If these notes afford evidence of an incipient social factor, the instinct of pecking is distinctively individualistic. Chicks peck with considerable but not complete accuracy of aim at practically anything of suitable size at suitable distance; but it is through experience that they learn what to select for food and what to reject or leave untouched. Moving objects, however, are more readily pecked at than those which are still; and the instinctive response seems to be stimulated if one tap on the ground near the object, or move it with a pencil, thus simulating the action of the hen. And this is even more marked with pheasants and partridges. Plovers seize small worms with an avidity which looks like an inherited response to the sight of natural food. Pheasants and partridges also appear to be specially affected by worms, and when one of them seizes a worm for the first time, he shakes it and dashes it against the ground. Chicks, a week or ten days old, also seize a largish fly or bee with a dash, and maul it on the ground, throwing it on one side before again approaching it. And such birds seem to show an instinctive tendency to bolt with such treasures as caterpillars or small worms. Moor-hens cannot at first be induced to take food from the ground. It has to be held above them, whereupon they crouch down, with head and neck held back, opening their beaks more like the callow young of nursling birds; but they also strike upwards at the object--these modes of behaviour being, no doubt, correlated with the manner in which the mother moor-hen normally feeds her young from her beak during the early days of life. Callow fledglings, such as young jays, simply open their mouths, gaping widely to be fed. And many will respond in this way to such a note as a low whistle, as may readily be seen with swallows. But at a later age such birds show instinctive modes of reaction of a more complex type. A jay, for example, was offered a summer chafer or June bug, seized it at once in his bill, and tried to place his foot on it. Then he hopped down on to the floor of his cage, dropped the beetle, seized it again as it crawled off, and after two or three attempts swallowed it, tossing it back from the point of his bill into the throat. This was the first time he took food from the ground or swallowed it in this manner.