This
capsule review appeared in Fortean Times
No. 139, October 2000, p.57. For a while the magazine ran a sidebar in its
review section called ‘Fortean Bookshelf’, in which “Each month FT revisits an out-of-print but still
important classic.” Readers could send in brief accounts of books they felt had
been neglected, and as at the time I was reading Edmund Selous’s Thought-Transference (or What?) in Birds,
I thought this a good candidate as it did not seem to have been much mentioned
in the seventy years since publication. Selous
was trying to account for the remarkable abilities of flocks of birds to move
in a coordinated way, in a sense as a single organism. He spent many, many
hours in the field watching birds’ behaviour in flocks, and described his
observations in obsessive detail.
As
well as being a noted, and prolific, naturalist, Selous (1857-1934) had joined
the Society for Psychical Research in 1891 and his book was reviewed by W. H.
Salter in the SPR’s Journal dated
January 1932. His elder brother was explorer and hunter Frederick Selous, a
model for Allan Quartermain, who led a life of African adventure in marked
contrast to Edmund’s sedate existence (the Rhodesian Selous Scouts were named
after him). The book was later referred to in a Fortean Times article by David
Hambling in September 2006 with the title
‘Hive Minds’, in which he discusses the mechanisms – the (or What?) – by which
birds actually do manage these amazing feats.
While commonplace now, psychical research involving animals was
ground-breaking in 1931, and even if mistaken in his conclusions, Edmund Selous
deserves an honoured place as a pioneer of what has come to be known as anpsi.
Thought
Transference (or What?) in Birds
Edmund
Selous
Constable
and Company, London, 1931
At
a time when interest in animals’ possible psychic abilities is high, it is a
shame that Edmund Selous’s book, the result of almost 30 years’ field research,
has been largely forgotten.
By
noting apparent instances of synchronised activity without an external
stimulus, he attempts to show that birds of various species seem to display
instances of telepathy, or, rather, the working of a group mind. He speculates
that humans too may once have had this ability, but lost it through the
development of speech (though elsewhere he declares himself convinced by the
evidence for telepathy in humans published by The Society for Psychical
Research).
There
are problems with Selous’s observational approach: it is possible that although
he could not see an external stimulus, the birds could; and although he may
have thought that they flew off simultaneously, movements could have been
sequential, though too fast for the human eye to perceive. Despite these
reservations, his work represents what was a groundbreaking approach to psi in
a neglected part of the animal kingdom.
