. British birds. Birds. OTES. MUD-DAUBED EGGS OF JACKDAW. In British Birds, Vol. VIII., p. 14, there is a note by me'on a Jackdaw which was in the habit of daubing its eggs with mud. In 1915 I had to leave Oswestry before the bird had finished laying in the particular nest referred to. A friend visited the nest two or three days later and found that it had been robbed in the meantime. This year (1916) I visited the nest on April 23rd, and foimd it nearly complete and lined as usual with wool, hair and a little moss and grass. I revisited it on May 2nd and foimd that it contained four eggs so t
. British birds. Birds. OTES. MUD-DAUBED EGGS OF JACKDAW. In British Birds, Vol. VIII., p. 14, there is a note by me'on a Jackdaw which was in the habit of daubing its eggs with mud. In 1915 I had to leave Oswestry before the bird had finished laying in the particular nest referred to. A friend visited the nest two or three days later and found that it had been robbed in the meantime. This year (1916) I visited the nest on April 23rd, and foimd it nearly complete and lined as usual with wool, hair and a little moss and grass. I revisited it on May 2nd and foimd that it contained four eggs so thickly daubed with mud that only very small portions of the shell were visible. The eggs were dry but the nest was very different from when I first saw it, for now the lining was thickly covered with mud which had caked and resembled the mud bottom of a Magpie's nest. I removed the eggs, which were incubated in slightly different stages, and replaced them by four clean fresh eggs from another nest. On May 3rd I revisited the nest and found the mud lining damp and the eggs slightly coated with mud. Previous to this year only the eggs had been daubed, but this time it would be difficult to say, of the bird's own eggs, whether the nest was mud-lined and the eggs got it from the lining, or whether in the process of daubing the eggs the lining of the nest became coated with mud. The latter is perhaps the right view. The clean eggs which I put into the nest were probably muddied accidentally from the lining : this may have been damped by the bird as she returned to the nest, as there had been rain in the morning and after I left the previous day. The difference in the stages of incubation of the mud-daubed eggs led me to examine a set out of a nest which had only one egg on April 23rd and on May 3rd held six. These were all in different stages of incubation, from clearly defined young to practically fresh. Other complete sets gave more or less similar results, but some sets were all
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