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"THE "lynching" of one of their kind by Common Mynahs and Jungle Babblers, and the execution of a Crow by crows, have been reported in the correspondence columns of The Statesman recently, and an explanation invited. The resigned passiveness of the victims has been remarked and a comparison to courts of justice suggested.

I have read similar reports of avian tribunals but shall not refer to them as the "court of justice" is bad, both in fact as in law. I do not object to the comparison because there is no considered justice in these assaults by birds on one of their feather. No serious student of jurisprudence will pretend that rabid injustice has not been dispensed at human judicial tribunals. There have been many bloodthirsty courts in our history where procedure was a farce and everyone knew the verdict before trial opened, but they were content to pronounce the sentence - its execution was left to others.

"I'll be judge, I'll be jury,"
said the cunning old Fury:
"I'll try the whole cause
and condemn you to death!"

Lewis Carroll tactfully refrains from what Fury did to the mouse. It is as one interested in law, not as a naturalist, that I object to the comparison!

AN EXPLANATION GOES

Having made this helpful contribution, I make another as a naturalist this time. No explanation can cover all intraspecific attacks of individuals by groups, in gregarious birds. Such attacks are known among gregarious mammals also, but are most often noticed in birds. In the old days a moralistic explanation was sometimes advanced that it was a punishment of the culprit by plebiscite, intended to secure social welfare. We know now that birds are quite incapable of moralistic thought or self-conscious appreciation of communal good. That explanation must go.

My point is not that there can be no explanation; there can be many. But first we must consider what we know of avian social life, for in trying to explain these attacks we are trying to understand bird behaviour better than birds themselves.

Clearly no question of sexual motive or extraspecific hostility is involved in these attacks. Crows and Mynahs are intelligent as birds go, but we can safely rule out the motive of conscious punishment of a crime. Birds have no critical intelligence. In fact, their social life is totally independent of an intellectual comprehension of rights and duties. Is it because of their freedom from imposition of the carping, petty, analytical intelligence that rules our lives so inexorably that we find birds fascinating?

EMOTIONAL LANGUAGE

In a bird clan social function and communications depend largely on patterned urges and responses, which may be visual, vocal, tactile or based on some other sense perception. But we do not imagine for a moment that because communication is not based on intelligence but on instinctive and emotional gestures birds are automatons. On the contrary, so many circumstances condition this "emotional language" (as Dr.Tinbergen puts it), so personal and intimate can these expressions and reactions be that no scientific observer can deny the existence of a bird mind capable of much varied and sensitive apprehension. Thanks to the recent work of scientific naturalists, the idea that birds (and even lesser animals) are automatons whose lives are merely a chain of rigid, mechanical actions has been fully exploded.

Certain of these responses are released by specific "gestures" (I use the term loosely to indicate both visual and acoustic signals), called "releasers". Releasers are of special value in the social behaviour of animals, particularly in their intraspecific fighting where they may serve to promote or inhibit hostile effort. In gregarious birds, these gestures often become highly personalised and are used only between birds knowing one another. Let me quote Tinbergen on this point: "Not all communication, however, is based on releasers; there are certain complications. As we have seen, many social animals respond to species' social releasers only when provided by certain individuals, which they know personally. In such cases, personal connections, established through learning processes, confine the reactor's responses to signals from one or a few individuals only; they still respond to the releasers of the species, but only after they narrowed their attention to particular members of the species."

That is the barest possible background against which we can try to understand these intraspecific attacks. In none of the instances reported by correspondents to The Statesman is there any detailed account of the circumstances anterior to the attack. We do not even know that the individual that was attacked by the group belonged to that group - though of the same feather, it might have belonged to another group. Among birds that go about habitually in company, such as Babblers (or Mynahs during certain periods, while feeding), the company is strictly limited. No outsider is tolerated, usually. Here we may note that birds are able to recognise members of their own party exceedingly well.

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