Bird Facts I cannot resist a lucky dip into some
of the facts given for the general reader in Watching Birds. Like flowers, birds interest the most unexpected people; and so " Among those I know are a Prime Minister, a Secretary of State, a charwoman, two police- men, two kings, one ex-king, five Communists, one Fascist, two Labour, one Liberal and six Conservative Members of Parlia- ment, the chairinan of a County Council, several farm labourers earning thirty shillings a week, a rich man who earns four or five times that amount in every hour of the day, and at least forty-six schoolmasters." The number of species of birds in the world is quite small: only twenty-eight thousand, as opposed to three-quarters of a million insects, to which entomologists add another ten thousand each year. (There are about 200,000 species of flowering plants.) A swan may have twenty-five bones in the neck—a giraffe only seven. The most destructive bird in England is (as often pointed out in this column) the wood-pigeon ; the most beneficial the robin.
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