A Queer Duel
In a rough, well-treed garden within a village that now is almost a town a very strange struggle has been' watched and listened to day after day. It has been so noisy that neighbours have complained! The com- batants are jays and a cuckoo. Every day the cuckoo returns to the neighbourhood of the jay's nest, and every day the jays with furious shrieks drive it away. Can it be that the cuckoo desires to lay in the jay's nest? One would not think so, but no satisfactory explanation of this odd and noisy feud suggests itself. Jays have multiplied and seem to be on the way to a more urban habit of life. I heard this very week of the presence of a jay in a small garden in the very midst of London. Several birds of prey seem to be fond of towns. The tawny owl and the carrion crow are two examples ; and on the Continent, if not often in London, hawks of several species frequent town churches and on occasion kill the tame pigeons. As Hood. wrote of another marauding bird : " A claw's not reckoned a religious bird, Because it keeps a-cawing from a steeple,"
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