Who can recount what transmigrations there
Are annual made? what nations come and go?
And how the living clouds on clouds arise?
Infinite wings! till all the plume-dark air
And rude resounding shore are one wild cry."
"He rained flesh upon them as dust, and feathered fowls like as the sand of the sea."—Psalm lxxviii.
1327. Most terrestrial birds, unacquainted with man, exhibit a remarkable tameness, and are slow in acquiring a dread of him, even after repeated lessons that danger is to be apprehended from his neighbourhood. Mr. Darwin speaks of a gun as almost superfluous in the unfrequented districts of South America, for with its muzzle he pushed a hawk off the branch of a tree. Once, while lying down, a mocking thrush alighted on the edge of a pitcher, made of the shell of a tortoise, which he was holding in his hand, and began very leisurely to sip the water, even allowing him to handle it while seated on the vessel. In Charles Island, which had been colonised about six years, he saw a boy sitting by a well with a switch in his hand, with which he killed the doves and finches as they came to drink; and for some time had been constantly in the habit of waiting by the well for the same purpose, to provide himself with his dinners. In the Falkland Islands, at Bourbon, and at Tristan d'Acunha, the same tameness was noticed by the early visitors. On the other hand, the small birds in the arctic regions of America, which have never been persecuted, exhibit the anomalous fact of great wildness. From a review of various facts, Mr. Darwin concludes, "first, that the wildness of birds with regard to man is a particular instinct directed against him, and not dependent on any general degree of caution arising from other sources of danger; secondly, that it is not acquired by individual birds in a short time, even when much persecuted; but that in the course of successive generations it becomes hereditary. Comparatively few young birds in any one year have been injured by man in England, yet almost all, even nestlings, are afraid of him; many individuals, however, both at the Galapagos and at the Falklands, have been pursued and injured by man, but yet have not learned a salutary dread of him."