United States or Cambodia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"My name is Chough, sir; the annual Conference has done me the favor of associating my name with yours at Swan Neck." "Oh, ho! You are my colleague; my wife, Brother Chough!" The wife runs Brother Chough over immediately, who looks very red and awkward, and she gives her estimate of him in an undertone.
Halliday burst into the room at this moment, singing a fragment of the "Chough and Crow" chorus, very much out of tune. He was in boisterously high spirits, and very little the worse for liquor. He had only walked from Covent Garden, he said, and had taken nothing but a tankard of stout and a Welsh rarebit.
At No. 12, the drawing-room windows are open, though the blinds are down; and the slow-pacing policeman pauses in his round, and leans against the iron railings, being suddenly brought up by the richly-harmonious strains of a glee for three voices: Brown, Jones, and Robinson are doing the Chough and Crow; and Smith, who prides himself on his semi-grand, which he tunes with his own hands once a week, is doing the accompaniment in his best style.
We like him best because he makes himself one of us. 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.
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.
The ornithologists were wrong about the chough, just as they had been wrong about the goldfinch, during the late years of the nineteenth century, and as they were wrong about the swallows and martins in later years.
Métivier, in his 'Rimes Guernseaise, gives "Cahouette" as the local Guernsey-French name of the Chough, though I suspect the name is equally applicable to the Jackdaw. The Chough is mentioned in Professor Ansted's list, but marked as only occurring in Guernsey and Sark. There are two specimens in the Museum. JACKDAW. Corvus monedula, Linnaeus. French, "Choucas," "Choucas gris."
And the perusal was so satisfactory, that he turned with a tone of injured, but patient innocence, and bade Richart read on. "The Italians are a polished and subtle people. They judge a man, not by his habits, but his speech and gesture. Here Sir Chough may by no means pass for falcon gentle, as did I in Germany, pranked in my noble servant's feathers.
Next to the chough the jay comes nearest to the daw mentally of all our crows, and as he excels most of our wild birds in beauty he would naturally have been a first favourite as a pet but for the fact that it is only in a state of nature in which he is like the daw lively, clever, impish; in captivity he is more like the magpie and affiliates even less than that bird with his human associates.
At the same time that there were so many in Guernsey, Starlings were reported as unusually numerous in Alderney, but how long the migratory flocks remained there I have not been able to ascertain. The Starling is included in Professor Ansted's list, but marked as only occurring in Guernsey and Sark. There are two specimens in the Museum and some eggs. CHOUGH. Pyrrhocorax graculus, Linnaeus.
Word Of The Day