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 (corvi monedulae) 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 circumstance 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 neighbours last Saturday, November the 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