BIRD-HAUNTED LONDON 97 



the running out of one tide of life, another sets in, 

 and larks, lapwings, pipits, chaffinches, greenfinches, 

 dunnocks, mistle-thrushes and pied wagtails begin 

 slowly to dribble in upon us like people going to 

 church. One day I actually saw a bullfinch dis- 

 appearing over the hedge into the orchard with a 

 gleam of his white rump. I had but time to shelter 

 him in a grassy recess of memory, for that was the 

 first and last I have ever seen of his loved kind in 

 or near London. Once, too, I saw a corn-bunting 

 feeding in a cabbage field among sparrows, chaffinches, 

 gulls and lapwings. 



Lapwings lend a peculiar distinction to my neighbour- 

 hood, and by the middle of December, when they 

 muster on the banks of the river and still earlier in 

 cold weather, they are more than a hundred strong. 

 They are as often in pairs as flocks, and it is possible 

 that Mr. Hudson's account of the starlings preserving 

 their marital identity in the winter congregation also 

 applies to the lapwing. Courtship begins as early as the 

 middle of a mild February, the male advancing towards 

 his fair with dancing steps and uplifted, quivering wings. 



One autumn day I received a striking demonstration 

 of the probability of the starling theory. I disturbed 

 a band of starlings and sparrows congregated on a 

 tree under which I was passing, and a starling, having 

 collided with a sparrow, was furiously pursued by it 

 and separated from the flock. No sooner were the 

 pair of them fifty yards or so away (they travelled 

 at right angles to it) than another starling detached 

 itself from its fellows, flew after and joined its partner. 



The immobility of the lapwing serves it wonder- 

 fully as a protective device on a ploughed field. I 

 was once sweeping such a field with the glass on the 

 Middlesex side of the river, when the wings of a 

 lapwing were raised, and I suddenly perceived that 

 the field was full of them. So perfectly did the 

 metallic greens of the back match the subdued high 

 lights of the clods that the birds had baffled even 

 the searching cunning of a field-glass. Without the 

 glass I could not see a single one, though it was 



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