Formerly, the raven and magpie came first as pets. The raven vanished as a pet, because like the goshawk, kite, and buzzard, he was extirpated in the interests of the game-preserver and hen-wife. The magpie was then first, and has only been recently ousted from that ancient, honourable position. The pie was a superior bird as a feathered pet in a cage; he is beautiful in shape and colour in his snow-white and metallic dark-green and purple-glossed plumage, and his long graduated tail. Moreover, he is a clever bird. To my mind there is no more fascinating species
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when I can find it in numbers, in places where it is not persecuted, and is accustomed to congregate at intervals, not as rooks and starlings do merely because they are gregarious, but purely for social purposes--to play and converse with one another. Its language at such times is so various as to be a surprise and delight to the listener; while its ways of amusing itself, its clowning and the little tricks and practical jokes the birds are continually playing on each other, are a delight to witness. All this is lost in a caged bird. He is handsome to look at and remarkably intelligent, but he distinguishes between magpies and men; he doesn't reveal himself; his accomplishments, vocal and mental, are for his own tribe. In this he differs from the daw; for the daw is less specialized; he is an undersized common crow, livelier, more impish than that bird, also more plastic, more adaptive, and takes more kindly to the domestic or parasitic life. Human beings to him are simply larger daws, and unlike the pie he can play his tricks and be himself among them as freely as when with his feathered comrades. We like him best because he makes himself one of us.
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Undoubtedly the chough comes nearest to the daw mentally, and as it is a far more beautiful bird--the poor daw having little of that quality--it would probably have been our prime favourite among the crows but for its rarity. Formerly it was a common pet bird, caged or free, in all the coast districts where it inhabited, and it may be that the desire for a pet chough was the cause of its decline and final disappearance all round the south and west coasts of England, except at one spot near Tintagel where half a dozen pairs still exist only because watchers appointed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds are always on the spot to warn off the nest-robbers during the breeding season. But of the chough in captivity or as a domesticated bird we know little now, as no records have been preserved. I have only known one bird, taken from a North Devon cliff about forty years ago, at a house near the coast; a very beautiful pet bird with charming, affectionate ways, always free to range about the country and the cliffs, where it associated with the daws. It was the last of its kind at that place, and I do not know if it still lives.
Next to the chough the jay comes nearest to
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