100 DARWINISM AND THE PROBLEMS OF LIFE 



Otherwise, all is quiet in Nature in the winter. A 

 few grain-eaters, like the titmouse, pick up a precarious 

 living. There is only one bird, the cross-bill, that has 

 its time of plenty in the winter, as the pine cones are 

 then ripe ; and we see the wonderful sight of the red 

 and restless gipsy-bird building its nest and rearing its 

 young on the snow-covered pines. But all the birds 

 that live on insects, and amongst these are our best 

 singers, have migrated far away in the autumn, where 

 a fresh summer smiles on them under a sky of perennial 

 blue. 



This enormous journey across the Mediterranean to 

 Africa only takes them an astonishingly brief time to 

 perform, as the little birds can attain a very high speed. 



Henry II. of France found out in the sixteenth 

 century how fast a bird can fly. A falcon escaped from 

 him at Fontainebleau, and was caught twenty-four hours 

 afterwards in Malta. When we calculate the distance 

 between the two places, we get a speed of forty-four 

 miles an hour ; but this is below the mark, as the falcon 

 would hardly do it in one flight and in a straight line. 



The expert whom we mentioned at the beginning of 

 the chapter, Gatke, puts the speed of migratory birds 

 far higher. He maintains, for instance, that the northern 

 blue-throated warbler does its journey from Africa to 

 Heligoland in one spring night, because at the time of 

 its migration it has been seen in swarms in Heligoland 

 while only a few stragglers were found in the rest of 

 Europe, and the bird always travels by night. If this 

 were so, its speed would be 209 miles an hour. It is 

 true that the route and the migration of the blue-throat 



