Darkening Skies 281 



unaccustomed footfall near their roost the thicket 

 begins to murmur and thresh with the stir of shifting 

 birds, until renewed silence lets them fall back to 

 sleep. The volume of noise produced by the slight 

 movement of so many birds in a confined space 

 is impressive and almost menacing ; it threatens 

 every moment to burst into the rumble as loud 

 as the first growlings of a thunder-peal, which a 

 great flock of starlings can raise when they spring 

 simultaneously into the air. But at night they 

 will hardly break from their cover at any alarm ; 

 the thicket seethes and grinds like a shingle beach 

 working in a storm, and lulls into the same momen- 

 tary calm. The life diffused in summer through 

 all the woods seems concentrated into a single 

 thicket, as the sap sinks back into the roots. Indi- 

 vidual life seems lost in this winter darkness, and 

 merged into the primal slumber of the soil ; and 

 the moon riding high above looks on a world almost 

 as lonely as its own. 



On mild, dim nights the winter moths and one 

 or two kindred species maintain a feeble play of 

 life all through the dark season of the year. They 

 are such frail and filmy creatures that winter seems 

 a most unfit time for them to be abroad ; but yet 

 there is something typical of the reduction of 

 active life to its narrowest limits in their very 

 frailness. The male moths have weak and rounded 

 wings, with characterless dusky patterns, and the 

 females are wingless. These insects are a well-known 

 pest of fruit trees, to the boughs of which the female 

 climbs after emerging from a chrysalis in the soil. 



