How Animals Talk 



you see a large flock of crows "drilling" in the 

 spring or autumn, rising or falling or wheeling all 

 together with marvelous precision, the ornitholo- 

 gists resolve the matter by saying that the many 

 crows act as one crow because they follow a "col- 

 lective impulse"; that is, because the same im- 

 pulse to rise or fall or wheel seizes upon them all 

 at precisely the same moment. And this they tell 

 you quite simply, as if pointing out an obvious 

 fact of natural history, when in reality they are 

 showing you the rarest chimera that ever looked 

 out of a vacuum. 



Now the wonderful wing drill of certain birds 

 has something in it which I cannot quite fathom 

 or understand, not even with a miracle of collective 

 impulse to help me; yet I have observed two 

 characteristics of the ordered flight which may help 

 to dispel the fog of assumption that now envelops 

 it. The first is, that the drill is seen only when 

 an uncommonly large number of birds of the same 

 kind are gathered together, on a sunny day of 

 early spring, as a rule, or in the perfection of 

 autumn weather. 



The starlings 1 furnish us an excellent example 



1 1 am speaking of starlings as they now appear in southern New Eng- 

 land. They were brought from Europe a few years ago, and are multi- 

 plying at an alarming rate. They have formed some curious new habits 

 here; even their voices are very different from the voices of starlings as I 

 have heard them in Europe. 



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