Each of such “bird-mountains” is a living illustration of mutual aid, as well as of the infinite variety of characters, individual and specific, resulting from social life.  The oyster-catcher is renowned for its readiness to attack the birds of prey.  The barge is known for its watchfulness, and it easily becomes the leader of more placid birds.  The turnstone, when surrounded by comrades belonging to more energetic species, is a rather timorous bird; but it undertakes to keep watch for the security of the commonwealth when surrounded by smaller birds.  Here you have the dominative swans; there, the extremely sociable kittiwake-gulls, among whom quarrels are rare and short; the prepossessing polar guillemots, which continually caress each other; the egoist she-goose, who has repudiated the orphans of a killed comrade; and, by her side, another female who adopts any one’s orphans, and now paddles surrounded by fifty or sixty youngsters, whom she conducts and cares for as if they all were her own breed.  Side by side with the penguins, which steal one another’s eggs, you have the dotterels, whose family relations are so “charming and touching” that even passionate hunters recoil from shooting a female surrounded by her young ones; or the eider-ducks, among which (like the velvet-ducks, or the coroyas of the Savannahs) several females hatch together in the same, nest. or the lums, which sit in turn upon a common covey.  Nature is variety itself, offering all possible varieties of characters, from the basest to the highest:  and that is why she cannot be depicted by any sweeping assertion.  Still less can she be judged from the moralist’s point of view, because the views of the moralist are themselves a result—­mostly unconscious—­of the observation of Nature.

Coming together at nesting-time is so common with most birds that more examples are scarcely needed.  Our trees are crowned with groups of crows’ nests; our hedges are full of nests of smaller birds; our farmhouses give shelter to colonies of swallows; our old towers are the refuge of hundreds of nocturnal birds; and pages might be filled with the most charming descriptions of the peace and harmony which prevail in almost all these nesting associations.  As to the protection derived by the weakest birds from their unions, it is evident.  That excellent observer, Dr. Coues, saw, for instance, the little cliff-swallows nesting in the immediate neighbourhood of the prairie falcon (Falco polyargus).  The falcon had its nest on the top of one of the minarets of clay which are so common in the canons of Colorado, while a colony of swallows nested just beneath.  The little peaceful birds had no fear of their rapacious neighbour; they never let it approach to their colony.  They immediately surrounded it and chased it, so that it had to make off at once.(4)