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 previous seventy years. 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.
The book was later covered in an article by David Hambling in FT in September 2006, called ‘Hive Minds’, in which he discusses the mechanisms – the (or What?) - by which birds actually do manage these amazing feats (he incorrectly hyphenates the ‘Thought Transference’ in the title). As well as a noted, and prolific, naturalist, Selous (1857-1934) had joined the Society for Psychical Research in the 1890s 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. While commonplace now, psychical research involving animals was ground-breaking in 1931, and even if mistaken in his conclusions, Selous deserves an honoured place as a pioneer of 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.
