THE STARLING IN AUTUMN 269 



other birds, and in his home-parties tries to repro- 

 duce them, and with remarkable success in every- 

 thing but volume. He does not even confine his 

 mimicry to the songsters of the grove, for he 

 tackles such a sound as the cry of the curlew, and 

 at ten yards his effort distinctly suggests a curlew 

 half a mile away. 



But to a great extent these afternoon assemblies 

 seem to be devoted to gossip. Seated among the 

 branches, the birds appear to talk to one another 

 in a fashion which might be pronounced quite 

 decorously polite, so low are the tones, were it not 

 for the fact that they all talk together. And the 

 idea that they are conversing receives rather a 

 rude shock at times. What looks like conversa- 

 tion when the talkers are informally grouped among 

 the branches looks like something quite different 

 when, as sometimes happen, they select as the 

 scene of their gathering the telegraph wires. Here 

 they sit in rows, with gaps separating little groups, 

 and almost always with the heads looking one way. 

 In its general appearance an assembly so perched 

 suggests a comic artist's effort to caricature a 

 piece of music, and especially is this the case when 

 there are four or five wires. But the birds go 

 through the same performance as on the tree, 

 chattering away as fast as they can find utterance, 

 but obviously not chattering anything in particular 

 to one another. Like mankind when they have 

 nothing to do, they like to do it in company, yet 

 each individual does it as if he were alone. 



