It is appropriate that this eulogy of the starling should appear in a Newcastle paper, for Bewick when residing there always regretted the absence of these birds from the town, and hoped that they might in time become numerous, as in the South and West. Starlings are such intelligent, interesting, and really remarkable birds that if they were rare they would be among the most prized of pets. Their open-air vocal performances are quite as remarkable as their latest admirer says. They are the British mocking-birds, able, when and if they choose, to reproduce almost any form of song. They do this partly, no doubt, because their throats are adaptable, but more from temperament and a kind of objective mind not very common in birds. Like parrots, starlings are given to spending a good deal of every fine morning in contemplating other people, including other birds, and then in thinking them over, or talking them over to themselves. Any one who is sitting or working quietly near a room where a parrot is in its cage alone can fairly follow the train of thought in the parrot's mind. It is evidently recalling episodes or things which form part of its daily mental experiences. It begins by barking like the dog, then remembers the dog's mistress, and tells it to be quiet, as she does. Then it hears the housemaid, and imitates a window-sash being let down, or some phrase it has picked up in the servants' quarters. If it has been lately struck with some new animal noise or unusual sound, it will be heard practising that. Starlings do exactly the same thing. When the sun begins to be hot on any fine day, summer or winter, the cock bird goes up usually alone, to a sunny branch, gable, or chimney, and there indulges in a pleasant reverie, talking aloud all the time. Its own modes of utterance are three. One is a melodious whistle, rather low and soft; another is a curious chattering, into which it introduces as many "clicks" as a Zulu talking his native language; and the third is a short snatch of song, either its own, or one which has become a national anthem or morning hymn common to all starlings, though it may originally have been a "selection" from other birds' notes. Then, or amongst the rest of the ordinary notes, the starling inserts or practises its accomplishments. Not all starlings do this, and only a few attain great eminence in that line. Obviously it is only personal feeling that induces them to do it, and they get no encouragement from other starlings, though when kept in cages, as they very seldom are now, and rewarded and taught, they might develop the most striking talents. It should be added that, like all good bird-mimics, they are ventriloquists. They can reproduce perfectly the sound of another bird's note, not as that bird utters it, but as it is heard, faint and low, softened by distance. They can also sing over bars of bird-songs in a low tone perfectly correctly, and repeat them in a high one.
To give a rather striking example. Last spring the writer was in the Valley of the Eden, opposite Eden-hall. The vale is a wide one, and on the north-east side are high fells, Cross Fell among others. On these the curlews breed, and occasionally fly right over the valley at a great height to the hills above Edenhall, uttering their long, musical call. When heard, this call is generally uttered several hundred feet above the valley. A curlew was heard flying above, and repeating its cry, but was not discernible. Again the call was heard, but no curlew seen, though such a large bird must have been visible. In the line of sound was a starling sitting on a chimney-pot. Again the curlew called, the long-drawn notes sounding from exactly the same place in the sky. It was the starling, reproducing with perfect accuracy the call, as it was used to hear it from the high-flying curlews crossing the valley. Apparently the tradition that they were good talkers has died out in rural England. It was always one of the firm beliefs of East Anglia that if a starling's tongue were slit with a thin sixpence it would learn to talk at once, but that otherwise it would only mimic other birds. The operation, like most other traditional brutalities, was absolutely unnecessary. Talking starlings were common enough, and must have been for many years previous to the time when they were no longer valued as cage-birds. Has not Sterne in his "Sentimental Journey" immortalised the poor bird whose one and leading sentiment, had he been able to find words for it, was "I can't get out! I can't get out!"?
From early spring until after midsummer the starlings have young broods in more varied places and positions than probably any other birds in England. They like the homes of men, and build with equal pleasure in thatched roofs, under tiles, in the eaves and under the leads of churches (though a recent edict by the Bench of Bishops has forbidden them the towers by causing wire netting to be placed over the louvre boards), and also in places the most remote from mankind. In the most solitary groves on Beaulieu Heath, under the ledges of stark Cornish precipices, and in ruins on islets in mountain lochs in Scotland, they tend their hungry nestlings with the same assiduous care. The good done by the starlings throughout the spring, summer, and autumn is incalculable. The young are fed entirely on insect food, and as the birds always seek this as close to home as possible, they act as police to our gardens and meadows. They do a little mischief when nesting and in the fruit season, partly because they have ideas. It was alleged recently that they picked off the cherry blossoms and carried them off to decorate their nests with. Later they are among the most inveterate robbers of cherry orchards and peckers of figs, which they always attack on the ripest side. But they have never developed a taste for devouring corn, like the rice-birds and starlings of the United States. They have a good deal in common with those bright, clever, and famous mimics, the Indian mynahs, which they much resemble physically. This was the bird which Bontius considered "went one better" than Ovid's famous parrot:--
"Psittacus, Eois quamvis tibi missus ab oris
Jussa loquar; vincit me sturnus garrulus Indis."
The mynahs have also the starling's habit of building in houses, and especially in temples. There is a finish about the mynah's and the starling's mimicry which certainly beats that of the parrots.
In their attendance on sheep and cattle the starlings have another creditable affinity. They are very like the famous rhinoceros-birds of Africa, to which also they are related. The rhinoceros-birds always keep in small flocks, every member of which sits on the back of the animal, whether antelope, buffalo, or rhinoceros, on which it is catching insects. The starlings do not keep so closely to the animal's body, though they frequently alight on the back of a sheep or cow and run all over it. But when seeking insect food among cattle the little groups of starlings generally keep in a pack and attend to a single animal. Mr. J.G. Millais, watching deer in a park with his glasses, saw a starling remove a fly from the corner of a deer's eye. When they have run round it, and over it, and caught all the flies they can there, they rise with a little unanimous exclamation, and fly on to the next beast. Their winter movements are also interesting. By day they associate with other birds, mainly with rooks. Gilbert White thought they did this because the rooks had extra nerves in their beaks, and were able to act as guides to the smaller birds searching for invisible food. Probably it is only due to the sociable instinct. Towards night they nearly always repair in innumerable flocks to some favourite roosting-place, either a reed-bed or a wood of evergreens, where they assemble in thousands. One of these communal sleeping-places is the duck island in St. James's Park. In hard weather they feed on the saltings and round the shore, especially where rotten seaweed abounds, with great quantities of insect life in it. At such times they roost in the crevices of the great sea cliffs. Under Culver Cliff, for instance, they may be seen flying along the shore and coming in to bed in the frost fog with the cormorants and other fishers of the deep.
[FLOWERS OF THE GRASS FIELDS]
Just before hay-time, the crowning glory of the Thames-side flats is given by the flowers growing in the grass. Their setting, among the uncounted millions of green grass stems, appeals not only by the contrast of colour, but by the sense of coolness and content which these sheltered and softly bedded blossoms suggest. The meadows which they adorn are best-loved of all the fields of England; but they would never be as dear to Englishmen as they are were it not for the flowers which deck them. The blossoms and plants found in the tall grasses differ from those on lawns and grazing pastures. They are taller, more delicate, and of a more graceful growth. The daisy, so dear to pastoral poets, is not a flower of the hayfield. The myriads of springing stems choke the daisy flowers, which love to lie low, on their flat and shallow-rooted stars of leaves. The daisy is a lawn plant that loves low turf, and only in early spring on the pasture-fields does it whiten the unmown grasses. The turf glades of the New Forest, grazed short by cattle for eight hundred years, are very properly called "lawns"; and on these the daisies grow in thousands, showing that they are true lawns, and not grassfields mown yearly by the scythe. What makes a flower of the grasses it is difficult to say. Bulbs flourish among them, and clovers, trefoils, and vetch. White ox-eye daisies love the grass, and many orchids, and in shady places white cow-parsley, and blue wild geraniums, and all the buttercups. Others, like the yellow snapdragon and the scarlet poppy, will have none of it, but love a dry and dusty fallow or a cornfield that has run to waste, shimmering with heat and drought. Up the valley of the Pang, you may see acres of poppies on a fallow as scarlet as a field-marshal's coat, and not one in the meadows by the stream. Even before the sheltering grass stems shoot upward and around them, drawing all the flower-life skywards as trees draw other trees upright towards the light, there are plants which are found only growing in the meadows, springing from the turf carpet, and happy in no other setting. Chief of these are the wild daffodils or Lent-lilies, the ornaments of old orchards and of the green meadows of Devon and the Isle of Wight. Why they, like the snowdrops, and in other parts of Europe the narcissi, should choose the turf in which to flower, instead of the woods, where grass does not grow, is one of the secrets of the flower-world. So, too, the wild hyacinths grow not in the meadows, though the fritillaries, the chequered red or pale "snake flowers," are grass-lovers, and grow only in the alluvial meadows by the streams and brooks of the valleys. Early though the fritillaries are, they are a real "grass flower," flourishing best where there is some early succulent growth around them, for they like the shelter so given. This they enjoy even early in the year, because their favourite home is in meadows over which flood-waters run in winter, and there the grass grows fast. With the cowslip comes the early common orchis, with its red-purple flower, and later the masses of buttercups, and the ox-eye daisies. Both these flowers are increasing in our meadows, the former to the detriment of the grass itself, and to the loss of the butter-makers, for the cows will not eat the buttercups' bitter stems. Like the ox-eye daisy, the buttercup is a typical meadow flower, tall, so that it tops the grasses and catches the sun in its petals, thin-foliaged, for no real grass-growing flower has broad or remarkable leaves, and with a habit of deep, underground growth far below the upper surface of the matted grass roots. You cannot easily pull up a buttercup root, or that of any flower of the meadows. The stems break first, for they draw their sustenance from a deep stratum of earth. Most of the meadow flowers and blossoms in the mowing grass belong to the beautiful, rather than to the useful, order of plants. They are fitted to weave a garland from rather than to distil into simples and potions. As Gerard says of the butterfly orchis, "there is no great use of these in physicke, but they are chiefly regarded for the pleasant and beautiful flowers wherewith Nature hath seemed to play and disport herselfe." Herein they differ from the roadside plants and the blossoms of waste-lands and woods, for these, especially the former, swell the list of the medicinal plants, the garden not of Flora, but of Aesculapius. It is these which have been gathered for centuries by the wise men and wise women of the villages from the Apennines to Exmoor, while, if we may infer from the story of agriculture, the flowers of the grassfields are in a sense modern and artificial. They owe their numbers to the discovery of the art of haymaking. Before men learnt to cut, dry, and stack hay, which, after fermenting partly in the stacks under pressure, becomes a manufactured food, it may be concluded that there were no such flower-spangled fields, in this country at least, as now form such a striking feature of rural England. Cattle and sheep wandered all over the common pastures, and ate the grass down, or trampled it under foot. Consequently, it never grew long, or formed the protecting bed in which the flowers now lie, and many of the meadow plants could seldom have flowered at all. The hungry cattle would graze down all the soft, juicy young buds and leaves, wandering at will over the valleys, under charge only of the herdsman. When haymaking became general the cattle were confined in spring and early summer, and the fields of "mowing grass" appeared, and nourished year by year the plants peculiar to this form of cultivation. The proof that this is so may be seen in the New Forest. There the private fields, carefully protected during the spring, from the tread or bite of cattle, and mown yearly in the summer, have all the wealth of flowers peculiar to our hay-meadows. Outside, in the forest itself, these flowers hardly exist, except by some pool-side, or on the meadow-like border of a bog. They are only natural in the second sense, because our mowing grass is a natural product of enclosed ground, when cattle are excluded. Some flowers just invade the meadows, venturing out a few yards from the hedges or woods, but never spreading broadcast over the sun-warmed central acres. Such are the blue bird's-eye, which just colours the mowing grass in shady spots and patches near the fence, and occasionally the bee-orchis and the butterfly-orchis. The latter does not grow tall in the meadows as it does in the woods, but affects a humbler growth. Blue wild geraniums also flourish in patches in the meadows, and sometimes cranesbill and campion. But campions do not seed well among the thick grasses and seldom hold their own, as they do where a copse has been cut down, or on a hedgeside. And, though it is not a flower, there is the "quaking grass" beloved of children, though useless as cattle food, and a sign of bad pasturage, but the only grass which cottage people gather to keep, as a memento of the hayfields.