52 BIRD WATCHING 



been pulsating so rapidly is as of a pause. This 

 pause, or rather this rest-in-speed, as the bird, re- 

 nouncing all effort, is carried swiftly and placidly 

 onwards in a curve of the extremest beauty has a 

 delicious effect upon one. One's spirit goes out until 

 one seems to be with the bird oneself, hanging and 

 sweeping as it does. Yet in this glory of motion it 

 will often be shot by beings, in all grace and beauty 

 and poetry of life, how infinitely its inferiors ! This 

 makes me think of Darwin's comment upon Bate's 

 account of a humming-bird caught and killed by a 

 huge Brazilian spider, wherein the destroyer and the 

 victim — " one, perhaps, the loveliest, the other the most 

 hideous in the scale of creation"* — are contrasted. 

 Spiders, too, had they their Phidiases, might be 

 idealised and made to look quite beautiful in marble, 

 even perhaps to our eyes (what cannot genius do ?) 

 whilst to their own, of course, the spider form would 

 be "the spider form divine." 



Wood-pigeons will also fly circling about above the 

 trees in which they have been sitting, in rapid pursuit 

 of each other, and whilst doing so, one or other of 

 them may be heard to make a very pronounced 

 swishing or beating sound with the wings, reminding 

 one of the peewit, nightjar, and a great many other 

 birds. Of instrumental music produced during flight, 

 the snipe is a familiar example. Here, however, the 

 very peculiar and highly specialised sound known as 

 bleating or drumming is produced, not by the feathers 

 of the wing, but by those of the tail, which have 

 been specially modified, as we may suppose (those, at 

 least, of us who are believers in that force), by a pro- 



* I quote from memory. 



