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.
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