How, then can we account for the increase of such a species? One cause is undoubtedly to be found in the removal by gamekeepers of its three chief enemies--the carrion crow, magpie, and jay--all these three being great devourers of pigeon's eggs, which of all eggs are most conspicuous and open to attack. Then again the winter immigration of wood-pigeons from northern Europe appears to be on the increase, and it may be conjectured that a considerable number of these visitors remain annually to breed with us. There has also been an increase in the stockdove and turtle-dove in recent years, and the former species is extending its range in the north. The cause or causes of the increase of the turtledove are not far to seek. Its chief feathered enemies, the egg and fledgling robbers, are the same as the wood-pigeon's; moreover, the turtledove is least persecuted by man of our four pigeons, and being strictly migratory it quits the country before shooting-time begins; add to this that the turtle-dove has been specially protected under Sir Herbert Maxwell's Act of 1894 in a good number of English counties, from Surrey to Yorkshire. Of the stock-dove we can only say that, like the ring-dove, it has increased in spite of the persecution it is subject to, since no person out after pigeons would spare it because it is without a white collar. With the exception of the county of Buckinghamshire it is not on the schedule anywhere in the country. One can only suppose that this species has been indirectly benefited by the bird legislation and all that has been done to promote a feeling favourable to bird-preservation during the last thirty years. V THE DAW SENTIMENT I have spoken of the wood adjacent to the villages of Hayle and Lelant where the rooks, daws, and starlings of the neighbourhood have their winter roosting-place. This is at Trevelloe, the ancient estate of the Praeds, who now call themselves Tyringham. Here the daws congregate each evening in such numbers that a stranger to the district and to the local habits of the bird might imagine that all the cliff-breeding jackdaws in West Cornwall had come to roost at that spot. Yet the cliff-breeders, albeit abundant enough, are but a minority of the daw population of this district. The majority of these birds live and breed in the neighbouring villages and hamlets--St. Ives, Carbis Bay, Towadneck, Lelant, Phillack, Hayle, and others further away. It is a jackdaw metropolis and, as we have seen, every village receives its own quota of birds each morning, and there they spend the daylight hours and subsist on the waste food and on what they can steal, just as the semi-domestic raven and the kite did in former ages, from Roman times down to the seventeenth century.