His elder brother was a big-game hunter, but bird-enthusiast Edmund Selous had a horrorof killing. In the earlyyears of the 20th century he made himself a pariah in the ornithological world through histirades against shooting wild birds and collectingtheir eggs. Surviving on a small private income, he spent his days watching birds and recording his observations in a large scrawling hand. At the time, few took much notice of his findings; today he is celebrated for his insights. Yet even his admirers would like to forget his penultimate book: Thought-Transference (or What?) in Birds. In it, he argued that “thought waves” could sweep through bird flocks, sparking instantaneous, collective action. Was Selous deluded, caught up in a wave of enthusiasm forthe paranormal? Or could he have been onto somethingthat eludes even present-day science?
LIKE many in his day, Edmund Selous was convinced that thought transference between people was a genuine phenomenon. Born in London in 1857, he grew up during the height of Victorian fascination with telepathy and the spirit world. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882 by a group of Cambridge-led academics, organised experiments to test the possibility that thoughts or mental images could pass directly from one mind to another. Selous read the society’s published evidence, and was convinced. But he didn’t stop there.
The son of a stockbroker who became chairman of the board of the London Stock Exchange, the young Selous was a shy, introverted boy and was strongly influenced by his mother’s love of the natural world. Early on, he did what was expected of him: he read law at Cambridge and qualified as a barrister. But he soon abandoned the legal profession in favour of full-time bird watching. Eventually, he found himself wondering – if people have telepathic powers, why not birds? As a committed Darwinian, Selous placed humanity firmly within nature and looked for continuity within the animal kingdom. “Our minds (however great) are but a part of nature,” he opined. So if people could do something, most likely other creatures could too, at least a bit, he reasoned. In our species, language may have made the faculty redundant, but birds might find it jolly useful.
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He assembled the evidence in his book Thought-Transference (or What?) in Birds, published in 1931. Extracts from his field notebooks described, in excruciating detail, examples of coordinated movement within small groups or large flocks of birds. Rooks, gulls, lapwings, dunlin, swans – all provided telling observations. Among the most vivid accounts were those of starlings, famed for their extraordinary communal display flights when thousands of tightly packed birds swirl through winter skies for minutes on end, creating ever-changing cloud-like patterns. Selous struggled to capture the essence of this “air-dance”. It “was a marvellous thing to witness, and again I ask how, without some process of thought transference so rapid as to amount practically to simultaneous collective thinking, are these things to be explained?”
In the 1920s and 1930s, thought transference among humans was a hot topic on the fringes of respectable science. Victorian tomes such as Apparitions and Thought Transference by Frank Podmore had been updated by a self-help guide: Henry Maskell’s The Human Wireless: A practical guide to telepathy and thought transference. At the time, radio broadcasts were only a decade old and still remarkable, and physicists were talking wave theory. Selous was hot-wired to the zeitgeist.
The Manchester Guardian reviewed Selous’s book favourably, if diplomatically: “Anyone who has patience to read this book carefully will find abundant food for thought.” Patience was the thing. Selous’s prose is “almost unreadable” unless you have watched the species yourself, declared Oxford ornithologist David Lack in 1959. On and on go the accounts, collected over years of intensive observation. Again and again he saw birds fly up in a mass, though nothing at all obvious had happened to inspire the movement: no predator, no aeroplane, no “vile shooter”.
This behaviour couldn’t be a collective response to individually perceived danger, he reasoned. It was as if some avian drill sergeant were ordering the off, and yet any notion of a “leader starling” with its followers in thrall was just “too ridiculous”, too much at odds with his observations.
He watched rooks suddenly rising from a field “like a leaping up of black flame, so instantaneous and unanimous was it. It is transfused thought, thought transference – collective thinking practically. What else can it be?” Again and again he puzzled over what he saw. “How did these goldfinches rise and turn and twist and come down again, as though it was all what they all wanted, just at the same moment, to do? Their little minds must act together. Though I cannot understand it, yet it seems to me that they must think collectively, all at the same time…”
But if Selous was onto something, why did his contemporaries cold-shoulder him? Why, at the very least, was the phenomenon of collective movement not widely discussed and wondered at? Selous struggled to find an explanation, and focused on his peers’ fascination with “killing birds and staring at their dried skins”. He made no attempt to hide his contempt for the practice and was dropped as a major contributor to F. B. Kirkman’s four-volume British Birds after penning bitter attacks on the collectors of birds’ eggs and skins.
Field research was almost an embarrassment to an insecure young science desperate to appear rigorous. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, natural history was rapidly becoming professional, and scientific status lay in poring over stuffed specimens in museums and university laboratories. Amateurs like Selous, who spent most days tramping around the countryside with notebook and binoculars, were easily frozen out by the establishment.
Yet a quarter of a century after Selous’s death in 1934, the eminent David Lack hailed him as a founder of the modern science of behaviour, and claimed that he was “the first to make intensive observations on individual birds and to theorise on what he saw”. Lack ranked Selous as the most important of the British ornithological pioneers of the early 20th century, whose fieldwork had a significant influence on leading lights such as Julian Huxley. Most famously, Selous’s observations of the mating displays of blackcock and ruff proved that the females of these species take an active role in sexual encounters, choosing their partners from a gaggle of posturing males. His fieldwork confirmed Darwin’s belief that female choice was a genuine phenomenon shaping sexual selection, at a time when few scientists supported the idea. But even Lack dismissed Thought-Transference (or What?) as “unconvincing speculation”, and cast aside Selous’s most perplexing observations.
Much of what Selous observed remains unexplained today. British starling expert Chris Feare gives an example. As thousands of starlings leave their winter roosts at dawn, their pattern of departure is so coordinated that it produces a telltale image on a radar screen – concentric ripples radiating from the roost at roughly 3-minute intervals. Stand near the roost, and you can hear the birds bickering and singing, louder and louder, until suddenly they all go silent. A few seconds later, singing recommences for about 3 minutes, then the sudden silence again. As the pattern is repeated the birds begin to leave in bursts, during the silences, producing “ring angels” picked up by radar. Large roosts can produce up to 20 rings. “Neither the means whereby starlings regulate this elaborate departure behaviour nor its function is understood,” says Feare.
Why and how do they do it? Feare talks of the transfer of “information” rather than “thoughts”, and speculates that by roosting together birds somehow find out about unpredictable food sources. It’s a fascinating idea that would have appealed to Selous, yet the mechanism of information transfer remains unclear and little studied, says Feare. Today Selous would rail against the mathematical modellers and the gene sequencers dominating the biological sciences, and still he would be out in the cold.