420 
THE MEDITERRANEAN NATURALIST 
I think, of the starlings, for he believed that 
they were friends of his fleecy charge, delivering 
them from the grops of insect life which in- 
fested their skins, and which helped, he thought 
to breed the maladies from which I sometimes 
saw them sadly suffering. When I came north- 
wards I was delighted to find that in these parts 
the starling was known by the homely name of 
shepster. The word rekindled happy thoughts 
and feelings, took me back to the hills that over- 
looked the sea, to the shepherd and his flocks, 
and to the starlings, of which even timid sheep 
were not afraid. 
The starlings that I have been watching are all 
old birds, as their plumage and the vigour and 
skill of their search for food all tell. They are not 
in quite as good condition as they will be in a few 
weeks’ time. Their domestic duties during the 
season have been arduous and long continued, and 
the weather lias tempted some of them, I really 
believe, to rear three families in the season. The 
neatness and burnished lustre of their feathering- 
have been interfered with, too, by their countless 
journeys in and out of the narrow crannies in which 
they have made their scrambling nests and reared 
their greedy young. But when the morning sun 
has caught them at the right angle their feathers 
have still looked beautiful, flecked as the bird is 
from beak to tail with its own peculiar markings, 
which though they do not look like stars, except 
collectively, have given him, as a friend declares, 
his Saxon name. 
At any, Nature has been thoughtful for 
the social position of my unpretentious friend, 
and has clad him, let us believe, for a pur- 
pose, in his suit of bountifully spangled, darkt 
rich watered silk. For otherwise the starling is not 
a handsome or an aristocratic bird. The lines on 
which he is built are not specially graceful. He 
has, too, a habit of shaking his feathers roughly out 
and leaving them so, and a further habit of open- 
ing his mouth and keeping it open; and when he 
indulges both habits at once he wears a very un- 
kemped and quite an uncanny appearance. He has 
no leisure and no variety in his movements, whe- 
ther he is in the air or on the ground. Of course he 
cannot help his appetite, which is insatiable from 
the time he quits his shell to the time he quits his 
place in nature; and it is this appetite of his 
which knocks all the aristocracy out of his charac- 
ter and his ways. 
See him as I have seen him this morning. Here 
he comes, with no variety in the rhythm of his 
labouring wings. There are no leaps and darts 
through the air; no graceful curves, impressing us 
as does the flight of many birds, with the sense of 
the joyous spirit that lives in nature, and makes 
mere existence an ecstasy. 
And now that he has alighted notice his utter dis- 
regard of deportment. Compared with his pad- 
dling trot along the turf the strut of that neiglibour- 
ingrook isstateliness itself. His hurrying impatience 
to find something to eat makes you feel that he 
sees nothing to admire, and has something distress- 
ful about it. Tt suggests hunger, ancl hunger sug- 
gest poverty, and poverty provokes— ought to pro- 
voke — pity. There is almost a tremble in his haste 
as he stabs tbe ground and bores it with his colour- 
ed bill, tapping, it seems, any likely and unlikely 
spot in the grass. Now he has dropped upon a grub; 
and, as if it were the first morsel that fortune 
had brought him in the hungry day, down goes 
the grub with a ravenous gulp, and the hasty 
search is instantly renewed. He robs himself of 
half the joy his fortune offers him by allowing 
himself no time to reflect upon it. His whole 
being is centred in finding and eating grubs. 
This, doubtless, is his useful place in Nature’s 
economic scheme; and right well he fills it. 
For this he is the farmer’s as well as the 
shepherd’s friend. 1 know that if need be he 
can eat grain, for I have seen him doing it this 
season; and last winter we had two of his class 
in the distressed company of birds that came to 
us for daily doles of meal and breadcrumbs. 
And the artist who has painted the picture in the 
present art Gallery Exhibition containing a very 
pretty, if a little too flattering portrait, of my 
friend “ going for ” a dish of cherries, scarcely 
does the starling an injustice, though a blackbird 
would have been more true to nature, and there- 
fore more true to art. 
But as a farmer I sometimes talk with says, 
“ grubs is the grubs for shepsters. ” And so, if I 
have been tempted, any time from my youth up 
until now, to look down upon the anxious, unlei- 
surely starling as a gluttonous, plebian bird, desti- 
tute of personal pride, and scarcely happy even 
