158 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



the expert who loses touch with the whole in his know- 

 ledge of the part. " It is possible," write Geddes and 

 Thomson, 



to interpret ideals of ethical progress — ^through love and 

 sociability, co-operation and sacrifice — ^not as mere Utopias 

 contradicted by experience, but as the highest expressions of 

 the central evolutionary process of the natural world. As 

 evolutionary biologists we are thus practically with moralist 

 and theologian, even with poet and sentimentalist, if you 

 will, against the " vulgar economist " of Ruskin or the self-atyled 

 practical politician of to-day. 



Or we can put it in another way, and say with the 

 all-round man against the specialist, with the trinity 

 of knowing, feeling and doing, with the good, the true 

 and the beautiful against the dominance of one or 

 other to the exclusion of the rest. Well, the great tit 

 is in his small way an all-rounder, as the wryneck, 

 for instance, is not. 



December 5th. — A day of small things but large birds. 

 Four and forty rooks all perched motionless on a small 

 leafless ash presented a sufficiently droll and fantastic 

 design. A magpie and a jay were sitting comfortably 

 together on the same twig, and as soon as my abhorred 

 form loomed up, the magpie scuttled away across the 

 open field, but the jay dropped down on the further 

 side of the hedge and crept away invisibly along it. 

 Ah, friend, thought I of him, you will take some 

 stamping out ! Pipits keep open house, for I find their 

 assemblies constantly mingled with larks, finches, 

 buntings and wagtails in the fields. I saw a detach- 

 ment from this League of Feathered Nations to-day 

 fly up into an elm where a kestrel was taking his 

 ease. They took no notice of him at all as he of them, 

 not even to harry him. The kestrel as a rule has much 

 ado to keep his dignity, so pestered is he by nearly 

 every bird that flies. As for retaliating, he never dreams 

 of it, and were it not for his accipitrine turn-out, birds 

 would no more regard him than they do a heron. Small 

 deer, not small birds are his concern.^ 



^ By nature, that is to say. In game-preserving districts the 

 kestrel often becomes a bird-eater, the temptation of being sur- 



