12 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



lettuce and delicate sea-grass wave their glaucous fronds 

 in the watery twilight. Yet sombreness and desolation, 

 even on the barest moorland, are only a passing impression, 

 for, apart from the sunsets over the sea, populous with 

 tints and shapes of every variety, the land on a fine autumn 

 day is suffused with an opalescence into which the greens 

 and browns of the earth are distilled, so that it has no more 

 substance than the heavens. 



But the birds were the country's refinement, expressing 

 its primeval qualities not only by their wild cries and 

 flights, but, paradoxical as it sounds, by their social life. 

 In these solitudes they were largely undisturbed, but I 

 was justified in looking further than this, and in seeing 

 in these communities, not only of individuals, but of 

 species,/ a condition of existence antedating their break-up 

 by man. l Autumn is a signal for flocking, even among 

 -unsocial species, partly for migration (all our birds, except 

 the town sparrows, migrate, whether for a thousand miles 

 or a thousand yards), partly owing to the growing scarcity 

 of food and the need of combining resources to secure it. 

 But sociabilit}^ is not confined to use, and in these rock- 

 bound wastes of sand, turf, bramble, gorse, ling and bracken, 

 I was in a playground as well as a market-place, where 

 I was a spectator from an unhappy world of a glee and 

 lightheartedness articulated both in music and in dis- 

 ciplined mobility. Starlings, daws, and rooks always get 

 on well together ; here they had learned to sport as well 

 as dine in company. 1 



When a lifting of the clouds had brought with it a 

 lifting of the birds' spirits, the starling squadrons used 

 to bear right through the flank of the stippled rook mass 

 without breaking it or confusing their own order and 

 wheel and plunge through the vanguard, emerging like 

 light cavalry from the front of the advancing surge. 



I once witnessed a beautiful manoeuvre of these starlings. 



1 Had a Martian naturalist visited this coast, he would have 

 smiled indulgently if some countryman had told him that rooks 

 are a tree-tribe and called black by the men of this earth. He 

 would have been right about the colour, for in this country one sees 

 rooks in their actual dress, not by our impression of it living, 

 iridescent, satin purple, glancing blue and bottle green. 



