The Jeweller’s Window One Of The Best Beloved Of Birds

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30082, 16 March 1963, Page 8

The Jeweller’s Window One Of The Best Beloved Of Birds

[SpectaUp written for “The Press" by ARNOLD WALL]

rpHE starling is one of the x beat beloved birds. He used to be called the “stare,” ana still is so in dialect, and his popularity is attested by the addition of the diminu-tive“-ling” which rhymes him with “darling.’’ He is no great singer but a very busy one, and he gets credit for the wonderful variety of his calls and cries, his babblings like running water, his imitations of other sounds, clicking of the beak and other indescribable vocables. He is the Mark Tapley of birds, always merry and bright even on the coldest of winter mornings. I have many cherished memories of this bird from my earliest acquaintance with nature. The egg is a beautiful pale unspotted blue. In one season I robbed a pair of starlings of five successive dutches of eggs laid in the same hole of a chestnut tree, and these 25 I blew and made into a necklace which I presented to my headmaster’s daughter to be worn to a dance. She put the necklace on, but I was not sure that she really wore it throughout the dance which I was much too young to attend. Anyhow, a unique adornment I feel sure.

Starlings have some curious habits; one is the assembly in vast numbers and performance of acrobatics before going to roost; another is frequent dropping of eggs anywhere but in the nest. Starlings do not pair for life as so many other birds are said to do. If disaster overtakes the husband the widow seems to be able to find No. 2 without delay as if some avian registry office were ready to supply her. On one occasion I had to visit the Half Moon Hutt on the Dillon river, a tributary of the .Clarence about 15 or 18 miles from Hanmer Springs. I was the first visitor to the hut since the previous autumn, and on entering it I found a starling's neat on a shelf with five half-grown nestlings in It; the hen bird entered and left by way of the chimney. On the floor of the hut were the dead bodies of six or seven cock starlings which had evidently come in by the chimney but were not clever enough to get out again as the hen did. I had to move the nest, as the bird was afraid to come in. I put the nest with the young into one of the dog kennels but the hen refused to recognise them and left them to die; what could I do? Sterne wrote of a starling which talked and repeated *T can’t get out” but I have never heard of a talking starling in these days and doubt whether this bird can learn to talk at all.

Wool-Gathering “Hackyng and Hemmyng as though our wittes and our senses were a woll-gather-yng.” Thus the dictionary illustrates by quotation the earliest known use of this old country idiom; it dates from 1553. so it has been current, with slight changes, for more than 400 years. It is an example of those homely rustical expressions which spring jo naturally to

the mind of the peasant (or his wife) and are apt to lose some of their savour when they move up unto “good society.” This one I should guess, was probably first struck off the flint by a woman rather than a man, for it relates to one of those tidying up or small-profit jobs which used to be relegated to the women and children, just like the gleaning of the grain in the cornfield after the harvesting. The image in the mind of the speaker was dear and familiar to him or her, the moving to and fro from briar bush to briar bush or hawthorn to hawthorn in an irregular wandering way to collect' the scrape of wool left by straying sheep. But to the modern farmer and his wife this image would not occur so naturally or vividly and the phrase, though still current, has lost much of its original freshness and vigour. How dull sounds the original definition “to indulge in wandering fancies or purposeless thinking” or the more pretentious “philosophical cerebration in the absence of sustained directional control” An amusing instance of the countryman’s natural use of the language of the farm in a figurative way was given me long ago by Professor W. W. Skeet, the great Cambridge lexicographer. A farmer had to sign his will and was instructed to put his name “on the dotted line.” It happened that the paper had been folded and left a deep crease just on the spot. The farmer said “Mun I sign in yon riggot?” “Riggot” is an old country word for a furrow. I suppose the farmer had some riggots in his forehead too.

Dissolute Stock Here is a gem that requires no polishing. In the newspaper the “New Zealander,” published in Auckland, appeared, on February 24, 1849, an advertisement as follows: “The advertiser has succeeded in perfecting the art of dissolving cattle, sheep, pigs etc. so as to extract entirely the tallow of these animals without depriving them of life—an art by which live stock will yield an unusual return surpassing anything before contemplated. Any gentleman who may return from California in the present year will find a most desirable investment for his capital.” Does anybody know, or can anybody guess, bow this ‘‘art” was practised? “A fortune awaits the man who etc, etc." —AW.