The jackdaw is one of the birds that the gamekeeper wars against without ruth, shooting and trapping them in the breeding season, especially when they are occupied in feeding their young, and can be seen and easily shot in their frequent journeys to and from the nesting-tree. But the jackdaw is not so easy to extirpate as some of its congeners. He is probably just as common as he ever was, while the chough is rapidly dying out, and crow and jay and pie are yearly diminishing in numbers, and the raven, driven from its inland haunts, clings to existence in the wildest and most inaccessible parts of the coast. The reason of this is that the jackdaw is more adaptive than the other species. He has been compared in this respect to the house-sparrow, for he can exist in town as well as country, and readily adapts himself to new surroundings. The variety of sites he uses for breeding purposes shows how plastic are his habits. He breeds apart from his fellows, like the carrion crow; or in communities, like the rook and chough. He builds in hollow trees in parks and woods, in rabbit-burrows, in ruins, church-towers, and buildings of all kinds; and in holes and crevices in cliffs, whether inland or facing the sea, where he lives in company with the rock-pigeon and the puffin. ‘At Flamborough,’ Seebohm says, ‘the jackdaws are very abundant. A republican might call them the aristocracy of the cliffs. Like the modern noble, or the monks of the Middle Ages, they contrive to eat the fat of the land without any ostensible means of living. They apparently claim an hereditary right in the cliffs; for they catch no fish, and do no work, but levy blackmail on the silly guillemots, stealing the fish which the male has brought to the ledges for the female, upsetting the egg of some unfortunate bird who has left it for a short time, and devouring as much of its contents as they can get hold of, when the egg is broken, on some ledge of rock or in the sea.’ [Illustration: ROOKS. JACKDAWS. STARLINGS.] The social disposition of the jackdaw, and its friendliness towards other species of its family, is no doubt favourable in the long run to it; for by mixing with the rooks, both when feeding and roosting, he comes in for a share of the protection extended to that bird in most districts. There is also a sentiment favourable to the jackdaw on account of its partiality for churches and castles: the ‘ecclesiastical’ daws are safe and fearless of man while soaring and playing round the sacred buildings in villages and towns; when they go abroad to forage, and are not with the rooks, there is danger for them, and they are, accordingly, wary and shy of man.