UNCONSCIOUS HYPOCRISY 159 



marvellous aerial manoeuvrings, that, at times, 

 absolute simultaneousness, as well as identity of 

 motion and action amidst vast crowded masses of 

 birds, flying thick as flakes in a snow-storm ? Is 

 there nothing to observe here, nothing to study ? 

 Are we only to disturb and destroy? Our island 

 offers no finer, no more grand and soul-exalting 

 sight than these nightly gatherings of the starlings 

 to their roosting-places. Who is the barbarian that 

 would do away with them ? Why, it would take a 

 Turner to depict what I have seen, to give those 

 grand effects those living clouds and storms, those 

 skies of beating breasts and hurrying wings. Will 

 no artist lift up his voice ? Will no life-and-nature 

 lover speak ? I call upon all naturalists with souls 

 (as Darwin says somewhere, feeling the need of a 

 distinction), upon all who can see beauty and poetry 

 where these exist, upon all who love birds and hate 

 their slayers and wearers, to protest against this 

 threatened infamy, the destruction of our starling- 

 roosts. How should these gatherings interfere with 

 the song-birds? The latter must be numerous 

 indeed if some small corner of a wood or even 

 some small wood itself to which all the starlings 

 for ten or twenty miles around repair, can at all 

 crowd them for room. Such an idea is, of course, 

 utterly ridiculous, and in what other way can they 

 be incommoded ? In none. They do not fear the 

 starlings. Why should they ? They are not hawks, 

 not predaceous birds, but their familiar friends and 

 neighbours. The whole thing is a chimera, or, rather, 

 a piece of unconscious hypocrisy, born of that thirst 

 for blood, that itching to destroy, which, instead of 



