Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/272

 bid his final farewell to life, on November 10, in the same year, at the age of seventy-six.

Speaking of Well Vale, I think I have seen and heard more starlings collected together in a young larch plantation there than I ever came across at once elsewhere. The only multitude of birds at all comparable to it was the army of cranes I have seen covering half a mile or more of sandbank in the Nile, near Komombos, while clouds of them kept dropping from the sky. They have black wings and white bodies, so that aloft they looked black, but standing on the sandbank as close as they could pack they looked all white.

But to return to our starlings. It is a very curious thing this massing of countless thousands of these birds amongst the osiers in the fenny parts of the county, or in some of the plantations in the Wolds. If you take your stand about sunset near one of these, when the wood pigeons, after much noisy flapping of their wings, have settled down to rest, a loud whirring noise will make you look up to see the sky darkened by a cloud of these birds, which will be only the advance portion of the multitudes that will quickly be converging from all sides to their roosting quarters. They have been feeding in many places, often at a considerable distance; but each night they assemble, and for a quarter of an hour or more the noise of their chattering and fluttering as each successive flight comes in will be indescribable. If a disturbing noise is made, myriads will rise with one loud rush, but nothing will prevent their return and, when the noise and movement has at length subsided, the trees will be black with their living load, which will sleep till sunrise, and then again disperse for the day in quest of food, returning every night for several weeks, till the call of spring scatters them for good.