STARLING. 239 



and join the majority of our home-bred birds in their sea- 

 side resorts or along the banks of tidal rivers. In such 

 places marine animals, and especially crustaceans, furnish 

 much of their food, and to obtain it they examine the heaps 

 of washed-up seaweed or turn over the stones with their 

 bill. The minority which stay about their own home are, 

 during hard frost, driven to great extremity, and, pinched 

 with hunger, depend chiefly on what may be got in sheep- 

 folds and cattle-lairs ; but, when the weather permits, they 

 assiduously follow the plough and in the pastures, beside 

 the grubs of Tijnthe so constantly present, there is often 

 a good store of food accessible, except in time of snow, 

 under dried cowdung. With the first indications of 

 returning spring our Starlings hasten to their old breeding- 

 quarters and await the arrival of that glad season.* 



The Starling is now found in almost every part of the 

 United Kingdom. On the Scottish mainland it used to be 

 comparatively scarce, and it was rare in the southern and 

 midland counties even when Macgillivray wrote. Mr. Gray 

 says that its appearance in the cultivated districts was an 

 event so recent as to have excited universal attention. But 

 at present there are few if any counties in which it does 

 not regularly breed more or less plentifully, and it seems to 

 have always frequented the rocky parts of the coast, and to 

 have been especially abundant in the Hebrides, Orkney and 

 Shetland, in all of which it occupies the same haunts as the 

 Rock-Dove and the Cormorant. Of Wales (though infor- 

 mation is far less precise) and Cornwall, much the same 

 may be averred (Zool. p. 3045 and s.s. pp. 137, 455) ; but 



* In thus attempting to trace the Starling's life the Editor, besides his own 

 observation, has been assisted by information from sources far too numerous to 

 mention. None of these, however, excels the admirable account given in 

 Stanley's 'Familiar History of Birds', which proves its author to have been 

 unsurpassed as an accurate observer and faithful narrator when opportunity 

 allowed him. But it must be remembered that, though one of the best chapters 

 of ornithological biography ever written, it had professedly but a local scope, its 

 scene being laid at Alderley in Cheshire. In the foregoing paragraphs there lias 

 been no intention of copying that inimitable account, but it cannot have failed 

 to affect the Editor in writing them, as from boyhood he has known it almost 

 by heart, and indeed it is one that no lover of birds who has read it can forgel 



VOL. IT. II 



