Page:A Book of Dartmoor.djvu/326

254 by a small coin. Whether such a custom existed in Devon I cannot say; I remember nothing of the sort

The sparrow-hawk is often seen quivering aloft in the air. A curious story is told of one by Mr. Elliot.

"As is well known, not only sparrow-hawks, but other birds of prey as well as other species, repair to the same site year after year for nesting. This knowledge is valuable to the keepers, who look up these haunts and try to shoot the old birds before they hatch their eggs. On one occasion he shot the female as she came off the nest, and this satisfied him, but on visiting the spot later he was surprised at another female flying off; on climbing to the nest he found that the male must have found another mate, as they had built a second nest over and into the old one, which contained four eggs, whilst the freshly-built nest contained five."

One has supposed hitherto that the gay widower who looked out for another spouse after having lost the first was a product of the human species only.

A visitor to Dartmoor in June or July will be surprised to find flights of rooks over it. As soon as their maternal cares are over, they desert the rookeries on the lowland and go for change of air and diet to the moor, where they feed on the whortleberry, possibly, but most certainly on the daddy longlegs and its first cousin, who is the hateful wireworm in his fully developed form. A friend one day saw a bit of the moor dense with rooks,