THE COAST OF SOUTH WALES 13 



They were in the habit of using one of the rock tumuli 

 upreared from the plain as a base for their wonderful 

 corporate parade-flights, evolved out of centuries of social 

 life, leaderless and psychically directed by " but a single 

 thought." They flew off some way from the squat tower 

 of rock, thinned their compact body into a long column, 

 and made at it at full speed. The van of the column 

 rounded the rock, appearing on the other (my) side of 

 it, but, instead of the rest of the line following, the cable 

 was broken, and the van, leaving the rocks, united with 

 the rear, which had made one of those simultaneous 

 right-about-turns habitual with starlings, and emerged 

 on its side at the same time as the front ranks. One 

 speaks in military terms of these intricate figures, but 

 their rhythmical formality is never rigid, and they are 

 really festival dances of the air, a leaping pulsation of 

 life whose discipline is the condition of its freedom. 



A collection of units is not of course a social order, 

 but winter starlings are a corporate body with conventions 

 and traditions of its own, while their active co-operation 

 pro bono publico both coincides with and enlarges their 

 capacity for happiness and for expressing what, they feel 

 in an artistic form of which they must surely be to some 

 extent conscious. The sense of obligation to the social 

 bond, instinctive in birds with a long social inheritance, 

 reacts upon the flock by making each member of it more 

 of an individual without being an individualist and 

 encroaching upon the rights of his fellows. Each for 

 himself in a flock or pack would make it extinct. Actual 

 observation of animal societies makes it easy to under- 

 stand how the more subtle and elaborate human societies 

 are developed from them, and how a closer integration 

 fosters rather than checks a wider differentiation. 



It was strange to see magpies commingled with the 

 rook, daw, and starling communities, an association I 

 have never seen in any other part of the country — shouting 

 with them, like them tumbling and careering in misty- 

 winged flight about the rocks, like them perched in silence 

 upon them. I noticed one evening that magpies were 

 making for the same mass of rock ribboned by the starlings, 

 and the sleeping chamber of the buzzards, singly, and in 



