ea lh THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
call a cane. ‘This piece of intelligence can be little depended 
on; but farther inquiry may be made. | 
A gentleman in this neighborhood had two milk-white rooks 
in one nest. A booby of a carter, finding them before they 
were able to fly, threw them down and destroyed them, to the 
regret of the owner, who would have been glad to have pre- 
served such a curiosity in his rookery. I saw the birds myself 
nailed against the end of a barn, and was surprised to find that 
their bills, legs, feet, and claws were milk-white. 
[ Rooks are continually fighting and pulling each other’s nests 
to pieces; these proceedings are inconsistent with living in such 
close community. And yet if a pair offer to build on a single 
tree, the nest is plundered and demolished at once. Some rooks 
roost on their nest-trees. The twigs which the rooks drop in 
building supply the poor with brushwood to light their fires. 
Some unhappy pairs are not permitted to finish any nest till 
the rest have completed their building. As soon as they get 
a few sticks together, a party comes and demolishes the whole. 
As soon as rooks have finished their nests, and before they 
lay, the males begin to feed the hens, who receive their bounty 
with a fondling tremulous voice and fluttering wings, and all 
the little blandishments that are expressed by the young while 
in a helpless state. This gallant deportment of the males is 
continued through the whole season of incubation." ] 
A shepherd saw, as he thought, some white larks on a down 
above my house this winter : were not these the snow-flake of 
the British Zoology ? No doubt they were. 
A few years ago I saw a male bullfinch in a cage, which had 
been caught in the fields after it was come to its full colors. 
1 After the first brood of rooks is sufficiently fledged, they all leave 
their nest-trees in the day-time, and resort to some distant place in search 
of food, but return regularly every evening, in vast flights, to their nest- 
trees, where, after flying round several times with much noise and clamor 
till they are all assembled together, they take up their abode for the night. 
