“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 [[167]]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.” [[168]]
CHAPTER XXII
WOODPECKERS
Greater Spotted Woodpecker
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. [[169]]
A multitude of birds of many kinds make this grove their abode. There the quarrelsome jay fights with one of its own species for the possession of a beechnut; there the magpie chatters on a high branch and then flies down and alights in a neighboring field, jerking up its tail and looking around with an air of defiance; crows have their evening rendezvous there; and there the woodpecker hammers away at old bark to make the insects come out so that it may snap them up with its viscous tongue. Listen to the bird at its work: toc, toc, toc! If it is interrupted in its task it flies away with a cry of teo, teo, teo, repeated thirty or forty times in quick succession and resembling a noisy burst of laughter.
“What bird is it that seems to be making fun of us with such loud laughter as it flies off?” Emile and Jules asked each other one day when they were watching from their window the woodpeckers and the jays at play in the branches of the old beech-trees.
Jacques, their uncle’s gardener, heard them as he was watering the cabbage bed. After finishing a series of little trenches to carry the water to all parts of the bed, he came up to the window for a talk with the boys.