BIRDS 151 



breaks up and migrates in detachments, until by the 1st of 

 December you listen in vain for the voices of myriads of Star- 

 lings that babbled of their adventures in the fields with so 

 strange and vehement an earnestness ; all that you can hear in 

 winter is the rehearsing concert of the select few which elect to 

 spend the frosty nights beside their summer friends. While 

 they are with us, it is a wonderful sight to see their evening 

 flights. At first they assemble in small squads or dense black 

 columns in the fields a mile or so round, and after practising 

 drill for a short space, flock after flock crosses the town, coming 

 in at a considerable height from all the quarters of the wind, 

 shooting down like showers of parachutes into the trees in which 

 they intend to pass the night. This return passage is not per- 

 formed hastily ; if you sit and watch the roost you will see a 

 constant flow of birds rolling in during an unbroken period of 

 three hours, drove after drove arriving from outlying and often 

 treeless districts, to claim the hospitality of their friends, whose 

 kind toleration permits these birds to indulge their whims 

 without interference. 



ROSE-COLOURED STARLING. 



Pastor roseus (L.). 



A small ash-tree, which stands alone in a roadside hedge 

 near Allonby, has often been pointed out to me as the identical 

 tree out of which Robert Dawson shot a Rose Pastor about the 

 year 1877. The month of its occurrence is not known, but the 

 specimen is in the bright, clear rosy plumage of midsummer. 

 Prior to this the species had not occurred in Lakeland for 

 twenty years. At least I do not know of a more recent occur- 

 rence than the bird which the late Mr. Anthony Mason told me 

 was shot in Cartmell in 1855. It was feeding on elder berries. 

 Only some half-a-dozen examples had been killed in Lakeland 

 prior to that. The earliest obtained was shot near Alston in 

 June 1837. T. C. Hey sham tried to buy this bird through 

 Greenwell the birdstufFer, but the owner retained it. 



