94 MY NATURE NOTEBOOK. 



CHANGING BIRD FASHIONS. 



It is worth while looking carefully at the old 

 starlings, too, and noting how the purple and green 

 are distributed upon head and neck. If the head 

 appears all glossy green, the bird is the old British 

 " common starling," now growing less common annu- 

 ally, like the once " common " pheasant, which has 

 no white ring round its neck. This was believed to 

 have been introduced into Britain as a table luxury 

 by the Romans, or even later ; but the recent dis- 

 covery of its bones among the kitchen refuse of pre- 

 historic people who lived in caves shows that its title 

 of old English pheasant rests on better precedent. 

 Now, however, it is almost everywhere giving place 

 to the ring-neck pheasant, of quite late introduction, 

 and from some preserves, where once it lorded the 

 solitudes alone, you may see large bags taken with- 

 out one plain-necked bird among them. In the same 

 way the Siberian starling, with purple instead of 

 green gloss upon its head, has been pushing its way 

 from the East close upon the heels of its forerunner, 

 the " intermediate starling," whose head is partly 

 purple and partly green, until among a group of 

 starlings in England you may sometimes fail to see 

 a single "common starling." Whether this change 

 is due to the fact that the starlings from the East 

 are more robust than our old Western form, or 

 whether the starling prefers purple to green as the 

 complexion of wife or husband whether, in fact, we 

 here see natural or sexual selection at work there is 

 no evidence to show. 



