A DORSET DIARY 139 



them thus, but in due rotation, beginning with the out- 

 side chick and going back to it, when the inner one had 

 been fed in its turn. Whether this fair dealing and 

 regularity be followed when the young are in the nest 

 or even whether it be the common practice of the 

 swallow tribe I do not know, but so it was here, 

 and the young, though all demonstrating at the same 

 time, never jostled one another or scrambled for the good 

 things. It was touch and go, but I am happy to say 

 that the whole family got away in time. What agony 

 of divided spirit must the parents suffer when the hot, 

 personal devotion is crossed by the mysterious, objective, 

 tribal impulse of migration, crossed, held up, beaten 

 down and finally swept away, and mercifully with it all 

 pain of loss, all bitterness of regret and gnaw of 

 remembrance ! 



October 17th. — Warde Fowler says that only once 

 in all his years of observation had he seen the grey 

 wagtail away from water. Yet to-day I watched this 

 little Undine, prancing over a cottage-roof, a hundred 

 yards from any water, and that but a muddy ditch. 

 Yellow-hammers had begun to flock on the uplands. 



October 22nd. — Taking a short stroll at dusk in the 

 fields I heard a tremendous uproar from the hedges 

 round. It was the blackbirds. The hedges vibrated 

 with their metallic chirps, so that one wondered whether 

 some terrible catastrophe was threatening the blackbird 

 world. There were so many of them that I guessed 

 they were migrants from the north, many of them no 

 doubt to cross the sea. Simultaneously the owls set 

 up their nocturnes ; so that the blackbirds were turning 

 night into day and the owls day into night. 



October 23rd. — The swallows have not yet gone, for 

 I saw a score of them circling the church-tower of the 

 village. The migration of swallows presents an inter- 

 esting problem.^ The question is this : Do swallows 



single bird, and the inference that the father fed one pair and the 

 mother the other. 



1 By the exercise of what mysterious faculties migrating birds 

 survive at all is a sufficient mystery. Granted that young birds 

 find their way by inherited memory, how can a sedentary species 



