One afternoon, when the month was all but at its end, I came home through
the riverside meadows. The sun had just dipped below the misty
earth-line. Before me, in the east, the darkness was spreading up the
sky, and the larger stars already shone with something of their nightly
lustre. But behind me it was still day. From the horizon upward, and
far overhead, the sky was a pale, luminous turquoise, overflecked with
cloud of fiery amber—the two colours a perfect harmony of cold and heat.
As I trod the narrow field-path, facing the dusk, with all that glorious
enmity reconciled at my back, I became aware of a mysterious sound
somewhere in the chain of tree-girt meadows on ahead. A missel-thrush
had been singing hard by, but now his clarion had ceased, and this other
far-away note forced me suddenly out of my musing. It was not a single
song, but a deep, continuous outpouring, a medley of music like the
splashing and tumbling of mountain brooks. With every step forward it
grew in volume. At last, in a belt of elm-trees that bordered one of the
farthest fields, I came upon the cause of it; and though I had many times
seen vast congregations of starlings, I had never before encountered so
huge a company as now met my gaze.
The trees stretched across the entire field, and every twig on every
branch had its perching songster, the combined effect being as though the
trees had suddenly shot out a magic foliage, coal-black against the
deepening blue of the sky, heavy and thick as leaves in June. Now the
mountain brooks had swollen to Niagaras. The hubbub was literally
deafening. I shouted my loudest, hoping to set the gargantuan host to
flight, but I could scarce hear my own voice. For a full ten minutes I
stood in that great flood-tide of melody, and all the time fresh
detachments of birds were continually arriving to swell the multitude,
and add their voices to the chorus. At length I saw two birds break away
from the mass, and fly straight off side by side. Immediately the tumult
ceased, and there followed a sound like the long, rumbling roll of
thunder. The whole concourse had taken wing together, the tree-tops,
released from their weight, lashing back as though struck by a flaw of
wind. Now the army swept over my head, darkening the sky as it went.
The thunderous sound grew less and less as the flock made for the distant
woods. A moment more, and an uncanny silence had fallen on everything.
Then, half a mile away in the misty dark, I heard the rich, wild voice
peal out again, where the starling host had taken up their quarters for
the night.
Thus it happened every evening for a week after, when they passed on out
of the district and I saw them no more. Probably no single stretch of
country could support such incredible numbers for more than a few days
together, and they must be for ever trekking onward, leaving behind them
a famine-stricken land, and making life all the harder for our own native
birds. For there is little doubt that these vast hordes of starlings
that sweep the country-side in winter, are foreigners in the main.