300 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



The action may have been inspired by a love of fun 

 or a spirit of mischief complicated with a sense of 

 irritation at the sight of a bird who was not of their 

 society, whose ways were not their ways — a feeling 

 akin to that which occasionally prompts a person of 

 a primitive order of mind to heave half a brick at a 

 stranger. The feeling is quite common among birds, 

 only the heaving process is performed with such a 

 precision and so gracefully that it is a pleasure 

 to witness it. 



In marked contrast with this spiteful behaviour 

 was another act of a flock of starlings I witnessed 

 at the same spot, showing the different feelings enter- 

 tained towards a stranger like the kestrel and a 

 comrade of the feeding-ground — a wild goose. A 

 small gaggle or company of a dozen or fourteen geese 

 came flying from the sea across the meadows on their 

 way inland to the feeding-ground, and at the same 

 time a flock of about a hundred starlings, travelling 

 at a much greater height than the geese, came flying 

 by, their course crossing that of the geese at right 

 angles. Just as the flocks crossed about thirty starlings 

 detached themselves from the flock and dropping 

 straight down joined the geese. They did not merely 

 place themselves alongside of the big birds; they 

 mixed and went away among them, accommodat- 

 ing their flight to that of the geese. Yet they must 

 have been uncomfortably placed among such big and 

 powerful birds, fanned by their wings and in some 

 peril of being struck with the long hard flight feathers. 

 With my binocular on the flock I watched them until 



