alighted beside it in a manner which seemed to express an entry into its feelings. This was in East Anglia, on the last day but one of February, and I look upon it as a premature breaking out of the nuptial activities before the birds had taken wing to their more northerly breeding-places. As to these aerial antics of the ravens, I doubt if they were strictly nuptial, on account of their performance of them whilst skirmishing with gulls, or with the hooded crow.
These two ravens were most devoted guardians of their young, and they pursued a plan with me—for I was the only intruder on their island—which was well calculated to blind me with regard to their whereabouts, and would certainly have succeeded in doing so, had not the nest been so openly situated, and such a conspicuous object. They took up their station daily—and in this they never once varied—at a point on the cliffs considerably beyond the place where they had built their nest, and which commanded a wide outlook. As I came each morning along the coast, which rose gradually, I became visible to them whilst about as far from their nest on the one side as they were on the other, and the instant my head appeared over the brow of the hill they rose together with the croaking clamour I have mentioned, and circled about round their own promontory. This strategy could hardly have been improved upon had it been carefully thought out by a man, for in the first place my attention was at once directed to the birds themselves, and then if the likelihood merely of there being a nest had occurred to me, that part of the cliffs from which they rose, and about which they
