THE FULL CHORUS 99 



Some birds have a way of picking up phrases from the 

 song of other species, and weaving them more or less com- 

 pletely into their own music. When the junction is smoothly 

 effected, and the tone and rhythm a little changed, it is often 

 hard to be sure how much of the song is original and how 

 much imitative. The most intelligent English mocking-bird 

 is undoubtedly the starling. A starling has not much song 

 of his own ; subtract the obvious imitations of thrushes and 

 blackbirds and other species from the cheerful noises which 

 he utters on a chimney-top or elm-branch on a May morning, 

 and there is nothing left but a few disjointed pipings inter- 

 spersed with curious hissing and simmering sounds, and the 

 sharp clattering of his beak. But most starlings add imita- 

 tions of the songs and cries of the commonest birds in their 

 neighbourhood, and the whole mixture is lively and spring- 

 like enough. The imitations are delivered in a casual and 

 indifferent way, and usually in a lower tone than the original, 

 but are often so close as to deceive. They sound like the 

 genuine cries at a little distance, when their real author is 

 performing just above our heads. Some starlings pick up 

 the three characteristic notes of the missel-thrush to perfec- 

 tion, and deliver them for a long while together with the 

 missel-thrush's own persistence. The song-thrush and black- 

 bird are the commonest models, as they are the most con- 

 spicuous singers in most of the places which starlings haunt. 

 But in moorland regions starlings pick up the cry of the 

 curlew and peewit, and in London squares they imitate the 

 long-drawn squeal of the cab whistle. In repeating their 

 cries they often show a long memory, which is the foundation 

 of intelligence in birds and animals ; they will repeat in 

 autumn notes which their models only utter in spring. They 

 thus display their kinship with the crow tribe, which is the 

 keenest- witted group in the whole kingdom of birds. 



