THE COAST OF SOUTH WALES 17 



and a whiteish eye-stripe running above the eye and 

 circling the crown like a diadem, as in the woodlark. 

 The whimbrel character, too, is different, more sedate 

 and bolder. They stalked magnificently about the rocks 

 and ran out into the trough of a receding wave after a 

 little flat-fish and then hard back again to escape the 

 next roller. The whimbrel breeds nowhere in these 

 islands except in the Orkneys and Shetlands, I believe, 

 and my pair stayed only a few days before the tidal impulse 

 of migration caught them once more and swept them 

 southward. When they took flight with the curlew, their 

 strident cries were queerly out of harmony with the 

 whistle of the curlew, most musical, most melancholy. 1 



The artistry of bird life gains not by economy but 

 multiplying, and its sociability is thus a delight to us as 

 it is to them. 



Two illustrations of this intensifying beauty of multi- 

 plication occur to me which may just be worth relating. 

 I was watching the nuptial offices of herring gulls on a 

 broad spit of sand outside Poole Harbour. I have noticed 

 that this gull, after pairing with his mate, will sometimes 

 stand erect (without the aid of the glass he looks as though 

 he were on tiptoe) upon her back, quite motionless, except 

 for movements of the tail, with fully extended wings 

 and shouting at the top of his voice. It is as though 

 he called bright sun, sparkling waters, golden sand and 

 scented air to witness his services in the perpetuation of 

 life. By a strange coincidence it chanced that half a 

 dozen of the birds were posed in this manner -at the same 

 tune and all loudly declaiming their epithalamia. Visual- 

 izing the scene over again, I can only see its comedy. But 

 though one gull, thus advertising his share hi the con- 

 tributions of the species to the future birthrate, is of 

 psychological rather than of aesthetic interest, the six of 

 them rejoicing in unison became something entirely 

 different partakers in a ceremonial, a thanksgiving rite 

 which seemed to reveal the dim origins of the manifold 

 religious forms of savage tribes in sacrificing or making 

 offerings to or dancing before their gods in gratitude or 

 appeal for fertility. The action of the birds became 



1 A local name of the whimbrel (from the cry) is the titterel. 



2 



