THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE, ~ 53 
obtained information with respect to this circumstance, I shall 
have finished my history of the stone-curlew, which I hope will 
prove to your satisfaction, as it will be, I trust, very near the 
truth. This gentleman, as he occupies a large farm of his own, 
and is abroad early and late, will be a very proper spy upon 
the motions of these birds ; and besides, as I have prevailed on 
him to buy the Naturalist’s Journal (with which he is much 
delighted), I shall expect that he will be very exact in his dates. 
It is very extraordinary, as you observe, that a bird so common 
with us should never straggle to you. 
And here will be the properest place to mention, while I 
think of it, an anecdote which the above-mentioned gentleman 
told me when I was last at his house; which was that, in a 
warren joining to his outlet, many daws build every year in the 
. rabbit-burrows under-ground. ‘The way he and his brothers 
used to take their nests, while they were boys, was by listening 
at the mouths of the holes ; and, if they heard the young ones 
cry, they twisted the nest out with a forked stick. Some water- 
-fowls (viz., the puffins) breed, I know, in that manner; but I 
should never have suspected the daws of building in holes on 
the flat ground. 
Another very unlikely spot is made use of by daws as a 
place to breed in, and that is Stonehenge. These birds 
deposit their nests in the interstices between the upright and 
the impost stones of that amazing work of antiquity : which cir- 
cumstance alone speaks the prodigious height of the upright 
stones, that they should be tall enough to secure those nests 
from the annoyance of shepherd-boys, who are always idling 
round that place. 
One of my neighbors last Saturday, November 26th, saw a 
martin in a sheltered bottom: the sun shone warm, and the 
bird was hawking briskly after flies. I am now perfectly 
satisfied that they do not all leave this island in the winter. 
You judge very right, I think, in speaking with reserve and 
