They
had forgotten that he was a hawk, and that even the gentle
mousing wind-hover has a nobler spirit than any crow of them
all.
On first coming to the cathedral I noticed a few pigeons
sitting on the roof and ledges very high up, and, not seeing
them well, I assumed that they were of the common or domestic
kind. By and by one cooed, then another; and recognizing the
stock-dove note I began to look carefully, and found that all
the birds on the building - about thirty pairs - were of this
species. It was a great surprise, for though we occasionally
find a pair of stock-doves breeding on the ivied wall of some
inhabited mansion in the country, it was a new thing to find a
considerable colony of this shy woodland species established
on a building in a town. They lived and bred there just as
the common pigeon - the vari-coloured descendant of the blue
rock - does on St. Paul's, the Law Courts, and the British
Museum in London. Only, unlike our metropolitan doves, both
the domestic kind and the ringdove in the parks, the Salisbury
doves though in the town are not of it. They come not down to
mix with the currents of human life in the streets and open
spaces; they fly away to the country to feed, and dwell on the
cathedral above the houses and people just as sea-birds
- kittiwake and guillemot and gannet - dwell on the ledges of
some vast ocean-fronting cliff.
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