BIRD-HAUNTED LONDON 103 



tree, calling his quaint squeak. Presumably, then, the 

 parents nested somewhere in the south-west, though I- 

 have no idea where. 



But the crow, the only disreputable or reputedly 

 disreputable member of the whole suburb, except me 

 and the cats, is the black angel of the fields and 

 allotments. He is one of the very few species which 

 has increased with us since Mr. Hudson wrote Birds 

 in London, and in 1919 our pair safely brought off 

 four young from a nest in the top fork of a tall elm 

 almost opposite my house on the Middlesex side of the 

 river. The six of them kept together, cruising the 

 neighbourhood throughout the summer, autumn, and 

 winter, their corvine wisdom being perfectly well aware 

 that these monotonous fields are a Jerusalem of safety 

 and abundance for them. 



I have seen as many as nine of them together in 

 the air, shouting, flying races and buffeting one another 

 in mock-battle, as many as twelve on the fields and 

 twenty-one feeding together on the river ooze in the 

 autumn of 1920 ; doubtless several families joined forces. 

 It is interesting to observe the crow resuming its 

 ancient social habits, broken up by man everywhere 

 else in England except perhaps in a few of the 

 wildest districts. And I think that the birds gain 

 by this in temperament and character, expanding and 

 fulfilling their individualities in the broader milieu of 

 social life. Kropotkin was a wise man when he said, 

 " Man did not make Society, but Society man," and 

 animal sociability has undoubtedly been one of the 

 greatest, perhaps with the exception of parental care, 

 the greatest driving force of progressive evolution. 



Here the crow is a plump, lamb-like creature, for 

 few temptations come his way, and he fully satisfies 

 his hearty appetite by varying a grub with a vegetable 

 diet, trundling down to the river at low tide to play 

 the gull for pickings both on the water and the mud, 

 when he wants to dine out, or the larder is bare in 

 cold weather. So comfortably does he live that he 

 has sloughed off all his rustic cunning and wariness, 

 and with the easing of the struggle for existence, is on 



