214 BIRD WATCHING 



over, as they but make a part in general scenes and 

 pictures, I will not separate them from their context 

 nor any bird from its companions. 



Starlings, again, furnish striking examples of the 

 same phenomenon. Their aerial evolutions before 

 roosting are sufficiently remarkable, but, perhaps, still 

 more so from this point of view is the manner in which 

 they leave the roosting-place in the morning. This 

 is not in one great body, as might have been expected, 

 but in successive flights at intervals of some three or 

 four to ten or twelve minutes, each flight comprising, 

 sometimes, hundreds of thousands of birds — the num- 

 bers, of course, will vary in different localities — and 

 the whole exodus occupying about half- an -hour. 

 Each of these great flights or uprushes from the dense 

 brake of bush and undergrowth where the birds are 

 congregated, takes place with startling suddenness, and 

 it seems as though every individual bird composing 

 it were linked to every other by some invisible material, 

 as are knots on the meshes of a net by the visible 

 twine connecting them. There is no preliminary,* 

 nor does it seem as though a certain number of more 

 restless individuals gradually affected others, but at 

 once a huge mass roars up from the still more im- 

 mense multitude, as does a wave from the sea, or as a 

 sudden cloud of dust is puffed by the wind from a 

 dust-heap, I am speaking here of the great main 

 flights, which are, in most cases, of this character. The 

 fact that quite small bands of birds will sometimes fly 



* As far, at least, as observable from just outside the plantation, and to 

 judge from the sound. But previous movements within the plantation — 

 unless we assume a quite human organisation — would not explain what 

 is here assumed to require explanation. 



