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Updated: June 17, 2025
"True enough," answered Ella, "but they loved each other." Her eyes glowed; Cecilie lowered hers and blushed. Ella took her hand and pressed it. "I tumbled into a love-story there," she thought, and flew, rather than walked, up to the villas, where most of her pupils lived. On a roof she saw two starlings; the first that year. The thaw of a few days back had deceived them.
The noise kept them off, but many would dodge in, and even if a gun was fired close to them the blackbirds would snatch a cherry and carry it off to the wood. That didn't matter a few cherries here and there didn't count. The starlings were the worst robbers: if you didn't scare them they would strip a tree and even an orchard in a few hours.
But in the blackest days of winter, when frost binds the ground hard as iron, the starlings return to the roof almost every day; they do not whistle much, but have a peculiar chuckling whistle at the instant of alighting.
It is probable that this use of the bird for sport caused people to eat it, and so common did the habit become that at the end of summer, or before the end, shooting starlings for the pot was practised everywhere. Old men in the country have told me that forty or fifty years ago it was common to hear people on the farms say that of all birds the starling was the best to eat.
It happens that I am writing this chapter in a small village on Salisbury Plain, the time being mid-September 1909, and that just outside my door there is a group of old elder-bushes laden just now with clusters of ripe berries on which the starlings come to feed, filling the room all day with that never-ending medley of sounds which is their song.
The yellow leaves were fluttering about the school play-ground, the starlings were gathering in flocks on the church roof to take their departure, and Ulrich would fain have gone with them, no matter where. He could not feel at home in the monastery and among his companions.
Thousands of them, borne along in a dance of this kind, advance with the beflustered, orderly air of a procession of starlings. The world ceases to be a universal grave. It is at the very least a dance and a dust-storm.
Little did I know then that ere long their fate would be his own, and that a mother's hand would deal it out to him. They caught sight of me seated beneath the tree, and chattered like startled starlings, till at length Nicephorus understood. "What say you, dear brothers?" he asked, "that the new governor of the prison is seated yonder? Well, why should we fear him?
Why leave these places to the Sparrows, the Grackles, and perhaps the Starlings, when Bluebirds and Thrushes are within hail, eager to come if the hand of invitation be extended?
The guard on horseback coming ahead, we heard the king was in the park. We went in, but did not see him; but walking through we saw his curiosities of birds which he kept there in cages slightly enough closed, such as eagles, cranes, a very large owl, a toucan, birds which we call hoontjen in Friesland, virviteaus, doves, starlings, and others of little importance.
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