A DORSET DIARY 165 



I have heard a starling imitate the pee wit of the lap- 

 wing, and it is recorded of another starling that he 

 used to imitate the chapel-bell, swinging his body to 

 and fro in the manner of the bell's pendulum the 

 while. It is perhaps too soon to state definitely (as 

 Witchell does) that songs and cries are modulated to 

 resemble sounds with which the birds are familiar, but 

 it is a striking fact that the voices of birds are as 

 much in harmony with the sounds of their neighbour- 

 hood as their colours with those of theii surroundings, 

 and this may be at any rate partly due to conscious 

 mimicry. I profess myself willing to believe anything 

 after reading Henry Drummond's account in Tropical 

 Africa of an insect instinctively imitating a bird 

 dropping. Of one thing we may be sure — ^nature's 

 sound artistic taste is at the back of it all. 



One thing the vocal imitations of birds do prove — 

 their acute awareness and intelligent appreciation of 

 what goes on around them on the one hand and their 

 ingrained social sensibilities on the other. The following 

 is R. W. Schufeldt's description of an American mocking- 

 bird {Mimus poliglottus) : — 



Clearly and with the greatest possible accuracy and rapidity, 

 and with a mellow strength even exceeding the originals, he 

 utters the notes and calls of twenty or more birds in succes- 

 sion, ranging all the way from the plaintive air of the blue- 

 bird to the harsh, discordant cries of jays, sparrow-hawks, 

 and even with equal compass the vociferations of the eagle. 

 Catching breath, and tossing himself lightly into the air above 

 his perch, he alarms the entire feathered commimity assembled 

 by his imitating the cries of a birdling seized by a hawk ; 

 this is followed, perhaps, by the crowing of a cock or the 

 vociferous note of the whippoorwill, and the very incongruity 

 appears to put his feathered listeners to shame at the hoax. 



The passage surely gathers up a bundle of social reali- 

 zations — curiosity, perception, humour, pride, memory, 

 aesthetic pleasure and conscious make-believe elaborated 

 into deliberate social drama. The whole scene is bathed 

 in a consciousness of which the simpler mimetic faculty 

 is the raw material. A performance like this is to the 

 first lispings of the young bird conning his parent's 



