114 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



The skylarks rarely left the fields. I had a remark- 

 able experience with these larks. On January 29th 

 (1919) I disturbed a round hundred of them from 

 a large turnip field, and instead of flying off close 

 to the ground with their loud, thick, guttural chirps 

 of alarm (which are woven into the song when heard 

 close at hand), to alight further off, as is their 

 usual custom, they massed into a dense column and 

 began to circle round and round me. The flight was 

 an undulating one, and the birds would sometimes dip 

 almost to the ground and sweep up from it again in 

 an intoxicating surge of brown bodies. They continued 

 their aerial evolutions, wheeling and looping round my 

 head for nearly four minutes. Finally the whole flock 

 came to the ground some twenty yards from where 

 I stood, and wonderful it was to see how they did 

 it. They did not drop to the ground in a shower 

 as linnets do, but swam down to it, the vanguard 

 ranks of the column sweeping low and parallel to 

 the ground, slowing down until they came almost 

 imperceptibly to rest, the higher ranks behind them 

 curving down to the same position and so on until 

 all of them were on the ground. Never for a single 

 moment did a bird of them fall out of his place, and 

 I was able to observe the continuity of the slope 

 right up to the moment when the foremost ranks 

 came to earth. As they flew round my head they 

 kept on passing a large brick building fifty yards 

 away, and the browns of their backs would leap into 

 vision as the birds passed between it and me and 

 fade into duskiness again as they came out against 

 the sky. If this was not the most beautiful, it was 

 certainly one of the strangest displays of bird-life 

 I have ever seen. I was grieved to see that the 

 larks were less numerous in the winter of 1919-20, 

 and their numbers, as I carefully ascertained by 

 repeated countings, at no time went beyond sixty. 

 One of them was splashed with white instead of 

 tawny on the margins of the feathers of the back, 

 so that by the time these words are printed I suppose 

 some pedant will have him in a glass case. Linnets 



