see 
these friends of the farmer hawking in the air at flies, in a 
manner quite peculiar to themselves, all through summer, 
when not too busy attending to the cares of their family, 
which are brought up in any crevice they can find, whether 
it be in house or tree. 
Jackdaws have increased enormously, and are a positive 
nuisance in some instances, blocking up chimneys with their 
building material, and ousting other species of birds from 
well and old-established nesting sites, and eating the eggs 
and young of all those they can find. It is, therefore, quite 
an open question whether their bad traits are counterbalanced 
by their good ones, It is more than a coincidence that, with 
the increase of this species, breeding indifferently in cliff or 
tree, house or spire, that the chough, or Cornish daw, should 
have been practically banished from the county. ‘The perse- 
cution by the collector will not alone account for it; the 
shortened food supply, the usurpation of nesting sites by the 
allied but hardier species, as well as the probable destruction 
