38 MY NATURE NOTEBOOK. 



the receding tide, it is hard to believe that they are 

 scavengers, after all, and the hoodie crows, solemnly 

 pacing the sand with reverend mien, seem more fitted 

 to offer prayers for the deceased sea-birds than to 

 batten upon their vitals. But the beauty of Nature 

 lies in its co-ordination, and not in its sentiment. 

 Indeed, if we had not an instinctive repulsion to 

 carrion birds, based upon ages of experience of the 

 treatment which they accord to human corpses, per- 

 haps before life is actually extinct, we might see as 

 much beauty in the conduct of hoodie crovys or great 

 black-backed gulls, when they quarrel over the re- 

 mains of a guillemot, as we do now in the thronging 

 of bees and butterflies to sweet-scented flowers. 



DRIVEN TO EAT TURNIPS. 



This March, so far as it had gone, had been an 

 exception, however, for we had had no preliminary 

 tempests from the north and east to strew the beach 

 with dead things. The hoodie crows had, in conse- 

 quence, gone comparatively hungry, for it was more 

 than a fortnight since they picked the bones of the 

 last of the starved blackbirds and fieldfares whose 

 bodies littered the field-sides and hedgerows after the 

 hard frost ; and they had to fill themselves cheaply 

 with turnips. When the cart made the circuit of the 

 field, discharging a shower of turnips in every three 

 yards, the ewes themselves, baa-ing in a hundred 

 strange hoarse tones to the treble bleating of their 

 lambs, were not more eager than the hoodie crows 

 to sample the generously scattered meal. Before the 



