122 WILD BIRDS 



from the west. The western parties may have 

 been coming from the Buckingham Palace Gardens 

 and from Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. 

 Those from the north struck right across Pall Mall. 

 A year or two ago I saw starlings pouring into the 

 park along just the same line. I watched for only 

 about half an hour, but, by the seething sounds 

 in many of the trees at the water when I arrived, 

 I know they must have been coming in some time 

 before ; and when I left, at a quarter past five, the 

 inrush had not ended. It is hard to get a true notion 

 of numbers in a bird crowd like this, but there must 

 have been many thousands in the trees when I left. 

 I counted some small parties where counting was 

 possible. A party of eighteen came over ; then 

 came odd birds, two or three at a time, or single 

 starlings ; then another small party of thirteen ; 

 directly afterwards one of twenty. There was a 

 pause of a few moments, and then one of the larger 

 parties, impossible to estimate, swept by. This was 

 the western line, and all the time starlings were 

 coming in from the north. 



The northern parties were sometimes distinctly 

 large : a hundred birds perhaps in a bunch ; three 

 hundred or so in quite a crowd. These birds coming 

 from the north would stop suddenly after crossing 

 the water, when they appeared to drop down into 

 the trees on the southern side like a shower of 

 skurrying autumn leaves in high wind. It looked 

 at a few hundred yards' distance as if they were 

 tumbling anyhow into the planes. 



