140 Wild Life in a Sotctkern County 



ing Mm about his business. Even those birds which do 

 not build in close contiguity no sooner find that a hawk is 

 near than they rise simultaneously and follow and annoy 

 him : so much so that he will sometimes actually drop 

 the prey he has captured. It is astonishing with what 

 temerity small birds, emboldened by numbers — chaffinches, 

 finches generally, sparrows, swallows, and so on — will 

 attack a hawk. 



The ' quar-martins ' that came to the orchard wall — 

 emigrating from the quarry, and wandering about in 

 search of a suitable habitation — if young birds, as we have 

 supposed them to be, would naturally not yet have had 

 much experience, and so might think the steep wall 

 (roughly resembling the face of a quarry) available for 

 their purpose till they had made the experiment. I have 

 thought, from watching the motions of birds that go in 

 flights, that most of them have a kind of leader or chief. 

 They do not yield anything like the same obedience or 

 reverence to the chief as the bees do to the queen-bee, 

 and exhibit little traces of following his motions implicitly. 

 He is more like the president of a republic ; each member 

 is individually free, and twitters his or her mind just as 

 he or she likes. But it seems to be reserved to one bird 

 to give the signal for all to move. So these martins, after 

 lingering about the wall for hours — some of them, too, 

 leaving it and flying away only to come back again — 

 finally started altogether. It is difficult to account for such 

 simultaneous and combined movements, unless we suppose 

 that it is reserved to a certain bird to give the signal. 



In the fork of a great apple tree — a Blenheim orange 

 — the missel-thrush has built her nest. Missel-thrushes, 

 doubtless of the same family, have used the tres for many 

 years. Though the nest is large, the young birds as they 



