better—for that one. Such fights as these are usually between two male birds, but hen chaffinches sometimes fight, whilst scuffles between a cock and a hen over food may also be witnessed.
Greenfinches fight in much the same manner, but they are more stoutly built, and their motions are not quite so brisk and airy, though chaffinches themselves are but clumsy birds in this respect compared to many others—larks, for example. They, too, fight tenaciously. After a brisk partie in the air, I have seen one, on their falling together, seize the other by the nape and be dragged about by it over the snow.
But what has interested me more than anything else in my frequent watchings of small birds congregated together at the stacks, is the way in which every few minutes or so—sometimes at longer, and sometimes at shorter intervals—they take instant and simultaneous flight, rising all together[1] with a sudden whirr of wings, and flurrying away to some near tree or trees, or into the hedgerow, to return in a much more scattered and gradual manner very soon—sometimes almost directly afterwards. These sudden spontaneous flights, where one and the same thought seems suddenly to take possession of a whole assembly of beings, I had before, and have often afterwards, observed in rooks, starlings, wood-pigeons, etc., and I have been equally puzzled to account for it in all of them. I do not remember that this habit, which is, indeed, common in a greater or less degree to a very great number of birds, has ever been brought
- ↑ This is the effect produced, but for greater accuracy see p. 245.
