When I have 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 (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.
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