pretty for an English winter in its blue and yellow coat, also hasten
to the feast of the berries. I do not know whether, under the iron
reign of high prices, people have ceased to hang out coco-nuts in
their gardens for the blue-tits; at present, fortunately, the berries
are abundant, and it is pleasant to see a tit venture to the edge of
the road in quest of one and then fly off into hiding, like a thief,
with a red ball in his beak. A scarcely less pretty bird that one sees
flying across the road now and then with cries of alarm is the grey
wagtail. The grey wagtail, you probably know, is the wagtail that is
not grey. As it struggles and shrills through the sunny air, it seems
a delight mainly of yellow. Both its cries and its flight make one
think that it lives in constant terror of falling. It proceeds through
the air in a series of efforts and ups-and-downs, and its long tail
seems perpetually to threaten to misguide it into collapse. Down among
the rocks and in the fields near them, the real grey wagtails
abound--the pied wagtails, as they are called--with their white cheeks
and their less hysterical voices that greet one in passing with a
pleasant little "Cheerio!" As they alight from the air beside a
puddle, they indulge in a little prance as though they were trying to
cut a figure of eight on nothing or were essaying in some manner to
sweep their tails out of way. Their whole existence, however, is a
dance. Whether they pick their food from the rocks or in a field of
cows, the alert head and jerking tail are never still, but are
nervously ready for flight almost before the hint of danger. And they
have usually with them as nervous companions the rock-pipits, charming
little tight-skinned, low-crowned birds that hurry off wavily through
the air, reiterating their solitary note of fear as they fly. The
starlings, which seemed to disappear for a time, have now returned to
the fields near the sea. They have left their wonderful sheen
somewhere behind them, and are mottled and plebeian. Still, to see a
cloud of them alighting in a field at the end of a swift circle of
flight is a pretty enough spectacle.
The evolutions of cavalry and still more of aeroplanes are elementary
compared to this. Close-packed as they are, a thousand of them will
wheel in order without an accident and alight each on his own patch of
ground with the easy grace of acrobats. It is only when they have
found their feet that the disorder begins. Whether it is worms or
insects or verdure they seek among the grazing cows, there is
evidently little enough to go round, and starling fights starling with
peck and protest all over the field. It is a scene of civil war, save
that the birds do not form themselves into sides but each wrestles
with its neighbour at random. But, after all, they are very hungry.
They cluster ravenously on the green patches, even on the sides of the
old stone walls. They have evidently not had the economic question
settled for them as the cows have.
Luckily, other birds are either less desperate or more pacific by
nature. The stone-chat as he flits from bramble to bramble in his
black cap, white collar, and red bib is a bird of charming behaviour
as well as of charming colour. There is nothing in him at discord with
these rainbow days. For stormy as they are, the days are rainbow days
to an astonishing extent. Seldom have I seen such a violence of
rainbows. The colours almost startle one, like a courting ape's. Every
passing shower builds an arch of the seven colours like a palace on
the sea. Then it draws near till the foot of the rainbow stands a few
yards below over the breaking waves. Sea-birds sail through it, and,
if a pot of gold is really to be found at the end of it, I must often
lately have been within touching distance of a fortune.... At night,
Jupiter--it is Jupiter, is it not? that hangs in the V of Aldebaran
about eight or nine in the evening just now--stills the world to
wonder as the rainbow does by day. He is so splendid a fire as to seem
almost solitary, even when the moon is shining. A few evenings ago, he
shed a path of light over the sea as the moon does, and seemed to
light up the sands on the far side of the bay.... It is undoubtedly a
blasted world, but what a beautiful blasted world! It is a pity that
we and the starlings are so belly-driven that we cannot settle down to
enjoy it. Peck, peck. My worm, I think. Peck, peck, peck.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Pleasures of Ignorance, by Robert Lynd