Magpies in Flight.
Magpies always seem .badly, suited to the business of flying for they have a top-heaviness that makes them pitch and dive in the air and sometimes they are not unlike fish. Their tails have a lot to do- with their seeming- lack of aerial balance and their wings are • overworked for-the progress made, and yet they can escape as swiftly as a sparrow hawk. I watched a family of six pitching out over the cliff on the side of which is the thorn scrub where the nest was built. They towered in the under-current 'of air and turned away round the rock face as 'though 'blown by the wind, as the 'jackdaws often do. The current obviously had an attraction for them for they returned to enjoy the use of their wings and tails and deVelop that ability so often shoWn by their kind when they sight a man in a field and swing back out of gun-range with astonishing speed. There was no doubt that the' six birds could see me, but they were uncon- cerned, 'sailing out over two hundred feet up and turning away with a spreading movement of their tails. I could think of nothing' so like the movement of turning and rising as that of a fish coming up out of an eddy and into the main stream for a brief moment or two.
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