MOORHEN.
" . . . that quaint, graceful, jetting gait."
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of green turf, deftly picking minute insects from the grass and not disdaining crumbs thrown by the children. A dainty thing to look at is that smooth, olive-brown little moor-hen, going about with such freedom and ease in its small dominion, lifting its green legs deliberately, turning its yellow beak and shield this way and that, and displaying the snow-white undertail at every step, as it moves with that quaint, graceful, jetting gait peculiar to the gallinules.
Such a fact as this--and numberless facts just as significant all pointing to the same conclusion, might be adduced--shows at once how utterly erroneous is that often-quoted dictum of Darwin's that birds possess an instinctive or inherited fear of man. These moor-hens fear him not at all; simply because in Hyde Park they are not shot at, and robbed of their eggs or young, nor in any way molested by him. They fear no living thing, except the irrepressible small dog that occasionally bursts into the enclosure, and hunts them with furious barkings to their reedy little refuge. And as with these moor-hens, so it is with all wild birds; they fear and fly from, and suspiciously watch from a safe distance, whatever molests
198 BIRDS IN TOWN AND VILLAGE
them, and wherever man suspends his hostility towards them they quickly outgrow the suspicion which experience has taught them, or which is traditional among them; for the young and inexperienced imitate the action of the adults they associate with, and learn the suspicious habit from them.