WYCHWOOD STARLINGS
By Loan OLIVEER.
OUR starlings' army is quite orthodox in its organization. Its units are progressively the platoon, the company, the battalion, the regiment, the division, and the nightly-assembled host. Its basis is .territorial. The platoon is the annual family, the old birds with two broods, or perhaps only one. When both broods are fledged the joint family caverages about ten. These platoons keep together right through the winter up to the next breeding season, but they are incomplete in the early summer and are enrolled into larger units, more permanently coherent. The broods reared in groups of adjacent buildings, such as a farmstead, combine into companies, generally about 80 to 100 in number but often more.
During the nesting season there are always unmated starlings about, independent swaggering cock-birds, and possibly some, presumably sterile, hens. While the young are in the nest, their parents are too busy feeding them to go out with the rooks and the jackdaws, as these bachelors continue to do. The industry of the nursing cock and hen while the broods are growing is truly prodigious. They dash hurriedly out and return every few minutes, always with grubs in their beaks. .I see them arrive again and again, each bringing back, every time, two leather-jackets (daddy-longlegs grubs). How they find them so quickly and what they do with the first one while they are ferreting up the second out of the grass- roots is a problem I still hope to explore through field glasses.
While the second broods are still in the nests the first are already at school, in cadet companies, with their uncles and aunts, among the high-browed dons and black-gowned undergraduates of the rookery and their croupy jackdaw scouts, in their daily field foraging. I think the society of our village rooks is the central attraction, the Depot Headquarters rendezvous of our local starling regiment, which appears to consist of three battalions, one big battalion clearly belonging to, Ramsden, another I surmise to Halley, down the road, and a smaller one to Pofiley End (I always wonder who Palley was). The battalion reflects the village, and runs from eight to twelve companies-700 or 800 to 1,500 birds. By midsummer, drill is in full swing every evening. The elder fledglings, with a small proportion of those old Staff Majors and Company Sergeants and latch-key spinsters I spoke of, beat to and fro in companies and battalions over some open fallow, being taught mass-manoeuvring. Companies separate from the pack as it wheels and settles and rises and wheels again, stream up into an oak tree and perch, chatter a minute or two, then simultaneously cease their gossip, whirr out again and slide back into their battalion. There is doubtless deliberate leadership and tuition by the older birds : the company seems to be the unit of drill. Many of the platoons, as one sees them outside of the pack, consist at this time of young birds only.
It cannot be a simple and automatic affair for 2,000 or 8,000 young birds, sometimes flying, evidently, as fast as ever they can, close together, with stoutish, solid bodies and short, whirring wings, to keep their distances and act all together on the sign of command without collision between individuals or one company wheeling across another's flight. They dash along the field, swirl, wheel and toss upwards the fringes of the bee-like swarm, rushing round on the outer circuit, the inner files circling slower, all banking to a sudden turn like one bird, the under sides of their wings and bodies gleaming silvery grey-brown in the sinking sunlight. I suppose they are marshalled partly by those penetrating, very high- pitched boatswains' whistle notes of the old male starling, partly by their own lightning-quick eyesight, partly by intuitions of nearness and distance and of their leaders' intentions to which their directing nerves react as, sympathetically as to a contact.
In winter the platoons still haunt their native gardens and fields, but are much more about with the rooks all day in their regiment or abroad in companies that roost in the army bivouack, wherever that may be stationed. Some old ones, singly or in pairs, come back now and then to have a look at their home-roof and sit importantly on the gable end or the chimney. Last November, in that fine warm weather which brought out many silly spring flowers, one of our pairs spent a giddy week-end poking about their old nest-hole, whistling, chattering, waddling about side by side and otherwise comporting themselves quite unseasonably. Snow disillusioned them.
Early last February the Army camp was transferred to a stretch of thickety land just this side of Wychwood Forest. Our Ramsden regiment mustered every evening in trees in front of our windows, one very high big elm from which you must have a good view of the forest ridge, and several lower ones near it. They collected into the trees, some in platoons which happened to have been feeding in fields close by, but mostly arriving in companies. The Halley and Poffley End battalions came in in larger. masses. By established prescription the Ramsden batta- lion first concentrated into a dense black mass in the biggest elm and about ten minutes before sunset stood dumb to attention and swarmed off straight to the ridge. Then the Halley battalion gathered itself up out of the other trees into the big one and in its turn took flight, and then the Poffley Enders. If any straggling companies or platoons arrived later they just perched and then followed up to the bivouack.
About fifty years ago, Wychwood Forest was " enclosed " and its outskirts of sticky glacial drift and intractable Oxford clay were lotted out to commoners in compensation for their deprivation of rights of pasture and wood. A belt of detestable soil along the new forest boundary was cleared, and being entirely worthless has now reverted to waste, densely covered with hawthorns and gorse. Up to five feet from the ground all is massive prickly tangle, with rabbit runs under it, above that level the hawthorn stems stand straight up with branching twigs, and are not very thorny. The land gathers down- wards north-westerly into a dell of the forest. Into this wide- depression, sheltered north, east and south by the- crest of the watershed, battalions, regiments, divisions, sweep in over the hill top, bank, wheel, and drop in clouds with a whirr of arresting wing-beats on to the hawthorns; each bird with just wing room between him and his neighbours. The rustling whistling chatter of thousands shrills hissingly into the ears like the sound of dragging surf over shingle, or the splashing of a high waterfall broken on rocks. Belated single companies come dashing over the rim, swiftly as arrows—small long shuttle shaped flocks scurrying on springy-pointed broad pinions, planing down, keeping their distances as stiffly as the blacks on a chessboard (the company drill is wonderful), then suddenly all bringing themselves to a standstill upright in the air and sinking with quiet flutterings down into their places.
Some companies or battalions get the word to shift : the chatter drops suddenly dead : and they rise with a rumbling roar like the sound of Atlantic rollers breaking on Cornish coasts. Gradually they settle to silence. Stray couples who have been on courting excursions re-sort themselves.
I watched them at daybreak about a week before the army-camp dispersed, sitting quiet enough for even the rabbits not to mind me. They are not so conversational in the morning as in the evening. They showed against the pallid sky in the tops of the thorns like great black fruits, their heads all set one way. Before sunrise a few single companies—possibly those which arrived late at night, coming from far, or enrolled in no battalion, began first to slip off in the twilight. With the same all-at-onceness as they had settled, they ceased their twittering, sprang suddenly with a flutter clear of the twigs, and dashed off at an astonishing starting pace in their elongated company formation, out of sight in half a minute.
Just about sunrise the whole thicket simultaneously thundered and the host towered suddenly upwards into the air, spreading mushroom-shaped at the summit, like the smoke of an exploded mine. Clear of the forest ridge the army deployed—it seemed at first a little confusedly—battalions and regiments wheeling round and crossing over and under each other. The whole evolution was so dazzlingly rapid that it was hard to see what was happening, but distinguishably they went north, east and south in three main divisions, one to the watershed north of the Evenlode, one to that between the Evenlode and the Windrush and the other beyond the Windrush towards the Thames Valley. No division started westward over the Forest.
Very few birds set off with the wrong division. Those that had done so came diving headlong back, alone or in pairs. Did these latter represent last-moment elopements across divisional frontiers ? The pack broke up next week : dwindling to nothing in two or three days time.
These habits of assemblage promote exogamy. Cross- pairing is facilitated between platoons, companies, battalions and even divisions. But the cadres of the whole formation, from the platoon-parents upwards, remain continuous and revert to their habitats, the breeders to their old nesting haunts, the celibates to the admired society of their local rookery and its jackdaw snobbery. The elements of the army are transmuted year by year, but it keeps perennially its tribal and territorial 'character.
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