“All the year round the rook lives with its own kind. It goes in flocks to seek food, and in flocks it chooses its breeding-place. Sometimes a single oak has a dozen nests, with as many in each of the trees around, over a large tract of ground. There is great commotion in this aërial city at the time of nest-building, for rooks are very clamorous and also much given to stealing from their neighbors. When a young and inexperienced couple suspend building operations for a moment, to go and get further material for construction, the neighbors pillage the half-completed nest; this one carries off a little stick, that one a blade of grass and some moss, to use in their own work. On their return the robbed ones are thrown into a terrible passion, accuse this one and that one, take counsel with friends, and attack the robbers furiously if the theft has not been cleverly concealed. Experienced couples never leave the nest unguarded, but one stays and watches while the other goes for building material. “The jackdaw or little belfry-crow is all black and about the size of a pigeon. Like rooks, these birds fly in flocks and nest with their own kind. High towers, old castles, and the belfries of Gothic churches are their favorite abode. Their nests, which are made of a few sticks and a little straw, sometimes are placed each by itself in a hole in the wall, and sometimes are very near together in huddled groups. The jackdaw when flying keeps uttering a harsh and piercing cry. It feeds on insects, worms, larvæ, and fruit, but never on decayed flesh. It renders us some service by clearing trees of caterpillars, but I complain of it for hunting the eggs of little birds. Although jackdaws are always to be found about our old buildings, they nevertheless move from place to place, usually in large flocks, sometimes of their own kind exclusively, at other times in company with rooks and mantled daws.” CHAPTER XXII WOODPECKERS In front of Uncle Paul’s house there is a grove of beeches several centuries old, its branches interlacing at a great height and forming a continuous canopy supported by hundreds of tree trunks as smooth and white as stone columns. In the autumn that is where Emile and Jules go and hunt in the moss for mushrooms of all colors to show to their uncle, who tells the boys how to distinguish the edible from the poisonous kinds. There, too, they hunt for beetles: the stag-beetle, whose large fat head bears enormous branching nippers; great black capricorn-beetles that may be seen at sunset running along the dead branches and clinging to them, as they go, with their jointed antennæ, which are longer than the insect’s body; and long-horn beetles, likewise furnished with antennæ of unusual length, and also remarkable for their wing sheaths richly colored with blue or yellow or red, with spots and stripes of black velvet.