Ways of Nature
by John Burroughs · English · Gutenberg #30249 · 416,632 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Ways of Nature
Author: John Burroughs
Release date: October 13, 2009 [eBook #30249]
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WAYS OF NATURE ***
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.
The words phoebe, manoeuvre, manoeuvring, Pooecetes and phoeniceus use
"oe" ligature in the original text.
The printer's inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, hyphenation,
and ligature usage have been retained.
WAYS OF NATURE
[Illustration: A BIRD IN SIGHT]
WAYS OF NATURE
BY
JOHN BURROUGHS
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT 1905 BY JOHN BURROUGHS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October 1905_
PREFACE
My reader will find this volume quite a departure in certain ways from
the tone and spirit of my previous books, especially in regard to the
subject of animal intelligence. Heretofore I have made the most of
every gleam of intelligence of bird or four-footed beast that came
under my observation, often, I fancy, making too much of it, and
giving the wild creatures credit for more "sense" than they really
possessed. The nature lover is always tempted to do this very thing;
his tendency is to humanize the wild life about him, and to read his
own traits and moods into whatever he looks upon. I have never
consciously done this myself, at least to the extent of willfully
misleading my reader. But some of our later nature writers have been
guilty of this fault, and have so grossly exaggerated and
misrepresented the every-day wild life of our fields and woods that
their example has caused a strong reaction to take place in my own
mind, and has led me to set about examining the whole subject of
animal life and instinct in a way I have never done before.
In March, 1903, I contributed to "The Atlantic Monthly" a paper called
"Real and Sham Natural History," which was as vigorous a protest as I
could make against the growing tendency to humanize the lower
animals. The paper was widely read and discussed, and bore fruit in
many ways, much of it good and wholesome fruit, but a little of it
bitter and acrid. For obvious reasons that paper is not included in
this collection. But I have given all the essays that were the outcome
of the currents of thought and inquiry that it set going in my mind,
and I have given them nearly in the order in which they were written,
so that the reader may see the growth of my own mind and opinions in
relation to the subject. I confess I have not been fully able to
persuade myself that the lower animals ever show anything more than a
faint gleam of what we call thought and reflection,--the power to
evolve ideas from sense impressions,--except feebly in the case of the
dog and the apes, and possibly the elephant. Nearly all the animal
behavior that the credulous public looks upon as the outcome of reason
is simply the result of the adaptiveness and plasticity of instinct.
The animal has impulses and impressions where we have ideas and
concepts. Of our faculties I concede to them perception, sense memory,
and association of memories, and little else. Without these it would
be impossible for their lives to go on.
I am aware that there is much repetition in this volume, and that the
names of several of the separate chapters differ much more than do the
subjects discussed in them.
When I was a boy on the farm, we used to thrash our grain with the
hand-flail. Our custom was to thrash a flooring of sheaves on one side,
then turn the sheaves over and thrash them on the other, then unbind
them and thrash the loosened straw again, and then finish by turning
the whole over and thrashing it once more. I suspect my reader will
feel that I have followed the same method in many of these papers. I
have thrashed the same straw several times, but I have turned it each
time, and I trust have been rewarded by a few additional grains of truth.
Let me hope that the result of the discussion or thrashing will not be to
make the reader love the animals less, but rather to love the truth more.
June, 1905.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. WAYS OF NATURE 1
II. BIRD-SONGS 29
III. NATURE WITH CLOSED DOORS 47
IV. THE WIT OF A DUCK 53
V. FACTORS IN ANIMAL LIFE 59
VI. ANIMAL COMMUNICATION 87
VII. DEVIOUS PATHS 109
VIII. WHAT DO ANIMALS KNOW? 123
IX. DO ANIMALS THINK AND REFLECT? 151
X. A PINCH OF SALT 173
XI. THE LITERARY TREATMENT OF NATURE 191
XII. A BEAVER'S REASON 209
XIII. READING THE BOOK OF NATURE 231
XIV. GATHERED BY THE WAY
I. THE TRAINING OF WILD ANIMALS 239
II. AN ASTONISHED PORCUPINE 242
III. BIRDS AND STRINGS 246
IV. MIMICRY 248
V. THE COLORS OF FRUITS 251
VI. INSTINCT 254
VII. THE ROBIN 261
VIII. THE CROW 265
INDEX 273
I
WAYS OF NATURE
I was much amused lately by a half-dozen or more letters that came to
me from some Californian schoolchildren, who wrote to ask if I would
please tell them whether or not birds have sense. One little girl
said: "I would be pleased if you would write and tell me if birds have
sense. I wanted to see if I couldn't be the first one to know." I felt
obliged to reply to the children that we ourselves do not have sense
enough to know just how much sense the birds and other wild creatures
do have, and that they do appear to have some, though their actions
are probably the result of what we call instinct, or natural
prompting, like that of the bean-stalk when it climbs the pole. Yet a
bean-stalk will sometimes show a kind of perversity or depravity that
looks like the result of deliberate choice. Each season, among my
dozen or more hills of pole-beans, there are usually two or three
low-minded plants that will not climb the poles, but go groveling upon
the ground, wandering off among the potato-vines or cucumbers,
departing utterly from the traditions of their race, becoming
shiftless and vagrant. When I lift them up and wind them around the
poles and tie them with a wisp of grass, they rarely stay. In some way
they seem to get a wrong start in life, or else are degenerates from
the first. I have never known anything like this among the wild
creatures, though it happens often enough among our own kind. The
trouble with the bean is doubtless this: the Lima bean is of South
American origin, and in the Southern Hemisphere, beans, it seems, go
the other way around the pole; that is, from right to left. When
transferred north of the equator, it takes them some time to learn the
new way, or from left to right, and a few of them are always
backsliding, or departing from the new way and vaguely seeking the
old; and not finding this, they become vagabonds.
How much or how little sense or judgment our wild neighbors have is
hard to determine. The crows and other birds that carry shell-fish
high in the air and then let them drop upon the rocks to break the
shell show something very much like reason, or a knowledge of the
relation of cause and effect, though it is probably an unthinking
habit formed in their ancestors under the pressure of hunger. Froude
tells of some species of bird that he saw in South Africa flying amid
the swarm of migrating locusts and clipping off the wings of the
insects so that they would drop to the earth, where the birds could
devour them at their leisure. Our squirrels will cut off the chestnut
burs before they have opened, allowing them to fall to the ground,
where, as they seem to know, the burs soon dry open. Feed a caged coon
soiled food,--a piece of bread or meat rolled on the ground,--and
before he eats it he will put it in his dish of water and wash it off.
The author of "Wild Life Near Home" says that muskrats "will wash what
they eat, whether washing is needed or not." If the coon washes his
food only when it needs washing, and not in every individual instance,
then the proceeding looks like an act of judgment; the same with the
muskrat. But if they always wash their food, whether soiled or not,
the act looks more like instinct or an inherited habit, the origin of
which is obscure.
Birds and animals probably think without knowing that they think;
that is, they have not self-consciousness. Only man seems to
be endowed with this faculty; he alone develops disinterested
intelligence,--intelligence that is not primarily concerned with his
own safety and well-being, but that looks abroad upon things. The wit
of the lower animals seems all to have been developed by the struggle
for existence, and it rarely gets beyond the prudential stage. The
sharper the struggle, the sharper the wit. Our porcupine, for
instance, is probably the most stupid of animals and has the least
speed; it has little use for either wit or celerity of movement. It
carries a death-dealing armor to protect it from its enemies, and it
can climb the nearest hemlock tree and live on the bark all winter.
The skunk, too, pays for its terrible weapon by dull wits. But think
of the wit of the much-hunted fox, the much-hunted otter, the
much-sought beaver! Even the grouse, when often fired at, learns, when
it is started in the open, to fly with a corkscrew motion to avoid the
shot.
Fear, love, and hunger were the agents that developed the wits of the
lower animals, as they were, of course, the prime factors in
developing the intelligence of man. But man has gone on, while the
animals have stopped at these fundamental wants,--the need of safety,
of offspring, of food.
Probably in a state of wild nature birds never make mistakes, but
where they come in contact with our civilization and are confronted by
new conditions, they very naturally make mistakes. For instance, their
cunning in nest-building sometimes deserts them. The art of the bird
is to conceal its nest both as to position and as to material, but now
and then it is betrayed into weaving into its structure showy and
bizarre bits of this or that, which give its secret away, and which
seem to violate all the traditions of its kind. I have the picture of
a robin's nest before me, upon the outside of which are stuck a muslin
flower, a leaf from a small calendar, and a photograph of a local
celebrity. A more incongruous use of material in bird architecture it
would be hard to find. I have been told of another robin's nest upon
the outside of which the bird had fastened a wooden label from a
near-by flower-bed, marked "Wake Robin." Still another nest I have
seen built upon a large, showy foundation of the paper-like flowers of
antennaria, or everlasting. The wood thrush frequently weaves a
fragment of newspaper or a white rag into the foundation of its nest.
"Evil communications corrupt good manners." The newspaper and the
rag-bag unsettle the wits of the birds. The phoebe-bird is capable
of this kind of mistake or indiscretion. All the past generations of
her tribe have built upon natural and, therefore, neutral sites,
usually under shelving and overhanging rocks, and the art of adapting
the nest to its surroundings, blending it with them, has been highly
developed. But phoebe now frequently builds under our sheds and
porches, where, so far as concealment is concerned, a change of
material, say from moss to dry grass or shreds of bark, would be an
advantage to her; but she departs not a bit from the family
traditions; she uses the same woodsy mosses, which in some cases,
especially when the nest is placed upon newly sawed timber, make her
secret an open one to all eyes.
It does indeed often look as if the birds had very little sense. Think
of a bluebird, or an oriole, or a robin, or a jay, fighting for hours
at a time its own image as reflected in a pane of glass; quite
exhausting itself in its fury to demolish its supposed rival! Yet I
have often witnessed this little comedy. It is another instance of how
the arts of our civilization corrupt and confuse the birds. It may be
that in the course of many generations the knowledge of glass will get
into their blood, and they will cease to be fooled by it, as they may
also in time learn what a poor foundation the newspaper is to build
upon. The ant or the bee could not be fooled by the glass in that way
for a moment.
_Have_ the birds and our other wild neighbors sense, as distinguished
from instinct? Is a change of habits to meet new conditions, or the
taking advantage of accidental circumstances, an evidence of sense?
How many birds appear to have taken advantage of the protection
afforded by man in building their nests! How many of them build near
paths and along roadsides, to say nothing of those that come close to
our dwellings! Even the quail seems to prefer the borders of the
highway to the open fields. I have chanced upon only three quails'
nests, and these were all by the roadside. One season a scarlet
tanager that had failed with her first nest in the woods came to try
again in a little cherry tree that stood in the open, a few feet from
my cabin, where I could almost touch the nest with my hand as I
passed. But in my absence she again came to grief, some marauder,
probably a red squirrel, taking her eggs. Will her failure in this
case cause her to lose faith in the protective influence of the shadow
of a human dwelling? I hope not. I have known the turtle dove to make
a similar move, occupying an old robin's nest near my neighbor's
cottage. The timid rabbit will sometimes come up from the bushy fields
and excavate a place for her nest in the lawn a few feet from the
house. All such things look like acts of judgment, though they may be
only the result of a greater fear overcoming a lesser fear.
It is in the preservation of their lives and of their young that the
wild creatures come the nearest to showing what we call sense or
reason. The boys tell me that a rabbit that has been driven from her
hole a couple of times by a ferret will not again run into it when
pursued. The tragedy of a rabbit pursued by a mink or a weasel may
often be read upon our winter snows. The rabbit does not take to her
hole; it would be fatal. And yet, though capable of far greater speed,
so far as I have observed, she does not escape the mink; he very soon
pulls her down. It would look as though a fatal paralysis, the
paralysis of utter fear, fell upon the poor creature as soon as she
found herself hunted by this subtle, bloodthirsty enemy. I have seen
upon the snow where her jumps had become shorter and shorter, with
tufts of fur marking each stride, till the bloodstains, and then her
half-devoured body, told the whole tragic story.
There is probably nothing in human experience, at this age of the
world, that is like the helpless terror that seizes the rabbits as it
does other of our lesser wild creatures, when pursued by any of the
weasel tribe. They seem instantly to be under some fatal spell which
binds their feet and destroys their will power. It would seem as if a
certain phase of nature from which we get our notions of fate and
cruelty had taken form in the weasel.
The rabbit, when pursued by the fox or by the dog, quickly takes to
hole. Hence, perhaps, the wit of the fox that a hunter told me about.
The story was all written upon the snow. A mink was hunting a rabbit,
and the fox, happening along, evidently took in the situation at a
glance. He secreted himself behind a tree or a rock, and, as the
rabbit came along, swept her from her course like a charge of shot
fired at close range, hurling her several feet over the snow, and then
seizing her and carrying her to his den up the mountain-side.
It would be interesting to know how long our chimney swifts saw the
open chimney-stacks of the early settlers beneath them before they
abandoned the hollow trees in the woods and entered the chimneys for
nesting and roosting purposes. Was the act an act of judgment, or
simply an unreasoning impulse, like so much else in the lives of the
wild creatures?
In the choice of nesting-material the swift shows no change of habit.
She still snips off the small dry twigs from the tree-tops and glues
them together, and to the side of the chimney, with her own glue. The
soot is a new obstacle in her way, that she does not yet seem to have
learned to overcome, as the rains often loosen it and cause her nest
to fall to the bottom. She has a pretty way of trying to frighten you
off when your head suddenly darkens the opening above her. At such
times she leaves the nest and clings to the side of the chimney near
it. Then, slowly raising her wings, she suddenly springs out from the
wall and back again, making as loud a drumming with them in the
passage as she is capable of. If this does not frighten you away, she
repeats it three or four times. If your face still hovers above her,
she remains quiet and watches you.
What a creature of the air this bird is, never touching the ground,
so far as I know, and never tasting earthly food! The swallow does
perch now and then and descend to the ground for nesting-material;
but the swift, I have reason to believe, even outrides the summer
storms, facing them on steady wing, high in air. The twigs for her
nest she gathers on the wing, sweeping along like children on a
"merry-go-round" who try to seize a ring, or to do some other feat, as
they pass a given point. If the swift misses the twig, or it fails to
yield to her the first time, she tries again and again, each time
making a wider circuit, as if to tame and train her steed a little
and bring him up more squarely to the mark next time.
The swift is a stiff flyer: there appear to be no joints in her wings;
she suggests something made of wires or of steel. Yet the air of
frolic and of superabundance of wing-power is more marked with her
than with any other of our birds. Her feeding and twig-gathering seem
like asides in a life of endless play. Several times both in spring
and fall I have seen swifts gather in immense numbers toward
nightfall, to take refuge in large unused chimney-stacks. On such
occasions they seem to be coming together for some aerial festival or
grand celebration; and, as if bent upon a final effort to work off a
part of their superabundant wing-power before settling down for the
night, they circle and circle high above the chimney-top, a great
cloud of them, drifting this way and that, all in high spirits and
chippering as they fly. Their numbers constantly increase as other
members of the clan come dashing in from all points of the compass.
Swifts seem to materialize out of empty air on all sides of the
chippering, whirling ring, as an hour or more this assembling of the
clan and this flight festival go on. The birds must gather in from
whole counties, or from half a State. They have been on the wing all
day, and yet now they seem as tireless as the wind, and as if unable
to curb their powers.
One fall they gathered in this way and took refuge for the night in a
large chimney-stack in a city near me, for more than a month and a
half. Several times I went to town to witness the spectacle, and a
spectacle it was: ten thousand of them, I should think, filling the
air above a whole square like a whirling swarm of huge black bees, but
saluting the ear with a multitudinous chippering, instead of a
humming. People gathered upon the sidewalks to see them. It was a rare
circus performance, free to all. After a great many feints and playful
approaches, the whirling ring of birds would suddenly grow denser
above the chimney; then a stream of them, as if drawn down by some
power of suction, would pour into the opening. For only a few seconds
would this downward rush continue; then, as if the spirit of frolic
had again got the upper hand of them, the ring would rise, and the
chippering and circling go on. In a minute or two the same manoeuvre
would be repeated, the chimney, as it were, taking its swallows at
intervals to prevent choking. It usually took a half-hour or more for
the birds all to disappear down its capacious throat. There was always
an air of timidity and irresolution about their approach to the
chimney, just as there always is about their approach to the dead
tree-top from which they procure their twigs for nest-building. Often
did I see birds hesitate above the opening and then pass on,
apparently as though they had not struck it at just the right angle.
On one occasion a solitary bird was left flying, and it took three or
four trials either to make up its mind or to catch the trick of the
descent. On dark or threatening or stormy days the birds would begin
to assemble by mid-afternoon, and by four or five o'clock were all in
their lodgings.
The chimney is a capacious one, forty or fifty feet high and nearly
three feet square, yet it did not seem adequate to afford
breathing-space for so many birds. I was curious to know how they
disposed themselves inside. At the bottom was a small opening. Holding
my ear to it, I could hear a continuous chippering and humming, as if
the birds were still all in motion, like an agitated beehive. At nine
o'clock this multitudinous sound of wings and voices was still going
on, and doubtless it was kept up all night. What was the meaning of
it? Was the press of birds so great that they needed to keep their
wings moving to ventilate the shaft, as do certain of the bees in a
crowded hive? Or were these restless spirits unable to fold their
wings even in sleep? I was very curious to get a peep inside that
chimney when the swifts were in it. So one afternoon this opportunity
was afforded me by the removal of the large smoke-pipe of the old
steam-boiler. This left an opening into which I could thrust my head
and shoulders. The sound of wings and voices filled the hollow shaft.
On looking up, I saw the sides of the chimney for about half its
length paved with the restless birds; they sat so close together that
their bodies touched. Moreover, a large number of them were
constantly on the wing, showing against the sky light as if they were
leaving the chimney. But they did not leave it. They rose up a few
feet and then resumed their positions upon the sides, and it was this
movement that caused the humming sound. All the while the droppings of
the birds came down like a summer shower. At the bottom of the shaft
was a mine of guano three or four feet deep, with a dead swift here
and there upon it. Probably one or more birds out of such a multitude
died every night. I had fancied there would be many more. It was a
long time before it dawned upon me what this uninterrupted flight
within the chimney meant. Finally I saw that it was a sanitary
measure: only thus could the birds keep from soiling each other with
their droppings. Birds digest very rapidly, and had they all continued
to cling to the sides of the wall, they would have been in a sad
predicament before morning. Like other acts of cleanliness on the part
of birds, this was doubtless the prompting of instinct and not of
judgment. It was Nature looking out for her own.
In view, then, of the doubtful sense or intelligence of the wild
creatures, what shall we say of the new school of nature writers or
natural history romancers that has lately arisen, and that reads into
the birds and animals almost the entire human psychology? This,
surely: so far as these writers awaken an interest in the wild
denizens of the field and wood, and foster a genuine love of them in
the hearts of the young people, so far is their influence good; but so
far as they pervert natural history and give false impressions of the
intelligence of our animals, catering to a taste that prefers the
fanciful to the true and the real, is their influence bad. Of course
the great army of readers prefer this sugar-coated natural history to
the real thing, but the danger always is that an indulgence of this
taste will take away a liking for the real thing, or prevent its
development. The knowing ones, those who can take these pretty tales
with the pinch of salt of real knowledge, are not many; the great
majority are simply entertained while they are being humbugged. There
may be no very serious objection to the popular love of sweets being
catered to in this field by serving up the life-history of our animals
in a story, all the missing links supplied, and all their motives and
acts humanized, provided it is not done covertly and under the guise
of a real history. We are never at a loss how to take Kipling in his
"Jungle Book;" we are pretty sure that this is fact dressed up as
fiction, and that much of the real life of the jungle is in these
stories. I remember reading his story of "The White Seal" shortly
after I had visited the Seal Islands in Bering Sea, and I could not
detect in the story one departure from the facts of the life-history
of the seal, so far as it is known. Kipling takes no covert liberties
with natural history, any more than he does with the facts of human
history in his novels.
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover
craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the
reality. Then, to know that a thing is true gives it such a savor! The
truth--how we do crave the truth! We cannot feed our minds on
simulacra any more than we can our bodies. Do assure us that the thing
you tell is true. If you must counterfeit the truth, do it so deftly
that we shall never detect you. But in natural history there is no
need to counterfeit the truth; the reality always suffices, if you
have eyes to see it and ears to hear it. Behold what Maeterlinck makes
out of the life of the bee, simply by getting at and portraying the
facts--a true wonder-book, the enchantment of poetry wedded to the
authority of science.
Works on animal intelligence, such as Romanes's, abound in incidents
that show in the animals reason and forethought in their simpler
forms; but in many cases the incidents related in these works are not
well authenticated, nor told by trained observers. The observations of
the great majority of people have no scientific value whatever.
Romanes quotes from some person who alleges that he saw a pair of
nightingales, during a flood in the river near which their nest was
placed, pick up the nest bodily and carry it to a place of safety.
This is incredible. If Romanes himself or Darwin himself said he saw
this, one would have to believe it. Birds whose nests have been
plundered sometimes pull the old nest to pieces and use the material,
or parts of it, in building a new nest; but I cannot believe that any
pair of birds ever picked up a nest containing eggs and carried it off
to a new place. How could they do it? With one on each side, how could
they fly with the nest between them? They could not carry it with
their feet, and how could they manage it with their beaks?
My neighbor met in the woods a black snake that had just swallowed a
red squirrel. Now your romance-naturalist may take such a fact as this
and make as pretty a story of it as he can. He may ascribe to the
snake and his victim all the human emotions he pleases. He may make
the snake glide through the tree-tops from limb to limb, and from tree
to tree, in pursuit of its prey: the main thing is, the snake got the
squirrel. If our romancer makes the snake fascinate the squirrel, I
shall object, because I don't believe that snakes have this power.
People like to believe that they have. It would seem as if this
subtle, gliding, hateful creature ought to have some such mysterious
gift, but I have no proof that it has. Every year I see the black
snake robbing birds'-nests, or pursued by birds whose nests it has
just plundered, but I have yet to see it cast its fatal spell upon a
grown bird. Or, if our romancer says that the black snake was drilled
in the art of squirrel-catching by its mother, I shall know he is a
pretender.
Speaking of snakes reminds me of an incident I have several times
witnessed in our woods in connection with a snake commonly called the
sissing or blowing adder. When I have teased this snake a few moments
with my cane, it seems to be seized with an epileptic or cataleptic
fit. It throws itself upon its back, coiled nearly in the form of a
figure eight, and begins a series of writhings and twistings and
convulsive movements astonishing to behold. Its mouth is open and
presently full of leaf-mould, its eyes are covered with the same, its
head is thrown back, its white belly up; now it is under the leaves,
now out, the body all the while being rapidly drawn through this
figure eight, so that the head and tail are constantly changing place.
What does it mean? Is it fear? Is it a real fit? I do not know, but
any one of our romance-naturalists could tell you at once. I can only
suggest that it may be a ruse to baffle its enemy, the black snake,
when he would attempt to crush it in his folds, or to seize its head
when he would swallow it.
I am reminded of another mystery connected with a snake, or a
snake-skin, and a bird. Why does our great crested flycatcher weave a
snake-skin into its nest, or, in lieu of that, something that suggests
a snake-skin, such as an onion-skin, or fish-scales, or a bit of oiled
paper? It is thought by some persons that it uses the snake-skin as a
kind of scarecrow, to frighten away its natural enemies. But think
what this purpose in the use of it would imply. It would imply that
the bird knew that there were among its enemies creatures that were
afraid of snakes--so afraid of them that one of their faded and
cast-off skins would keep these enemies away. How could the bird
obtain this knowledge? It is not afraid of the skin itself; why should
it infer that squirrels, for instance, are? I am convinced there is
nothing in this notion. In all the nests that have come under my
observation, the snake-skin was in faded fragments woven into the
texture of the nest, and one would not be aware of its presence unless
he pulled the nest to pieces. True, Mr. Frank Bolles reports finding a
nest of this bird with a whole snake-skin coiled around a single egg;
but it was the skin of a small garter-snake, six or seven inches long,
and could not therefore have inspired much terror in the heart of the
bird's natural enemies. Dallas Lore Sharp, author of that delightful
book, "Wild Life Near Home," tells me he has seen a whole skin
dangling nearly its entire length from the hole that contained the
nest, just as he has seen strings hanging from the nest of the
kingbird. The bird was too hurried or too careless to pull in the
skin. Mr. Sharp adds that he cannot "give the bird credit for
appreciating the attitude of the rest of the world toward snakes, and
making use of the fear." Moreover, a cast-off snake-skin looks very
little like a snake. It is thin, shrunken, faded, papery, and there is
no terror in it. Then, too, it is dark in the cavity of the nest,
consequently the skin could not serve as a scarecrow in any case.
Hence, whatever its purpose may be, it surely is not that. It looks
like a mere fancy or whim of the bird. There is that in its voice and
ways that suggests something a little uncanny. Its call is more like
the call of the toad than that of a bird. If the toad did not always
swallow its own cast-off skin, the bird would probably use that too.
At the best we can only guess at the motives of the birds and beasts.
As I have elsewhere said, they nearly all have reference in some way
to the self-preservation of these creatures. But how the bits of an
old snake-skin in a bird's nest can contribute specially to this end,
I cannot see.
Nature is not always consistent; she does not always choose the best
means to a given end. For instance, all the wrens except our house
wren seem to use about the best material at hand for their nests. What
can be more unsuitable, untractable, for a nest in a hole or cavity
than the twigs the house wren uses? Dry grasses or bits of soft bark
would bend and adapt themselves easily to the exigencies of the case;
but stiff, unyielding twigs! What a contrast to the suitableness of
the material the hummingbird uses--the down of some plant, which seems
to have a poetic fitness!
Yesterday in my walk I saw where a red squirrel had stripped the soft
outer bark off a group of red cedars to build its winter's nest with.
This also seemed fit,--fit that such a creature of the trees should
not go to the ground for its nest-material, and should choose
something soft and pliable. Among the birches, it probably gathers the
fine curling shreds of the birch bark.
Beside my path in the woods a downy woodpecker, late one fall, drilled
a hole in the top of a small dead black birch for his winter quarters.
My attention was first called to his doings by the white chips upon
the ground. Every day as I passed I would rap upon his tree, and if he
was in he would appear at his door and ask plainly enough what I
wanted now. One day when I rapped, something else appeared at the
door--I could not make out what. I continued my rapping, when out came
two flying-squirrels. On the tree being given a vigorous shake, it
broke off at the hole, and the squirrels went sliding down the air to
the foot of a hemlock, up which they disappeared. They had
dispossessed Downy of his house, had carried in some grass and leaves
for a nest, and were as snug as a bug in a rug. Downy drilled another
cell in a dead oak farther up the hill, and, I hope, passed the winter
there unmolested. Such incidents, comic or tragic, as they chance to
strike us, are happening all about us, if we have eyes to see them.
The next season, near sundown of a late November day, I saw Downy
trying to get possession of a hole not his own. I chanced to be
passing under a maple, when white chips upon the ground again caused
me to scrutinize the branches overhead. Just then I saw Downy come to
the tree, and, hopping around on the under side of a large dry limb,
begin to make passes at something with his beak. Presently I made out
a round hole there, with something in it returning Downy's thrusts.
The sparring continued some moments. Downy would hop away a few feet,
then return to the attack, each time to be met by the occupant of the
hole. I suspected an English sparrow had taken possession of Downy's
cell in his absence during the day, but I was wrong. Downy flew to
another branch, and I tossed up a stone against the one that contained
the hole, when, with a sharp, steely note, out came a hairy woodpecker
and alighted on a near-by branch. Downy, then, had the "cheek" to try
to turn his large rival out of doors--and it was Hairy's cell, too;
one could see that by the size of the entrance. Thus loosely does the
rule of _meum_ and _tuum_ obtain in the woods. There is no moral code
in nature. Might reads right. Man in communities has evolved ethical
standards of conduct, but nations, in their dealings with one another,
are still largely in a state of savage nature, and seek to establish
the right, as dogs do, by the appeal to battle.
One season a wood duck laid her eggs in a cavity in the top of a tall
yellow birch near the spring that supplies my cabin with water. A bold
climber "shinned" up the fifty or sixty feet of rough tree-trunk and
looked in upon the eleven eggs. They were beyond the reach of his arm,
in a well-like cavity over three feet deep. How would the mother duck
get her young up out of that well and down to the ground? We watched,
hoping to see her in the act. But we did not. She may have done it at
night or very early in the morning. All we know is that when Amasa one
morning passed that way, there sat eleven little tufts of black and
yellow down in the spring, with the mother duck near by. It was a
pretty sight. The feat of getting down from the tree-top cradle had
been safely effected, probably by the young clambering up on the
inside walls of the cavity and then tumbling out into the air and
coming down gently like huge snowflakes. They are mostly down, and why
should they not fall without any danger to life or limb? The notion
that the mother duck takes the young one by one in her beak and
carries them to the creek is doubtless erroneous. Mr. William Brewster
once saw the golden-eye, whose habits of nesting are like those of the
wood duck, get its young from the nest to the water in this manner:
The mother bird alighted in the water under the nest, looked all
around to see that the coast was clear, and then gave a peculiar call.
Instantly the young shot out of the cavity that held them, as if the
tree had taken an emetic, and came softly down to the water beside
their mother. Another observer assures me that he once found a newly
hatched duckling hung by the neck in the fork of a bush under a tree
in which a brood of Wood ducks had been hatched.
The ways of nature,--who can map them, or fathom them, or interpret
them, or do much more than read a hint correctly here and there? Of
one thing we may be pretty certain, namely, that the ways of wild
nature may be studied in our human ways, inasmuch as the latter are an
evolution from the former, till we come to the ethical code, to
altruism and self-sacrifice. Here we seem to breathe another air,
though probably this code differs no more from the animal standards of
conduct than our physical atmosphere differs from that of early
geologic time.
Our moral code must in some way have been evolved from our rude animal
instincts. It came from within; its possibilities were all in nature.
If not, where were they?
I have seen disinterested acts among the birds, or what looked like
such, as when one bird feeds the young of another species when it
hears them crying for food. But that a bird would feed a grown bird of
another species, or even of its own, to keep it from starving, I have
my doubts. I am quite positive that mice will try to pull one of their
fellows out of a trap, but what the motive is, who shall say? Would
the same mice share their last crumb with their fellow if he were
starving? That, of course, would be a much nearer approach to the
human code, and is too much to expect. Bees will clear their fellows
of honey, but whether it be to help them, or to save the honey, is a
question.
In my youth I saw a parent weasel seize one of its nearly grown young
which I had wounded and carry it across an open barway, in spite of my
efforts to hinder it. A friend of mine, who is a careful observer,
says he once wounded a shrike so that it fell to the ground, but
before he got to it, it recovered itself and flew with difficulty
toward some near trees, calling to its mate the while; the mate came
and seemed to get beneath the wounded bird and buoy it up, so aiding
it that it gained the top of a tall tree, where my friend left it. But
in neither instance can we call this helpfulness entirely
disinterested, or pure altruism.
Emerson said that he was an endless experimenter with no past at his
back. This is just what Nature is. She experiments endlessly, seeking
new ways, new modes, new forms, and is ever intent upon breaking away
from the past. In this way, as Darwin showed, she attains to new
species. She is blind, she gropes her way, she trusts to luck; all her
successes are chance hits. Whenever I look over my right shoulder, as
I sit at my desk writing these sentences, I see a long shoot of a
honeysuckle that came in through a crack of my imperfectly closed
window last summer. It came in looking, or rather feeling, for
something to cling to. It first dropped down upon a pile of books,
then reached off till it struck the window-sill of another large
window; along this it crept, its regular leaves standing up like so
many pairs of green ears, looking very pretty. Coming to the end of
the open way there, it turned to the left and reached out into
vacancy, till it struck another window-sill running at right angles to
the former; along this it traveled nearly half an inch a day, till it
came to the end of that road. Then it ventured out into vacant space
again, and pointed straight toward me at my desk, ten feet distant.
Day by day it kept its seat upon the window-sill, and stretched out
farther and farther, almost beckoning me to give it a lift or to bring
it support. I could hardly resist its patient daily appeal. Late in
October it had bridged about three feet of the distance that separated
us, when, one day, the moment came when it could maintain itself
outright in the air no longer, and it fell to the floor. "Poor thing,"
I said, "your faith was blind, but it was real. You knew there was a
support somewhere, and you tried all ways to find it." This is Nature.
She goes around the circle, she tries every direction, sure that she
will find a way at some point. Animals in cages behave in a similar
way, looking for a means of escape. In the vineyard I see the
grape-vines reaching out blindly in all directions for some hold for
their tendrils. The young arms seize upon one another and tighten
their hold as if they had at last found what they were in search of.
Stop long enough beside one of the vines, and it will cling to you and
run all over you.
Behold the tumble-bug with her ball of dung by the roadside; where is
she going with it? She is going anywhere and everywhere; she changes
her direction, like the vine, whenever she encounters an obstacle. She
only knows that somewhere there is a depression or a hole in which her
ball with its egg can rest secure, and she keeps on tumbling about
till she finds it, or maybe digs one, or comes to grief by the foot of
some careless passer-by. This, again, is Nature's way, randomly and
tirelessly seeking her ends. When we look over a large section of
history, we see that it is man's way, too, or Nature's way in man. His
progress has been a blind groping, the result of endless
experimentation, and all his failures and mistakes could not be
written in a book. How he has tumbled about with his ball, seeking the
right place for it, and how many times has he come to grief! All his
successes have been lucky hits: steam, electricity, representative
government, printing--how long he groped for them before he found
them! There is always and everywhere the Darwinian tendency to
variation, to seek new forms, to improve upon the past; and man is
under this law, the same as is the rest of nature. One generation of
men, like one generation of leaves, becomes the fertilizer of the
next; failures only enrich the soil or make smoother the way.
There are so many conflicting forces and interests, and the conditions
of success are so complex! If the seed fall here, it will not
germinate; if there, it will be drowned or washed away; if yonder, it
will find too sharp competition. There are only a few places where it
will find all the conditions favorable. Hence the prodigality of
Nature in seeds, scattering a thousand for one plant or tree. She is
like a hunter shooting at random into every tree or bush, hoping to
bring down his game, which he does if his ammunition holds out long
enough; or like the British soldier in the Boer War, firing vaguely at
an enemy that he does not see. But Nature's ammunition always holds
out, and she hits her mark in the end. Her ammunition on our planet is
the heat of the sun. When this fails, she will no longer hit the mark
or try to hit it.
Let there be a plum tree anywhere with the disease called the
"black-knot" upon it, and presently every plum tree in its
neighborhood will have black knots. Do you think the germs from the
first knot knew where to find the other plum trees? No; the wind
carried them in every direction, where the plum trees were not as well
as where they were. It was a blind search and a chance hit. So with
all seeds and germs. Nature covers all the space, and is bound to hit
the mark sooner or later. The sun spills his light indiscriminately
into space; a small fraction of his rays hit the earth, and we are
warmed. Yet to all intents and purposes it is as if he shone for us
alone.
II
BIRD-SONGS
I suspect it requires a special gift of grace to enable one to hear
the bird-songs; some new power must be added to the ear, or some
obstruction removed. There are not only scales upon our eyes so that
we do not see, there are scales upon our ears so that we do not hear.
A city woman who had spent much of her time in the country once asked
a well-known ornithologist to take her where she could hear the
bluebird. "What, never heard the bluebird!" said he. "I have not,"
said the woman. "Then you will never hear it," said the bird-lover;
never hear it with that inward ear that gives beauty and meaning to
the note. He could probably have taken her in a few minutes where she
could have heard the call or warble of the bluebird; but it would have
fallen upon unresponsive ears--upon ears that were not sensitized by
love for the birds or associations with them. Bird-songs are not
music, properly speaking, but only suggestions of music. A great many
people whose attention would be quickly arrested by the same volume of
sound made by a musical instrument or by artificial means never hear
them at all. The sound of a boy's penny whistle there in the grove or
the meadow would separate itself more from the background of nature,
and be a greater challenge to the ear, than is the strain of the
thrush or the song of the sparrow. There is something elusive,
indefinite, neutral, about bird-songs that makes them strike
obliquely, as it were, upon the ear; and we are very apt to miss them.
They are a part of nature, the Nature that lies about us, entirely
occupied with her own affairs, and quite regardless of our presence.
Hence it is with bird-songs as it is with so many other things in
nature--they are what we make them; the ear that hears them must be
half creative. I am always disturbed when persons not especially
observant of birds ask me to take them where they can hear a
particular bird, in whose song they have become interested through a
description in some book. As I listen with them, I feel like
apologizing for the bird: it has a bad cold, or has just heard some
depressing news; it will not let itself out. The song seems so casual
and minor when you make a dead set at it. I have taken persons to hear
the hermit thrush, and I have fancied that they were all the time
saying to themselves, "Is that all?" But should one hear the bird in
his walk, when the mind is attuned to simple things and is open and
receptive, when expectation is not aroused and the song comes as a
surprise out of the dusky silence of the woods, then one feels that
it merits all the fine things that can be said of it.
One of our popular writers and lecturers upon birds told me this
incident: He had engaged to take two city girls out for a walk in the
country, to teach them the names of the birds they might see and hear.
Before they started, he read to them Henry van Dyke's poem on the song
sparrow,--one of our best bird-poems,--telling them that the song
sparrow was one of the first birds they were likely to hear. As they
proceeded with their walk, sure enough, there by the roadside was a
sparrow in song. The bird man called the attention of his companions
to it. It was some time before the unpracticed ears of the girls could
make it out; then one of them said (the poem she had just heard, I
suppose, still ringing in her ears), "What! that little squeaky
thing?" The sparrow's song meant nothing to her at all, and how could
she share the enthusiasm of the poet? Probably the warble of the
robin, or the call of the meadowlark or of the highhole, if they
chanced to hear them, meant no more to these girls. If we have no
associations with these sounds, they will mean very little to us.
Their merit as musical performances is very slight. It is as signs of
joy and love in nature, as heralds of spring, and as the spirit of the
woods and fields made audible, that they appeal to us. The drumming of
the woodpeckers and of the ruffed grouse give great pleasure to a
countryman, though these sounds have not the quality of real music. It
is the same with the call of the migrating geese or the voice of any
wild thing: our pleasure in them is entirely apart from any
considerations of music. Why does the wild flower, as we chance upon
it in the woods or bogs, give us more pleasure than the more elaborate
flower of the garden or lawn? Because it comes as a surprise, offers a
greater contrast with its surroundings, and suggests a spirit in wild
nature that seems to take thought of itself and to aspire to beautiful
forms.
The songs of caged birds are always disappointing, because such birds
have nothing but their musical qualities to recommend them to us. We
have separated them from that which gives quality and, meaning to
their songs. One recalls Emerson's lines:--
"I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it cheers not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky;--
He sang to my ear,--they sang to my eye."
I have never yet seen a caged bird that I wanted,--at least, not on
account of its song,--nor a wild flower that I wished to transfer to
my garden. A caged skylark will sing its song sitting on a bit of
turf in the bottom of the cage; but you want to stop your ears, it is
so harsh and sibilant and penetrating. But up there against the
morning sky, and above the wide expanse of fields, what delight we
have in it! It is not the concord of sweet sounds: it is the soaring
spirit of gladness and ecstasy raining down upon us from "heaven's
gate."
Then, if to the time and the place one could only add the association,
or hear the bird through the vista of the years, the song touched with
the magic of youthful memories! One season a friend in England sent me
a score of skylarks in a cage. I gave them their liberty in a field
near my place. They drifted away, and I never heard them or saw them
again. But one Sunday a Scotchman from a neighboring city called upon
me, and declared with visible excitement that on his way along the
road he had heard a skylark. He was not dreaming; he knew it was a
skylark, though he had not heard one since he had left the banks of
the Doon, a quarter of a century or more before. What pleasure it gave
him! How much more the song meant to him than it would have meant to
me! For the moment he was on his native heath again. Then I told him
about the larks I had liberated, and he seemed to enjoy it all over
again with renewed appreciation.
Many years ago some skylarks were liberated on Long Island, and they
became established there, and may now occasionally be heard in certain
localities. One summer day a friend of mine was out there observing
them; a lark was soaring and singing in the sky above him. An old
Irishman came along, and suddenly stopped as if transfixed to the
spot; a look of mingled delight and incredulity came into his face.
Was he indeed hearing the bird of his youth? He took off his hat,
turned his face skyward, and with moving lips and streaming eyes stood
a long time regarding the bird. "Ah," my friend thought, "if I could
only hear that song with his ears!" How it brought back his youth and
all those long-gone days on his native hills!
The power of bird-songs over us is so much a matter of association
that every traveler to other countries finds the feathered songsters
of less merit than those he left behind. The stranger does not hear
the birds in the same receptive, uncritical frame of mind as does the
native; they are not in the same way the voices of the place and the
season. What music can there be in that long, piercing, far-heard note
of the first meadowlark in spring to any but a native, or in the
"o-ka-lee" of the red-shouldered starling as he rests upon the willows
in March? A stranger would probably recognize melody and a wild woodsy
quality in the flutings of the veery thrush; but how much more they
would mean to him after he had spent many successive Junes threading
our northern trout-streams and encamping on their banks! The veery
will come early in the morning, and again at sundown, and perch above
your tent, and blow his soft, reverberant note for many minutes at a
time. The strain repeats the echoes of the limpid stream in the halls
and corridors of the leafy woods.
While in England in 1882, I rushed about two or three counties in late
June and early July, bent on hearing the song of the nightingale, but
missed it by a few days, and in some cases, as it seemed, only by a
few hours. The nightingale seems to be wound up to go only so long, or
till about the middle of June, and it is only by a rare chance that
you hear one after that date. Then I came home to hear a nightingale
in song one winter morning in a friend's house in the city. It was a
curious let-down to my enthusiasm. A caged song in a city chamber in
broad daylight, in lieu of the wild, free song in the gloaming of an
English landscape! I closed my eyes, abstracted myself from my
surroundings, and tried my best to fancy myself listening to the
strain back there amid the scenes I had haunted about Haslemere and
Godalming, but with poor success, I suspect. The nightingale's song,
like the lark's, needs vista, needs all the accessories of time and
place. The song is not all in the singing, any more than the wit is
all in the saying. It is in the occasion, the surroundings, the spirit
of which it is the expression. My friend said that the bird did not
fully let itself out. Its song was a brilliant medley of notes,--no
theme that I could detect,--like the lark's song in this respect; all
the notes of the field and forest appeared to be the gift of this
bird, but what tone! what accent! like that of a great poet!
Nearly every May I am seized with an impulse to go back to the scenes
of my youth, and hear the bobolinks in the home meadows once more. I
am sure they sing there better than anywhere else. They probably drink
nothing but dew, and the dew distilled in those high pastoral regions
has surprising virtues. It gives a clear, full, vibrant quality to the
birds' voices that I have never heard elsewhere. The night of my
arrival, I leave my southern window open, so that the meadow chorus
may come pouring in before I am up in the morning. How it does
transport me athwart the years, and make me a boy again, sheltered by
the paternal wing! On one occasion, the third morning after my
arrival, a bobolink appeared with a new note in his song. The note
sounded like the word "baby" uttered with a peculiar, tender
resonance: but it was clearly an interpolation; it did not belong
there; it had no relation to the rest of the song. Yet the bird never
failed to utter it with the same joy and confidence as the rest of his
song. Maybe it was the beginning of a variation that will in time
result in an entirely new bobolink song.
On my last spring visit to my native hills, my attention was attracted
to another songster not seen or heard there in my youth, namely, the
prairie horned lark. Flocks of these birds used to be seen in some of
the Northern States in the late fall during their southern migrations;
but within the last twenty years they have become regular summer
residents in the hilly parts of many sections of New York and New
England. They are genuine skylarks, and lack only the powers of song
to make them as attractive as their famous cousins of Europe.
The larks are ground-birds when they perch, and sky-birds when they
sing; from the turf to the clouds--nothing between. Our horned lark
mounts upward on quivering wing in the true lark fashion, and, spread
out against the sky at an altitude of two or three hundred feet,
hovers and sings. The watcher and listener below holds him in his eye,
but the ear catches only a faint, broken, half-inarticulate note now
and then--mere splinters, as it were, of the song of the skylark. The
song of the latter is continuous, and is loud and humming; it is a
fountain of jubilant song up there in the sky: but our lark sings in
snatches; at each repetition of its notes it dips forward and downward
a few feet, and then rises again. One day I kept my eye upon one until
it had repeated its song one hundred and three times; then it closed
its wings, and dropped toward the earth like a plummet, as does its
European congener. While I was watching the bird, a bobolink flew over
my head, between me and the lark, and poured out his voluble and
copious strain. "What a contrast," I thought, "between the voice of
the spluttering, tongue-tied lark, and the free, liquid, and varied
song of the bobolink!"
I have heard of a curious fact in the life-histories of these larks in
the West. A Michigan woman once wrote me that her brother, who was an
engineer on an express train that made daily trips between two Western
cities, reported that many birds were struck by the engine every day,
and killed--often as many as thirty on a trip of sixty miles. Birds of
many kinds were killed, but the most common was a bird that went in
flocks, the description of which answered to the horned lark. Since
then I have read in a Minnesota newspaper that many horned larks are
killed by railroad locomotives in that State. It was thought that the
birds sat behind the rails to get out of the wind, and on starting up
in front of the advancing train, were struck down by the engine. The
Michigan engineer referred to thought that the birds gathered upon the
track to earth their wings, or else to pick up the grain that leaks
out of the wheat-trains, and sows the track from Dakota to the
seaboard. Probably the wind which they might have to face in getting
up was the prime cause of their being struck. One does not think of
the locomotive as a bird-destroyer, though it is well known that many
of the smaller mammals often fall beneath it.
A very interesting feature of our bird-songs is the wing-song, or song
of ecstasy. It is not the gift of many of our birds. Indeed, less than
a dozen species are known to me as ever singing on the wing. It seems
to spring from more intense excitement and self-abandonment than the
ordinary song delivered from the perch. When its joy reaches the point
of rapture, the bird is literally carried off its feet, and up it goes
into the air, pouring out its song as a rocket pours out its sparks.
The skylark and the bobolink habitually do this, while a few others of
our birds do it only on occasions. One summer, up in the Catskills, I
added another name to my list of ecstatic singers--that of the vesper
sparrow. Several times I heard a new song in the air, and caught a
glimpse of the bird as it dropped back to the earth. My attention
would be attracted by a succession of hurried, chirping notes,
followed by a brief burst of song, then by the vanishing form of the
bird. One day I was lucky enough to see the bird as it was rising to
its climax in the air, and to identify it as the vesper sparrow. The
burst of song that crowned the upward flight of seventy-five or one
hundred feet was brief; but it was brilliant and striking, and
entirely unlike the leisurely chant of the bird while upon the ground.
It suggested a lark, but was less buzzing or humming. The preliminary
chirping notes, uttered faster and faster as the bird mounted in the
air, were like the trail of sparks which a rocket emits before its
grand burst of color at the top of its flight.
It is interesting to note that this bird is quite lark-like in its
color and markings, having the two lateral white quills in the tail,
and it has the habit of elevating the feathers on the top of the head
so as to suggest a crest. The solitary skylark that I discovered
several years ago in a field near me was seen on several occasions
paying his addresses to one of these birds, but the vesper-bird was
shy, and eluded all his advances.
Probably the perch-songster among our ordinary birds that is most
regularly seized with the fit of ecstasy that results in this lyric
burst in the air, as I described in my first book, "Wake Robin," over
thirty years ago, is the oven-bird, or wood-accentor--the
golden-crowned thrush of the old ornithologists. Every loiterer about
the woods knows this pretty, speckled-breasted, olive-backed little
bird, which walks along over the dry leaves a few yards from him,
moving its head as it walks, like a miniature domestic fowl. Most
birds are very stiff-necked, like the robin, and as they run or hop
upon the ground, carry the head as if it were riveted to the body. Not
so the oven-bird, or the other birds that walk, as the cow-bunting, or
the quail, or the crow. They move the head forward with the movement
of the feet. The sharp, reiterated, almost screeching song of the
oven-bird, as it perches on a limb a few feet from the ground, like
the words, "preacher, preacher, preacher," or "teacher, teacher,
teacher," uttered louder and louder, and repeated six or seven times,
is also familiar to most ears; but its wild, ringing, rapturous burst
of song in the air high above the tree-tops is not so well known. From
a very prosy, tiresome, unmelodious singer, it is suddenly transformed
for a brief moment into a lyric poet of great power. It is a great
surprise. The bird undergoes a complete transformation. Ordinarily it
is a very quiet, demure sort of bird. It walks about over the leaves,
moving its head like a little hen; then perches on a limb a few feet
from the ground and sends forth its shrill, rather prosy, unmusical
chant. Surely it is an ordinary, common-place bird. But wait till the
inspiration of its flight-song is upon it. What a change! Up it goes
through the branches of the trees, leaping from limb to limb, faster
and faster, till it shoots from the tree-tops fifty or more feet into
the air above them, and bursts into an ecstasy of song, rapid,
ringing, lyrical; no more like its habitual performance than a match
is like a rocket; brief but thrilling; emphatic but musical. Having
reached its climax of flight and song, the bird closes its wings and
drops nearly perpendicularly downward like the skylark. If its song
were more prolonged, it would rival the song of that famous bird. The
bird does this many times a day during early June, but oftenest at
twilight. The song in quality and general cast is like that of its
congener, the water-accentor, which, however, I believe is never
delivered on the wing. From its habit of singing at twilight, and from
the swift, darting motions of the bird, I am inclined to think that in
it we have solved the mystery of Thoreau's "night-warbler," that
puzzled and eluded him for years. Emerson told him he must beware of
finding and booking it, lest life should have nothing more to show
him. The older ornithologists must have heard this song many times,
but they never seem to have suspected the identity of the singer.
Other birds that sing on the wing are the meadowlark, goldfinch,
purple finch, indigo-bird, Maryland yellow-throat, and woodcock. The
flight-song of the woodcock I have heard but twice in my life. The
first time was in the evening twilight about the middle of April. The
bird was calling in the dusk "yeap, yeap," or "seap, seap," from the
ground,--a peculiar reedy call. Then, by and by, it started upward on
an easy slant, that peculiar whistling of its wings alone heard; then,
at an altitude of one hundred feet or more, it began to float about in
wide circles and broke out in an ecstatic chipper, almost a warble at
times, with a peculiar smacking musical quality; then, in a minute or
so, it dropped back to the ground again, not straight down like the
lark, but more spirally, and continued its call as before. In less
than five minutes it was up again. The next time, a few years later,
I heard the song in company with a friend, Dr. Clara Barrus. Let me
give the woman's impression of the song as she afterward wrote it up
for a popular journal.
"The sunset light was flooding all this May loveliness of field and
farm and distant wood; song sparrows were blithely pouring out
happiness by the throatful; peepers were piping and toads trilling,
and we thought it no hardship to wait in such a place till the dusk
should gather, and the wary woodcock announce his presence. But hark!
while yet 'tis light, only a few rods distant, I hear that welcome
'seap ... seap,' and lo! a chipper and a chirr, and past us he
flies,--a direct, slanting upward flight, somewhat labored,--his bill
showing long against the reddened sky. 'He has something in his
mouth,' I start to say, when I bethink me what a long bill he has.
Around, above us he flies in wide, ambitious circles, the while we are
enveloped, as it were, in that hurried chippering sound--fine,
elusive, now near, now distant. How rapid is the flight! Now it sounds
faster and faster, 'like a whiplash flashed through the air,' said my
friend; up, up he soars, till he becomes lost to sight at the instant
that his song ends in that last mad ecstasy that just precedes his
alighting."
The meadowlark sings in a level flight, half hovering in the air,
giving voice to a rapid medley of lark-like notes. The goldfinch also
sings in a level flight, beating the air slowly with its wings broadly
open, and pouring out its jubilant, ecstatic strain I think it
indulges in this wing-song only in the early season. After the mother
bird has begun sitting, the male circles about within earshot of her,
in that curious undulating flight, uttering his "per-chic-o-pee,
per-chic-o-pee," while the female calls back to him in the tenderest
tones, "Yes, lovie; I hear you." The indigo-bird and the purple finch,
when their happiness becomes too full and buoyant for them longer to
control it, launch into the air, and sing briefly, ecstatically, in a
tremulous, hovering flight. The air-song of these birds does not
differ essentially from the song delivered from the perch, except that
it betrays more excitement, and hence is a more complete lyrical
rapture.
The purple finch is our finest songster among the finches. Its strain
is so soft and melodious, and touched with such a childlike gayety and
plaintiveness, that I think it might sound well even in a cage inside
a room, if the bird would only sing with the same joyous abandonment,
which, of course, it would not do.
It is not generally known that individual birds of the same species
show different degrees of musical ability. This is often noticed in
caged birds, among which the principle of variation seems more active;
but an attentive observer notes the same fact in wild birds.
Occasionally he hears one that in powers of song surpasses all its
fellows. I have heard a sparrow, an oriole, and a wood thrush, each
of which had a song of its own that far exceeded any other. I stood
one day by a trout-stream, and suspended my fishing for several
minutes to watch a song sparrow that was singing on a dry limb before
me. He had five distinct songs, each as markedly different from the
others as any human songs, which he repeated one after the other. He
may have had a sixth or a seventh, but he bethought himself of some
business in the next field, and flew away before he had exhausted his
repertory. I once had a letter from Robert Louis Stevenson, who said
he had read an account I had written of the song of the English
blackbird. He said I might as well talk of the song of man; that every
blackbird had its own song; and then he told me of a remarkable singer
he used to hear somewhere amid the Scottish hills. But his singer was,
of course, an exception; twenty-four blackbirds out of every
twenty-five probably sing the same song, with no appreciable
variations: but the twenty-fifth may show extraordinary powers. I told
Stevenson that his famous singer had probably been to school to some
nightingale on the Continent or in southern England. I might have told
him of the robin I once heard here that sang with great spirit and
accuracy the song of the brown thrasher, or of another that had the
note of the whip-poor-will interpolated in the regular robin song, or
of still another that had the call of the quail. In each case the
bird had probably heard the song and learned it while very young. In
the Trossachs, in Scotland, I followed a song thrush about for a long
time, attracted by its peculiar song. It repeated over and over again
three or four notes of a well-known air, which it might have caught
from some shepherd boy whistling to his flock or to his cow.
The songless birds--why has Nature denied them this gift? But they
nearly all have some musical call or impulse that serves them very
well. The quail has his whistle, the woodpecker his drum, the pewee
his plaintive cry, the chickadee his exquisitely sweet call, the
highhole his long, repeated "wick, wick, wick," one of the most
welcome sounds of spring, the jay his musical gurgle, the hawk his
scream, the crow his sturdy caw. Only one of our pretty birds of the
orchard is reduced to an all but inaudible note, and that is the
cedar-bird.
III
NATURE WITH CLOSED DOORS
December in our climate is the month when Nature finally shuts up
house and turns the key. She has been slowly packing up and putting
away her things and closing a door and a window here and there all the
fall. Now she completes the work and puts up the last bar. She is
ready for winter. The leaves are all off the trees, except that here
and there a beech or an oak or a hickory still clings to a remnant of
its withered foliage. Her streams are full, her new growths of wood
are ripened, her saps and juices are quiescent. The muskrat has
completed his house in the shallow pond or stream, the beaver in the
northern woods has completed his. The wild mice and the chipmunk have
laid up their winter stores of nuts and grains in their dens in the
ground and in the cavities of trees. The woodchuck is rolled up in his
burrow in the hillside, sleeping his long winter sleep. The coon has
deserted his chamber in the old tree and gone into winter quarters in
his den in the rocks. The winter birds have taken on a good coat of
fat against the coming cold and a possible scarcity of food. The
frogs and toads are all in their hibernaculums in the ground.
I saw it stated the other day, in a paper read before some scientific
body, that the wood frogs retreat two feet into the ground beyond the
reach of frost. In two instances I have found the wood frog in
December with a covering of less than two inches of leaves and moss.
It had buried itself in the soil and leaf mould only to the depth of
the thickness of its own body, and for covering had only the ordinary
coat of dry leaves and pine needles to be found in the wood. It was
evidently counting upon the snow for its main protection. In one case
I marked the spot, and returned there in early spring to see how the
frog had wintered. I found it all right. Evidently it had some charm
against the cold, for while the earth around and beneath it was yet
frozen solid, there was no frost in the frog. It was not a brisk frog,
but it was well, and when I came again on a warm day a week later, it
had come forth from its retreat and was headed for the near-by marsh,
where in April, with its kith and kin, it helped make the air vocal
with its love-calls. A friend of mine, one mild day late in December,
found a wood frog sitting upon the snow in the woods. She took it home
and put it to bed in the soil of one of her flower-pots in the cellar.
In the spring she found it in good condition, and in April carried it
back to the woods. The hyla, or little piping frog, passes the winter
in the ground like the wood frog. I have seen the toad go into the
ground in the late fall. It is an interesting proceeding. It literally
elbows its way into the soil. It sits on end, and works and presses
with the sharp joints of its folded legs until it has sunk itself at a
sufficient depth, which is only a few inches beneath the surface. The
water frogs appear to pass the winter in the mud at the bottom of
ponds and marshes. The queen bumblebee and the queen hornet, I think,
seek out their winter quarters in holes in the ground in September,
while the drones and the workers perish. The honey-bees do not
hibernate: they must have food all winter; but our native wild bees
are dormant during the cold months, and survive the winter only in the
person of the queen mother. In the spring these queens set up
housekeeping alone, and found new families.
Insects in all stages of their growth are creatures of the warmth; the
heat is the motive power that makes them go; when this fails, they are
still. The katydids rasp away in the fall as long as there is warmth
enough to keep them going; as the heat fails, they fail, till from the
emphatic "Katy did it" of August they dwindle to a hoarse, dying,
"Kate, Kate," in October. Think of the stillness that falls upon the
myriad wood-borers in the dry trees and stumps in the forest as the
chill of autumn comes on. All summer have they worked incessantly in
oak and hickory and birch and chestnut and spruce, some of them
making a sound exactly like that of the old-fashioned hand augur,
others a fine, snapping, and splintering sound; but as the cold comes
on, they go slower and slower, till they finally cease to move. A warm
day starts them again, slowly or briskly according to the degree of
heat, but in December they are finally stilled for the season. These
creatures, like the big fat grubs of the June beetles which one
sometimes finds in the ground or in decayed wood, are full of frost in
winter; cut one of the big grubs in two, and it looks like a lump of
ice cream.
Some time in October the crows begin to collect together in large
flocks and establish their winter quarters. They choose some secluded
wood for a roosting-place, and thither all the crows for many square
miles of country betake themselves at night, and thence they disperse
in all directions again in the early morning. The crow is a social
bird, a true American; no hermit or recluse is he. The winter probably
brings them together in these large colonies for purposes of
sociability and for greater warmth. By roosting close together and
quite filling a tree-top, there must result some economy of heat.
I have seen it stated in a rhetorical flight of some writer that the
new buds crowd the old leaves off. But this is not true as a rule. The
new bud is formed in the axil of the old leaf long before the leaves
are ready to fall. With only two species of our trees known to me
might the swelling bud push off the old leaf. In the sumach and
button-ball or plane-tree the new bud is formed immediately under the
base of the old leaf-stalk, by which it is covered like a cap. Examine
the fallen leaves of these trees, and you will see the cavity in the
base of each where the new bud was cradled. Why the beech, the oak,
and the hickory cling to their old leaves is not clear. It may be
simply a slovenly trait--inability to finish and have done with a
thing--a fault of so many people. Some oaks and beeches appear to lack
decision of character. It requires strength and vitality, it seems,
simply to let go. Kill a tree suddenly, and the leaves wither upon the
branches. How neatly and thoroughly the maples, the ashes, the
birches, the elm clean up. They are tidy, energetic trees, and can
turn over a new leaf without hesitation.
A correspondent, writing to me from one of the colleges, suggests that
our spring really begins in December, because the "annual cycle of
vegetable life" seems to start then. At this time he finds that many
of our wild flowers--the bloodroot, hepatica, columbine, shinleaf,
maidenhair fern, etc.--have all made quite a start toward the next
season's growth, in some cases the new shoot being an inch high. But
the real start of the next season's vegetable life in this sense is
long before December. It is in late summer, when the new buds are
formed on the trees. Nature looks ahead, and makes ready for the new
season in the midst of the old. Cut open the terminal hickory buds in
the late fall and you will find the new growth of the coming season
all snugly packed away there, many times folded up and wrapped about
by protecting scales. The catkins of the birches, alders, and hazel
are fully formed, and as in the case of the buds, are like eggs to be
hatched by the warmth of spring. The present season is always the
mother of the next, and the inception takes place long before the sun
loses his power. The eggs that hold the coming crop of insect life are
mostly laid in the late summer or early fall, and an analogous start
is made in the vegetable world. The egg, the seed, the bud, are all
alike in many ways, and look to the future. Our earliest spring
flower, the skunk-cabbage, may be found with its round green
spear-point an inch or two above the mould in December. It is ready to
welcome and make the most of the first fitful March warmth. Look at
the elms, too, and see how they swarm with buds. In early April they
suggest a swarm of bees.
In all cases, before Nature closes her house in the fall, she makes
ready for its spring opening.
IV
THE WIT OF A DUCK
The homing instinct in birds and animals is one of their most
remarkable traits: their strong local attachments and their skill in
finding their way back when removed to a distance. It seems at times
as if they possessed some extra sense--the home sense--which operates
unerringly. I saw this illustrated one spring in the case of a mallard
drake.
My son had two ducks, and to mate with them he procured a drake of a
neighbor who lived two miles south of us. He brought the drake home in
a bag. The bird had no opportunity to see the road along which it was
carried, or to get the general direction, except at the time of
starting, when the boy carried him a few rods openly.
He was placed with the ducks in a spring run, under a tree in a
secluded place on the river slope, about a hundred yards from the
highway. The two ducks treated him very contemptuously. It was easy to
see that the drake was homesick from the first hour, and he soon left
the presence of the scornful ducks.
Then we shut the three in the barn together, and kept them there a
day and a night. Still the friendship did not ripen; the ducks and the
drake separated the moment we let them out. Left to himself, the drake
at once turned his head homeward, and started up the hill for the
highway.
Then we shut the trio up together again for a couple of days, but with
the same results as before. There seemed to be but one thought in the
mind of the drake, and that was home.
Several times we headed him off and brought him back, till finally on
the third or fourth day I said to my son, "If that drake is really
bound to go home, he shall have an opportunity to make the trial, and
I will go with him to see that he has fair play." We withdrew, and the
homesick mallard started up through the currant patch, then through
the vineyard toward the highway which he had never seen.
When he reached the fence, he followed it south till he came to the
open gate, where he took to the road as confidently as if he knew for
a certainty that it would lead him straight to his mate. How eagerly
he paddled along, glancing right and left, and increasing his speed at
every step! I kept about fifty yards behind him. Presently he met a
dog; he paused and eyed the animal for a moment, and then turned to
the right along a road which diverged just at that point, and which
led to the railroad station. I followed, thinking the drake would soon
lose his bearings, and get hopelessly confused in the tangle of roads
that converged at the station.
But he seemed to have an exact map of the country in his mind; he soon
left the station road, went around a house, through a vineyard, till
he struck a stone fence that crossed his course at right angles; this
he followed eastward till it was joined by a barbed wire fence, under
which he passed and again entered the highway he had first taken. Then
down the road he paddled with renewed confidence: under the trees,
down a hill, through a grove, over a bridge, up the hill again toward
home.
Presently he found his clue cut in two by the railroad track; this was
something he had never before seen; he paused, glanced up it, then
down it, then at the highway across it, and quickly concluded this
last was his course. On he went again, faster and faster.
He had now gone half the distance, and was getting tired. A little
pool of water by the roadside caught his eye. Into it he plunged,
bathed, drank, preened his plumage for a few moments, and then started
homeward again. He knew his home was on the upper side of the road,
for he kept his eye bent in that direction, scanning the fields. Twice
he stopped, stretched himself up, and scanned the landscape intently;
then on again. It seemed as if an invisible cord was attached to him,
and he was being pulled down the road.
Just opposite a farm lane which led up to a group of farm buildings,
and which did indeed look like his home lane, he paused and seemed to
be debating with himself. Two women just then came along; they lifted
and flirted their skirts, for it was raining, and this disturbed him
again and decided him to take to the farm lane. Up the lane he went,
rather doubtingly, I thought.
In a few moments it brought him into a barn-yard, where a group of hens
caught his eye. Evidently he was on good terms with hens at home, for
he made up to these eagerly as if to tell them his troubles; but the
hens knew not ducks; they withdrew suspiciously, then assumed a
threatening attitude, till one old "dominic" put up her feathers and
charged upon him viciously.
Again he tried to make up to them, quacking softly, and again he was
repulsed. Then the cattle in the yard spied this strange creature and
came sniffing toward it, full of curiosity.
The drake quickly concluded he had got into the wrong place, and
turned his face southward again. Through the fence he went into a
plowed field. Presently another stone fence crossed his path; along
this he again turned toward the highway. In a few minutes he found
himself in a corner formed by the meeting of two stone fences. Then he
turned appealingly to me, uttering the soft note of the mallard. To
use his wings never seemed to cross his mind.
Well, I am bound to confess that I helped the drake over the wall, but
I sat him down in the road as impartially as I could. How well his
pink feet knew the course! How they flew up the road! His green head
and white throat fairly twinkled under the long avenue of oaks and
chestnuts.
At last we came in sight of the home lane, which led up to the
farmhouse one hundred or more yards from the road. I was curious to
see if he would recognize the place. At the gate leading into the lane
he paused. He had just gone up a lane that looked like that and had
been disappointed. What should he do now? Truth compels me to say that
he overshot the mark: he kept on hesitatingly along the highway.
It was now nearly night. I felt sure the duck would soon discover his
mistake, but I had not time to watch the experiment further. I went
around the drake and turned him back. As he neared the lane this time
he seemed suddenly to see some familiar landmark, and he rushed up it
at the top of his speed. His joy and eagerness were almost pathetic.
I followed close. Into the house yard he rushed with uplifted wings,
and fell down almost exhausted by the side of his mate. A half hour
later the two were nipping the grass together in the pasture, and he,
I have no doubt, was eagerly telling her the story of his adventures.
V
FACTORS IN ANIMAL LIFE
The question that the Californian schoolchildren put to me, "Have the
birds got sense?" still "sticks in my crop."
Such extraordinary sense has been attributed to most of the wild
creatures by several of our latter day nature-writers, that I have
been moved to examine the whole question more thoroughly than ever
before, and to find out, as far as I can, just how much and what kind
of sense the birds and four-footed beasts have.
In this and in some following chapters I shall make an effort to use
my own sense to the best advantage in probing that of the animals,
which has, as I think, been so vastly overrated.
When sentiment gets overripe, it becomes sentimentalism. The sentiment
for nature which has been so assiduously cultivated in our times is
fast undergoing this change, and is softening into sentimentalism
toward the lower animals. Many a wholesome feeling can be pushed so
far that it becomes a weakness and a sign of disease. Pity for the
sufferings of our brute neighbors may be a manly feeling; and then
again it may be so fostered and cosseted that it becomes maudlin and
unworthy. When hospitals are founded for sick or homeless cats and
dogs, when all forms of vivisection are cried down, when the animals
are humanized and books are written to show that the wild creatures
have schools and kindergartens, and that their young are instructed
and disciplined in quite the human way by their fond parents; when we
want to believe that reason and not instinct guides them, that they
are quite up in some of the simpler arts of surgery, mending or
amputating their own broken limbs and salving their wounds,--when, I
say, our attitude toward the natural life about us and our feeling for
it have reached the stage implied by these things, then has sentiment
degenerated into sentimentalism, and our appreciation of nature lost
its firm edge.
No doubt there is a considerable number of people in any community
that are greatly taken with this improved anthropomorphic view of wild
nature now current among us. Such a view tickles the fancy and touches
the emotions. It makes the wild creatures so much more interesting.
Shall we deny anything to a bird or beast that makes it more
interesting, and more worthy of our study and admiration?
This sentimental view of animal life has its good side and its bad
side. Its good side is its result in making us more considerate and
merciful toward our brute neighbors; its bad side is seen in the
degree to which it leads to a false interpretation of their lives. The
tendency to which I refer is no doubt partly the result of our growing
humanitarianism and feeling of kinship with all the lower orders of
creation, and partly due to the fact that we live in a time of
impromptu nature study, when birds and plants and trees are fast
becoming a fad with half the population, and when the "yellow"
reporter is abroad in the fields and woods. Never before in my time
have so many exaggerations and misconceptions of the wild life about
us been current in the popular mind. It is becoming the fashion to
ascribe to the lower animals nearly all our human motives and
attributes, and often to credit them with plans and devices that imply
reason and a fair amount of mechanical knowledge. An illustration of
this is the account of the nest of a pair of orioles, as described in
the "North American Review" for May, 1903, by a writer of popular
nature books. These orioles built a nest so extraordinary that it can
be accounted for only on the theory that there _is_ a school of the
woods, and that these two birds had been pupils there and had taken an
advanced course in Strings. Among other things impossible for birds to
do, these orioles tied a knot in the end of a string to prevent its
fraying in the wind! If the whole idea were not too preposterous for
even a half-witted child to believe, one might ask, What in the name
of anything and everything but the "Modern School of Nature Study" do
orioles know about strings fraying in the wind and the use of knots to
prevent it? They have never had occasion to know; they have had no
experience with strings that hang loose and unravel in the wind. They
often use strings, to be sure, in building their nests, but they use
them in a sort of haphazard way, weaving them awkwardly into the
structure, and leaving no loose ends that would suffer by fraying in
the wind. Sometimes they use strings in attaching the nest to the
limb, but they never knot or tie them; they simply wind them round and
round as a child might. It is possible that a bird might be taught to
tie a knot with its foot and beak, though I should have to see it done
to be convinced. But the orioles in question not only tied knots; they
tied them with a "reversed double hitch, the kind that a man uses in
cinching his saddle"! More wonderful still, not finding in a New
England elm-embowered town a suitable branch from which to suspend
their nest, the birds went down upon the ground and tied three twigs
together in the form of "a perfectly measured triangle" (no doubt
working from a plan drawn to a scale). They attached to the three
sides of this framework four strings of equal length (eight or ten
inches), all carefully doubled, tied them to a heavier string, carried
the whole ingenious contrivance to a tree, and tied it fast to a limb
in precisely the way you or I would have done it! From this framework
they suspended their nest, the whole structure being about two feet
long, and having the effect of a small hanging basket. Still more
astonishing, when the genuineness of the nest is questioned, a man is
found who makes affidavit that he saw the orioles build it! After such
a proceeding, how long will it be before the water-birds are building
little rush cradles for their young, or rush boats to be driven about
the ponds and lakes by means of leaf sails, or before Jenny Wren will
be living in a log cabin of her own construction? How long will it be
before some one makes affidavit that the sparrow with his bow and
arrow has actually been seen to kill Cock Robin, and the beetle with
his thread and needle engaged in making the shroud? Birds show the
taste and skill of their kind in building their nests, but rarely any
individual ingenuity and inventiveness. The nest referred to is on a
plane entirely outside of Nature and her processes. It belongs to a
different order of things, the order of mechanical contrivances, and
was of course "made up," probably from a real oriole's nest, and the
writer who vouches for its genuineness has been the victim of a clever
practical joke--a willing victim, no doubt, since he is looking in
Nature for just this kind of thing, and since he believes there is
"absolutely no limit to the variety and adaptiveness of Nature even in
a single species." If there is no such limit, then I suppose we need
not be surprised to meet a winged horse, or a centaur, or a mermaid at
any time.
It is as plain as anything can be that the animals share our emotional
nature in vastly greater measure than they do our intellectual or our
moral nature; and because they do this, because they show fear, love,
joy, anger, sympathy, jealousy, because they suffer and are glad,
because they form friendships and local attachments and have the home
and paternal instincts, in short, because their lives run parallel to
our own in so many particulars, we come, if we are not careful, to
ascribe to them the whole human psychology. But it is equally plain
that of what we mean by mind, intellect, they show only a trace now
and then. They do not accumulate a store of knowledge any more than
they do a store of riches. A store of knowledge is impossible without
language. Man began to emerge from the lower orders when he invented a
language of some sort. As the language of animals is little more than
various cries expressive of pleasure or pain, or fear or suspicion,
they do not think in any proper sense, because they have no terms in
which to think--no language. I shall have more to say upon this point
in another chapter. One trait they do show which is the first step
toward knowledge--curiosity. Nearly all the animals show at times
varying degrees of curiosity, but here again an instinctive feeling of
possible danger probably lies back of it. They even seem to show at
times a kind of altruistic feeling. A correspondent writes me that she
possessed a canary which lived to so great an age that it finally
became so feeble it could not crack the seeds she gave it, when the
other birds, its own progeny, it is true, fed it; and Darwin cites
cases of blind birds, in a state of nature, being fed by their
fellows. Probably it would be hasty to conclude that such acts show
anything more than instinct. I should be slow to ascribe to the
animals any notion of the uses of punishment as we practice it, though
the cat will box her kittens when they play too long with her tail,
and the mother hen will separate her chickens when they get into a
fight, and sometimes peck one or both of them on the head, as much as
to say, "There, don't you do that again." The rooster will in the same
way separate two hens when they are fighting. On the surface this
seems like a very human act, but can we say that it is punishment or
discipline in the human sense, as having for its aim a betterment of
the manners of the kittens or of the chickens? The cat aims to get rid
of an annoyance, and the rooster and the mother hen interfere to
prevent an injury to members of their family; they exhibit the
paternal and maternal instinct of protection. More than that would
imply ethical considerations, of which the lower animals are not
capable. The act of the baboon, mentioned by Darwin, I believe, that
examined the paws of the cat that had scratched it, and then
deliberately bit off the nails, belongs to a different and to a
higher order of conduct.
A complete statement of the factors that shape the lives of the lower
orders would include three terms--instinct, imitation (though,
doubtless, this is instinctive), and experience. Instinct is, of
course, the main factor, and by this term we mean that which prompts
an animal or a man to act spontaneously, without instruction or
experience. All creatures are imitative, and man himself not the least
so. I had a visit the other day from a woman who had spent the last
two years in London, and her speech betrayed the fact; she had quite
unconsciously caught certain of the English mannerisms of speech. A
few years in the South will give the New Englander the Southern
accent, and vice versa. The young are, of course, more imitative than
the old. Children imitate their parents; the young writer imitates his
favorite author.
Animals of different species closely associated will imitate each
other. A lady writes me that she has a rabbit that lives in a cage
with a monkey, and that it has caught many of the monkey's ways. I can
well believe it. Dogs reared with cats have been known to acquire the
cat habit of licking the paws and then washing the ears and face.
Wolves reared with dogs learn to bark, and who has not seen a dog draw
its face as if trying to laugh as its master does? When a cat has been
taught to sit up for its food, its kittens have been known to imitate
the mother. Darwin tells of a cat that used to put its paw into the
mouth of a narrow milk-jug and then lick it off, and that its kittens
soon learned the same trick. In all such cases, hasty observers say
the mother taught its young. Certainly the young learned, but there
was no effort to teach on the part of the parent. Unconscious
imitation did it all. Our "Modern School of Nature Study" would say
that the old sow teaches her pigs to root when they follow her afield,
rooting in their little ways as she does. But would she not root if
she had no pigs, and would not the pigs root if they had no mother?
All acts necessary to an animal's life and to the continuance of the
species are instinctive; the creature does not have to be taught them,
nor are they acquired by imitation. The bird does not have to be
taught to build its nest or to fly, nor the beaver to build its dam or
its house, nor the otter or the seal to swim, nor the young of mammals
to suckle, nor the spider to spin its web, nor the grub to weave its
cocoon. Nature does not trust these things to chance; they are too
vital. The things that an animal acquires by imitation are of
secondary importance in its life. As soon as the calf, or the lamb, or
the colt can get upon its feet, its first impulse is to find the udder
of its dam. It requires no instruction or experience to take this
important step.
How far the different species of song-birds acquire each their
peculiar songs by imitation is a question that has not yet been fully
settled. That imitation has much to do with it admits of little doubt.
The song of a bird is of secondary importance in its life. Birds
reared in captivity, where they have never heard the songs of their
kind, sing at the proper age, but not always the songs of their
parents. Mr. Scott of Princeton proved this with his orioles. They
sang at the proper age, but not the regular oriole song. I am told
that there is a well-authenticated case of an English sparrow brought
up with canaries that learned to sing like a canary. "The Hon. Daines
Barrington placed three young linnets with three different
foster-parents, the skylark, the woodlark, and the titlark or
meadow-pipit, and each adopted, through imitation, the song of its
foster-parent." I have myself heard goldfinches that were reared in a
cage sing beautifully, but not the regular goldfinch song; it was
clearly the song of a finch, but of what finch I could not have told.
I have also heard a robin that sang to perfection the song of the
brown thrasher; it had, no doubt, caught it by imitation. I have heard
another robin that had the call of the quail interpolated into its own
proper robin's song. But I have yet to hear of a robin building a nest
like a brown thrasher, or of an oriole building a nest like a robin,
or of kingfishers drilling for grubs in a tree. The hen cannot keep
out of the water the ducks she has hatched, nor can the duck coax into
the water the chickens she has hatched. The cowbird hatched and
reared by the sparrow, or the warbler, or the vireo does not sing the
song of the foster-parent. Why? Did its parent not try to teach it? I
have no evidence that young birds sing, except occasionally in a low,
tentative kind of way, till they return the following season, and then
birds of a feather flock together, robins staying with robins, and
cowbirds with cowbirds, each singing the song of its species. The
songs of bobolinks differ in different localities, but those of the
same locality always sing alike. I once had a caged skylark that
imitated the songs of nearly every bird in my neighborhood.
Mr. Leander S. Keyser, author of "Birds of the Rockies," relates in
"Forest and Stream" the results of his experiments with a variety of
birds taken from the nest while very young and reared in captivity;
among them meadowlarks, red-winged blackbirds, brown thrashers, blue
jays, wood thrushes, catbirds, flickers, woodpeckers, and several
others. Did they receive any parental instruction? Not a bit of it,
and yet at the proper age they flew, perched, called, and sang like
their wild fellows--all except the robins and the red-winged
blackbirds: these did not sing the songs of their species, but sang a
medley made up of curious imitations of human and other sounds. And
the blue jay never learned to sing "the sweet gurgling roulade of the
wild jays," though it gave the blue jay call correctly. Mr. Keyser's
experiment was interesting and valuable, but his sagacity fails him
when interpreting the action of the jay in roosting in an exposed
place after it had been given its liberty. He thinks this showed how
little instinct can be relied on, and how much the bird needed
parental instruction. Could he not see that the artificial life of the
bird in the cage had demoralized its instincts, and that acquired
habits had supplanted native tendencies? The bird had learned to be
unafraid in the cage, and why should it be afraid out of the cage?
This reminds me of a letter from a correspondent: he had a tame crow
that was not afraid of a gun; therefore he concluded that the old
crows must instill the fear of guns into their young! Why should the
crow be afraid of a gun, if it had learned not to be afraid of the
gunner?
I have seen a young chickadee fly late in the day from the nest in the
cavity of a tree straight to a pear-tree, where it perched close to
the trunk and remained unregarded by its parents till next morning.
But no doubt its parents had given it minute directions before it left
the nest how to fly and where to perch!
That animals learn by experience in a limited way is very certain. Yet
that old birds build better nests or sing better than young ones it
would be hard to prove, though it seems reasonable that it should be
so.
Rarely does one see nests of the same species of varying degrees of
excellence--that is, first nests in the spring. The second nest of any
species is likely to be a more hurried and incomplete affair. Some
species are at all times poor nest-builders, as the cuckoos and the
pigeons. Other birds are good nest-builders, as the orioles, the
thrushes, the finches, the warblers, the hummingbirds, and one never
finds an inferior specimen of the nests of any of these birds. There
is probably no more improvement in this respect among birds than there
is among insects.
I have no proof that wild birds improve in singing. One does not hear
a vireo, or a finch, or a thrush, or a warbler that is noticeably
inferior as a songster to its fellows; their songs are all alike,
except in the few rare cases when one hears a master songster among
its kind; but whether this mastery is natural or acquired, who shall
tell?
What birds learn about migration, if anything, I do not see that we
have any means of finding out.
It has been observed of birds reared under artificial conditions that
the young males practice a long time before they sing well. That this
is true of wild birds, there is no proof. What birds and animals learn
by experience is greater cunning. Does not even an old trout know more
about hooks than a young one? Birds of any kind that are much hunted
become wilder, even though they have not had the experience of being
shot. Ask any duck or grouse or quail hunter if this is not so. Our
ruffed grouse learns to fly with a corkscrew motion where it is much
fired at on the wing. How wary and cautious the fox becomes in regions
where it is much trapped and hunted! Even the woodchuck becomes very
wild on the farms where it is much shot at, and this wildness extends
to its young. In his "Wilderness Hunter" President Roosevelt says the
same thing of the big game of the Rockies. Antelope and deer can be
lured near the concealed hunter by the waving of a small flag till
they are shot at a few times. Then they see through the trick. "The
burnt child fears the fire." Animals profit by experience in this way;
they learn what not to do. In the accumulation of positive knowledge,
so far as we know, they make little or no progress. Birds and beasts
will adapt themselves more or less to their environment, but plants
and trees will do that, too. The rats in Jamaica have learned to nest
in trees to escape the mongoose, but this is only the triumph of the
instinct of self-preservation. The mongoose has not yet learned to
climb trees; the pressure of need is not yet great enough. It is said
that in districts subject to floods moor-hens often build in trees.
All animals will change their habits under pressure of necessity; man
changes his without this pressure. The Duke of Argyll saw a bald eagle
seize a fish in the stream--an unusual proceeding; but the eagle was
doubtless very hungry, and there was no osprey near upon whom to levy
tribute.
Romanes found that rats would get certain semi-liquid foods out of a
bottle with their tails, as a cat will get milk out of a jar with her
paw, but neither ever progresses so far as to use any sort of tool for
the purpose, or to tip the vessel over. Animals practice concealment
to secure their prey, but not deception, as man does. They do not use
lures or disguises, or traps or poison.
There is, of course, no limit to the variety and adaptiveness of
nature taken as a whole, but each species is hedged about by
impassable limitations. The ouzel is akin to the thrushes, and yet it
lives along and in the water. Does it ever take to the fields and
woods, and live on fruit and land-insects, and nest in trees like
other thrushes? So with all birds and beasts. They vary constantly,
but not in one lifetime, and the sum of these variations, accumulated
through natural selection, as Darwin has shown, gives rise, in the
course of long periods of time, to new species.
As I have already said, domestic animals vary more than wild ones.
Every farmer and poultry-grower knows that some hens are better with
chickens than others--more motherly, more careful--and rear a greater
number of their brood. The same is true of sows with pigs. Some sows
will eat their pigs, and wild animals in cages often destroy their
young. Some ewes will not own their lambs, and occasionally a cow will
not own her calf. (Such cases show perverted or demoralized
instinct.) Similar to these are the strange friendships that sometimes
occur among the domestic animals, as that of a sheep with a cow, a
goose with a horse, or a hen adopting kittens. In a state of nature
these curious attachments probably never spring up. Instinct is likely
to be more or less demoralized when animal life touches human life.
With the wild creatures we sometimes see one instinct overcoming
another, as when fear drives a bird to desert its nest, or when the
instinct of migration leads a pair of swallows to desert their
unfledged young.
A great many young birds come to grief by leaving the nest before they
can fly. In such cases, I suppose, they disobey the parental
instructions! I find it easier to believe that instinct is at fault,
or that one instinct has overcome another; something has disturbed or
alarmed the young birds, and the fear of danger has led them to
attempt flight before their wings were strong enough. Once, when I was
climbing up to the nest of a broad-winged hawk, the young took fright
and launched out in the air, coming to the ground only a few rods
away.
Instinct, natural prompting, is the main matter, after all. It makes
up at least nine tenths of the lives of all our wild neighbors. How
much has fear had to do in shaping their lives and in perpetuating
them! And "fear of any particular enemy," says Darwin, "is certainly
an instinctive quality." It has been said that kittens confined in a
box, and which have never known a dog, will spit and put up their
backs at a hand that has just stroked a dog,--even before their eyes
are opened, one authority says, but this I doubt. My son's tame gray
squirrel had never seen chestnuts, nor learned about them in the
school of the woods, and yet when he was offered some, he fairly
danced with excitement; he put his paws eagerly around them and drew
them to him, and chattered, and looked threateningly at all about him.
Does man know his proper food in the same way? The child has only the
instinct to eat, and will put anything into its mouth.
How the instinctive wildness of the turkey crops out in the young! Let
the mother turkey while hovering her brood give the danger-signal, and
the young will run from under her and hide in the grass. Why? To give
her a chance to fly and decoy away the enemy. I think young chickens
will do the same. Young partridges hatched under a hen run away at
once. Pheasants in England reared under a domestic fowl are as wild as
in a state of nature. Some California quail hatched under a bantam hen
in the Zoo in New York did not heed the calls of their foster-mother
at all the first week, but at her alarm-note they instantly squatted,
showing that the danger-cry of a fowl is a kind of universal language
that all species understand. One may prove this at any time by
arousing the fears of any wild bird: how all the other birds catch the
alarm! Charles St. John says that in Scotland the stag you are
stalking is sure to be put to flight if it hears the alarm-cry of the
cock-grouse. You see it is more important that the wild creatures
should understand the danger-signals of one another than that they
should understand the rest of their language.
To what extent animals reason, or show any glimmering of what we call
reason, is a much-debated question among animal psychologists, and I
shall have more to say upon the subject later on. Dogs undoubtedly
show gleams of reason, and other animals in domestication, such as the
elephant and the monkey. One does not often feel like questioning
Darwin's conclusions, yet the incident of the caged bear which he
quotes, that pawed the water in front of its cage to create a current
that should float within its reach a piece of bread that had been
placed there, does not, in my judgment, show any reasoning about the
laws of hydrostatics. The bear would doubtless have pawed a cloth in
the same way, vaguely seeking to draw the bread within reach. But when
an elephant blows through his trunk upon the ground _beyond_ an object
which he wants, but which is beyond his reach, so that the rebounding
air will drive it toward him, he shows something very much like
reason.
Instinct is a kind of natural reason,--reason that acts without proof
or experience. The principle of life in organic nature seeks in all
ways to express and to perpetuate itself. It finds many degrees of
expression and fulfillment in the vegetable world; it finds higher
degrees of expression and fulfillment in the animal world, reaching
its highest development in man.
That the animals, except those that have been long associated with
man, and they only in occasional gleams and hints, are capable of any
of our complex mental processes, that they are capable of an act of
reflection, of connecting cause and effect, of putting this and that
together, is to me void of proof. Why, there are yet savage tribes in
which the woman is regarded as the sole parent of the child. When the
mother is sick at childbirth, the father takes to his bed and feigns
the illness he does not feel, in order to establish his relationship
to the child. It is not at all probable that the males of any species
of animals, or the females either, are guided or influenced in their
actions by the desire for offspring, or that they possess anything
like knowledge of the connection between their love-making and their
offspring. This knowledge comes of reflection, and reflection the
lower animals are not capable of. But I shall have more to say upon
this point in another chapter, entitled "What do Animals Know?" I will
only say here that animals are almost as much under the dominion of
absolute nature, or what we call instinct, innate tendency, habit of
growth, as are the plants and trees. Their lives revolve around three
wants or needs--the want of food, of safety, and of offspring. It is
in securing these ends that all their wit is developed. They have no
wants outside of these spheres, as man has. Their social wants and
their love of beauty, as in some of the birds, are secondary. It is
quite certain that the animals that store up food for the winter do
not take any thought of the future. Nature takes thought for them and
gives them their provident instinct. The jay, by his propensity to
carry away and hide things, plants many of our oak and chestnut trees,
but who dares say that he does this on purpose, any more than that the
insects cross-fertilize the flowers on purpose? Sheep do not take
thought of the wool upon their backs that is to protect them from the
cold of winter, nor does the fox of his fur. In the tropics sheep
cease to grow wool in three or four years.
All the lower animals, so far as I know, swim the first time they find
themselves in the water. They do not have to be taught: it is a matter
of instinct. It is what we should expect from our knowledge of their
lives. Not so with man; he must learn to swim as he learns so many
other things. The stimulus of the water does not at once set in motion
his legs and arms in the right way, as it does the animal's legs; his
powers of reason and reflection paralyze him--his brain carries him
down. Not until he has learned to resign himself to the water as the
animal does, and to go on all fours, can he swim. As soon as the boy
ceases to struggle against his tendency to sink, assumes the
horizontal position, and strikes out as the animal does, with but one
thought, and that to apply his powers of locomotion to the medium
about him, he swims as a matter of course. It is said that children
have sometimes been known to swim when thrown into the water. Their
animal instincts were not thwarted by their powers of reflection.
Doubtless this never happened to a grown person. Moreover, is it not
probable that the specific gravity of the hairless human body is
greater than that of the hair-covered animal, and that it sinks, while
that of the cat or dog floats? This, with the erect position of man,
makes swimming with him an art that must be acquired.
There is no better illustration of the action of instinct as opposed
to conscious intelligence than is afforded by the parasitic
birds,--the cuckoo in Europe and the cowbird in this country,--birds
that lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. Darwin speculates as
to how this instinct came about, but whatever may have been its
genesis, it is now a fixed habit among these birds. Moreover, the
instinct of the blind young alien, a day or two after it is hatched,
to throw or crowd its foster-brothers out of the nest is a strange and
anomalous act, and is as untaught and unreasoned as anything in
vegetable life. But when our yellow warbler, finding this strange egg
of the cowbird in her nest, proceeds to bury it by putting another
bottom in the nest and carrying up the sides to correspond, she shows
something very much like sense and judgment, though of a clumsy kind.
How much simpler and easier it would be to throw out the strange egg!
I have known the cowbird herself to carry an egg from a nest in which
she wished to deposit one of her own. Again, how stupid and ludicrous
it seems on the part of the mother sparrow, or warbler, or vireo, when
she goes about toiling desperately to satisfy the hunger of her big
clamorous bantling of a cowbird, never suspecting that she has been
imposed upon!
Of course the line that divides man from the lower orders is not a
straight line. It has many breaks and curves and deep indentations.
The man-like apes, as it were, mark where the line rises up into the
domain of man. Furthermore, the elephant and the dog, especially as we
know them in domestication, encroach upon man's territory.
Men are born with aptitudes for different things, but the art and the
science of them all they have to learn; proficiency comes with
practice. Man must learn to spin his web, to build his house, to sing
his song, to know his food, to sail his craft, to find his way--things
that the animals know "from the jump." The animal inherits its
knowledge and its skill: man must acquire his by individual effort;
all he inherits is capacity in varying degrees for these things. The
animal does rational things without an exercise of reason. It is
intelligent as nature is intelligent. It does not know that it knows,
or how it knows, while man does. Man's knowledge is the light of his
mind that shines on many and widely different objects, while the
knowledge of animals cannot be symbolized by the term "light" at all.
The animal acts blindly so far as any conscious individual
illumination or act of judgment is concerned. It does the thing
unwittingly, because it must. Confront it with a new condition, and it
has no resources to meet that condition. The animal knows what
necessity taught its progenitors, and it knows that only as a
spontaneous impulse to do certain things.
Instinct, I say, is a great matter, and often shames reason. It adapts
means to an end, it makes few or no mistakes, it takes note of times
and seasons, it delves, it bores, it spins, it weaves, it sews, it
builds, it makes paper, it constructs a shelter, it navigates the air
and the water, it is provident and thrifty, it knows its enemies, it
outwits its foes, it crosses oceans and continents without compass, it
foreshadows nearly all the arts and trades and occupations of mankind,
it is skilled without practice, and wise without experience. How it
arose, what its genesis was, who can tell? Probably natural selection
has been the chief agent in its development. If natural selection has
developed and sharpened the claws of the cat and the scent of the
fox, why should it not develop and sharpen their wits also? The remote
ancestors of the fox or of the crow were doubtless less shrewd and
cunning than the crows and the foxes of to-day. The instinctive
intelligence of an animal of our time is the sum of the variations
toward greater intelligence of all its ancestors. What man stores in
language and in books--the accumulated results of experience--the
animals seem to have stored in instinct. As Darwin says, a man cannot,
on his first trial, make a stone hatchet or a canoe through his power
of imitation. "He has to learn his work by practice; a beaver, on the
other hand, can make its dam or canal, and a bird its nest, as well or
nearly as well, and a spider its wonderful web quite as well, the
first time it tries as when old and experienced."
An animal shows intelligence, as distinct from instinct, when it takes
advantage of any circumstance that arises at the moment, when it finds
new ways, whether better or not, as when certain birds desert their
old nesting-sites, and take up with new ones afforded by man. This
act, at least, shows power of choice. The birds and beasts all quickly
avail themselves of any new source of food supply. Their wits are
probably more keen and active here than in any other direction. It is
said that in Oklahoma the coyotes have learned to tell ripe
watermelons from unripe ones by scratching upon them. If they have
not, they probably will. Eating is the one thing that engrosses the
attention of all creatures, and the procuring of food has been a great
means of education to all.
I notice that certain of the wood-folk--mice and squirrels and
birds--eat mushrooms. If I would eat them, I must learn how to
distinguish the edible from the poisonous ones. I have no special
sense to guide me in the matter, as doubtless the squirrels have.
Their instinct is sure where my reason fails. It would be very
interesting to know if they ever make a mistake in this matter.
Domestic animals sometimes make mistakes as to their food because
their instinct has been tampered with and is by no means as sure as
that of the wild creatures. It is said that sheep will occasionally
eat laurel and St. John's-wort, which are poisonous to them. In the
far West I was told that the horses sometimes eat a weed called the
loco-weed that makes them crazy. I have since learned that the
buffaloes and cattle with a strain of the buffalo blood never eat this
weed.
The imitation among the lower animals to which I have referred is in
no sense akin to teaching. The boy does not learn arithmetic by
imitation. To teach is to bring one mind to act upon another mind; it
is the result of a conscious effort on the part of both teacher and
pupil. The child, says Darwin, has an instinctive tendency to speak,
but not to brew, or bake, or write. The child comes to speak by
imitation, as does the parrot, and then learns the meaning of words,
as the parrot does not.
I am convinced there is nothing in the notion that animals consciously
teach their young. Is it probable that a mere animal reflects upon the
future any more than it does upon the past? Is it solicitous about the
future well-being of its offspring any more than it is curious about
its ancestry? Persons who think they see the lower animals training
their young consciously or unconsciously supply something to their
observations; they read their own thoughts or preconceptions into what
they see. Yet so trained a naturalist and experienced a hunter as
President Roosevelt differs with me in this matter. In a letter which
I am permitted to quote, he says:--
"I have not the slightest doubt that there is a large amount of
_unconscious_ teaching by wood-folk of their offspring. In
unfrequented places I have had the deer watch me with almost as much
indifference as they do now in the Yellowstone Park. In frequented
places, where they are hunted, young deer and young mountain sheep, on
the other hand,--and of course young wolves, bobcats, and the
like,--are exceedingly wary and shy when the sight or smell of man is
concerned. Undoubtedly this is due to the fact that from their
earliest moments of going about they learn to imitate the unflagging
watchfulness of their parents, and by the exercise of some associative
or imitative quality they grow to imitate and then to share the alarm
displayed by the older ones at the smell or presence of man. A young
deer that has never seen a man feels no instinctive alarm at his
presence, or at least very little; but it will undoubtedly learn to
associate extreme alarm with his presence from merely accompanying its
mother, if the latter feels such alarm. I should not regard this as
schooling by the parent any more than I should so regard the instant
flight of twenty antelope who had not seen a hunter, because the
twenty-first has seen him and has instantly run. Sometimes a deer or
an antelope will deliberately give an alarm-cry at sight of something
strange. This cry at once puts every deer or antelope on the alert;
but they will be just as much on the alert if they witness nothing but
an exhibition of fright and flight on the part of the first deer or
antelope, without there being any conscious effort on its part to
express alarm.
"Moreover, I am inclined to think that on certain occasions, rare
though they may be, there is a conscious effort at teaching. I have
myself known of one setter dog which would thrash its puppy soundly if
the latter carelessly or stupidly flushed a bird. Something similar
may occur in the wild state among such intelligent beasts as wolves
and foxes. Indeed, I have some reason to believe that with both of
these animals it does occur--that is, that there is conscious as well
as unconscious teaching of the young in such matters as traps."
Probably the President and I differ more in the meaning we attach to
the same words than in anything else. In a subsequent letter he says:
"I think the chief difference between you and me in the matter is one
of terminology. When I speak of unconscious teaching, I really mean
simply acting in a manner which arouses imitation."
Imitation is no doubt the key to the whole matter. The animals
unconsciously teach their young by their example, and in no other way.
But I must leave the discussion of this subject for another chapter.
VI
ANIMAL COMMUNICATION
The notion that animals consciously train and educate their young has
been held only tentatively by European writers on natural history.
Darwin does not seem to have been of this opinion at all. Wallace
shared it at one time in regard to the birds,--their songs and
nest-building,--but abandoned it later, and fell back upon instinct or
inherited habit. Some of the German writers, such as Brehm, Büchner,
and the Müllers, seem to have held to the notion more decidedly. But
Professor Groos had not yet opened their eyes to the significance of
the play of animals. The writers mentioned undoubtedly read the
instinctive play of animals as an attempt on the part of the parents
to teach their young.
That the examples of the parents in many ways stimulate the imitative
instincts of the young is quite certain, but that the parents in any
sense aim at instruction is an idea no longer held by writers on
animal psychology.
Of course it all depends upon what we mean by teaching. Do we mean the
communication of knowledge, or the communication of emotion? It seems
to me that by teaching we mean the former. Man alone communicates
knowledge; the lower animals communicate feeling or emotion. Hence
their communications always refer to the present, never to the past or
to the future.
That birds and beasts do communicate with each other, who can doubt?
But that they impart knowledge, that they have any knowledge to
impart, in the strict meaning of the word, any store of ideas or
mental concepts--that is quite another matter. Teaching implies such
store of ideas and power to impart them. The subconscious self rules
in the animal; the conscious self rules in man, and the conscious self
alone can teach or communicate knowledge. It seems to me that the
cases of the deer and the antelope, referred to by President Roosevelt
in the letter to me quoted in the last chapter, show the communication
of emotion only.
Teaching implies reflection and judgment; it implies a thought of, and
solicitude for, the future. "The young will need this knowledge," says
the human parent, "and so we will impart it to them now." But the
animal parent has consciously no knowledge to impart, only fear or
suspicion. One may affirm almost anything of trained dogs and of dogs
generally. I can well believe that the setter bitch spoken of by the
President punished her pup when it flushed a bird,--she had been
punished herself for the same offense,--but that the act was
expressive of anything more than her present anger, that she was in
any sense trying to train and instruct her pup, there is no proof.
But with animals that have not been to school to man, all ideas of
teaching must be rudimentary indeed. How could a fox or a wolf
instruct its young in such matters as traps? Only in the presence of
the trap, certainly; and then the fear of the trap would be
communicated to the young through natural instinct. Fear, like joy or
curiosity, is contagious among beasts and birds, as it is among men;
the young fox or wolf would instantly share the emotion of its parent
in the presence of a trap. It is very important to the wild creatures
that they have a quick apprehension of danger, and as a matter of fact
they have. One wild and suspicious duck in a flock will often defeat
the best laid plans of the duck-hunter. Its suspicions are quickly
communicated to all its fellows: not through any conscious effort on
its part to do so, but through the law of natural contagion above
referred to. Where any bird or beast is much hunted, fear seems to be
in the air, and their fellows come to be conscious of the danger which
they have not experienced.
What an animal lacks in wit it makes up in caution. Fear is a good
thing for the wild creatures to have in superabundance. It often saves
them from real danger. But how undiscriminating it is! It is said
that an iron hoop or wagon-tire placed around a setting hen in the
woods will protect her from the foxes.
Animals are afraid on general principles. Anything new and strange
excites their suspicions. In a herd of animals, cattle, or horses,
fear quickly becomes a panic and rages like a conflagration. Cattlemen
in the West found that any little thing at night might kindle the
spark in their herds and sweep the whole mass away in a furious
stampede. Each animal excites every other, and the multiplied fear of
the herd is something terrible. Panics among men are not much
different.
In a discussion like the present one, let us use words in their strict
logical sense, if possible. Most of the current misconceptions in
natural history, as in other matters, arise from a loose and careless
use of words. One says teach and train and instruct, when the facts
point to instinctive imitation or unconscious communication.
That the young of all kinds thrive better and develop more rapidly
under the care of their parents than when deprived of that care is
obvious enough. It would be strange if it were not so. Nothing can
quite fill the place of the mother with either man or bird or beast.
The mother provides and protects. The young quickly learn of her
through the natural instinct of imitation. They share her fears, they
follow in her footsteps, they look to her for protection; it is the
order of nature. They are not trained in the way they should go, as a
child is by its human parents--they are not trained at all; but their
natural instincts doubtless act more promptly and surely with the
mother than without her. That a young kingfisher or a young osprey
would, in due time, dive for fish, or a young marsh hawk catch mice
and birds, or a young fox or wolf or coon hunt for its proper prey
without the parental example, admits of no doubt at all; but they
would each probably do this thing earlier and better in the order of
nature than if that order were interfered with.
The other day I saw a yellow-bellied woodpecker alight upon a decaying
beech and proceed to drill for a grub. Two of its fully grown young
followed it and, alighting near, sidled up to where the parent was
drilling. A hasty observer would say that the parent was giving its
young a lesson in grub-hunting, but I read the incident differently.
The parent bird had no thought of its young. It made passes at them
when they came too near, and drove them away. Presently it left the
tree, whereupon one of the young examined the hole its parent had made
and drilled a little on its own account. A parental example like this
may stimulate the young to hunt for grubs earlier than they would
otherwise do, but this is merely conjecture. There is no proof of it,
nor can there be any.
The mother bird or beast does not have to be instructed in her
maternal duties: they are instinctive with her; it is of vital
importance to the continuance of the species that they should be. If
it were a matter of instruction or acquired knowledge, how precarious
it would be!
The idea of teaching is an advanced idea, and can come only to a being
that is capable of returning upon itself in thought, and that can form
abstract conceptions--conceptions that float free, so to speak,
dissociated from particular concrete objects.
If a fox, or a wolf, for instance, were capable of reflection and of
dwelling upon the future and upon the past, it might feel the need of
instructing its young in the matter of traps and hounds, if such a
thing were possible without language. When the cat brings her kitten a
live mouse, she is not thinking about instructing it in the art of
dealing with mice, but is intent solely upon feeding her young. The
kitten already knows, through inheritance, about mice. So when the hen
leads her brood forth and scratches for them, she has but one
purpose--to provide them with food. If she is confined to the coop,
the chickens go forth and soon scratch for themselves and snap up the
proper insect food.
The mother's care and protection count for much, but they do not take
the place of inherited instinct. It has been found that newly hatched
chickens, when left to themselves, do not know the difference between
edible and non-edible insects, but that they soon learn. In such
matters the mother hen, no doubt, guides them.
A writer in "Forest and Stream," who has since published a book about
his "wild friends," pushes this notion that animals train their young
so far that it becomes grotesque. Here are some of the things that
this keen observer and exposer of "false natural history" reports that
he has seen about his cabin in the woods: He has seen an old crow that
hurriedly flew away from his cabin door on his sudden appearance,
return and beat its young because they did not follow quickly enough.
He has seen a male chewink, while its mate was rearing a second brood,
take the first brood and lead them away to a bird-resort (he probably
meant to say to a bird-nursery or kindergarten); and when one of the
birds wandered back to take one more view of the scenes of its
infancy, he has seen the father bird pounce upon it and give it a
"severe whipping and take it to the resort again."
He has seen swallows teach their young to fly by gathering them upon
fences and telegraph wires and then, at intervals (and at the word of
command, I suppose), launching out in the air with them, and swooping
and circling about. He has seen a song sparrow, that came to his
dooryard for fourteen years (he omitted to say that he had branded him
and so knew his bird), teach _his year-old boy to sing_ (the italics
are mine). This hermit-inclined sparrow wanted to "desert the fields
for a life in the woods," but his "wife would not consent." Many a
featherless biped has had the same experience with his society-spoiled
wife. The puzzle is, how did this masterly observer know that this
state of affairs existed between this couple? Did the wife tell him,
or the husband? "Hermit" often takes his visitors to a wood thrushes'
singing-school, where, "as the birds forget their lesson, they drop
out one by one."
He has seen an old rooster teaching a young rooster to crow! At first
the old rooster crows mostly in the morning, but later in the season
he crows throughout the day, at short intervals, to show the young
"the proper thing." "Young birds removed out of hearing will not learn
to crow." He hears the old grouse teaching the young to drum in the
fall, though he neglects to tell us that he has seen the young in
attendance upon these lessons. He has seen a mother song sparrow
helping her two-year-old daughter build her nest. He has discovered
that the cat talks to her kittens with her ears: when she points them
forward, that means "yes;" when she points them backward, that means
"no." Hence she can tell them whether the wagon they hear approaching
is the butcher's cart or not, and thus save them the trouble of
looking out.
And so on through a long list of wild and domestic creatures. At first
I suspected this writer was covertly ridiculing a certain other
extravagant "observer," but a careful reading of his letter shows him
to be seriously engaged in the worthy task of exposing "false natural
history."
Now the singing of birds, the crowing of cocks, the drumming of
grouse, are secondary sexual characteristics. They are not necessary
to the lives of the creatures, and are probably more influenced by
imitation than are the more important instincts of self-preservation
and reproduction. Yet the testimony is overwhelming that birds will
sing and roosters crow and turkeys gobble, though they have never
heard these sounds; and, no doubt, the grouse and the woodpeckers drum
from promptings of the same sexual instinct.
I do not wish to accuse "Hermit" of willfully perverting the facts of
natural history. He is one of those persons who read their own fancies
into whatever they look upon. He is incapable of disinterested
observation, which means he is incapable of observation at all in the
true sense. There are no animals that signal to each other with their
ears. The movements of the ears follow the movements of the eye. When
an animal's attention is directed to any object or sound, its ears
point forward; when its attention is relaxed, the ears fall. But with
the cat tribe the ears are habitually erect, as those of the horse are
usually relaxed. They depress them and revert them, as do many other
animals, when angered or afraid.
Certain things in animal life lead me to suspect that animals have
some means of communication with one another, especially the
gregarious animals, that is quite independent of what we mean by
language. It is like an interchange or blending of subconscious
states, and may be analogous to telepathy among human beings. Observe
what a unit a flock of birds becomes when performing their evolutions
in the air. They are not many, but one, turning and flashing in the
sun with a unity and a precision that it would be hard to imitate. One
may see a flock of shore-birds that behave as one body: now they turn
to the sun a sheet of silver; then, as their dark backs are presented
to the beholder, they almost disappear against the shore or the
clouds. It would seem as if they shared in a communal mind or spirit,
and that what one felt they all felt at the same instant.
In Florida I many times saw large schools of mullets fretting and
breaking the surface of the water with what seemed to be the tips of
their tails. A large area would be agitated and rippled by the backs
or tails of a host of fishes. Then suddenly, while I looked, there
would be one splash and every fish would dive. It was a multitude,
again, acting as one body. Hundreds, thousands of tails slapped the
water at the same instant and were gone.
When the passenger pigeons were numbered by millions, the enormous
clans used to migrate from one part of the continent to another. I saw
the last flight of them up the Hudson River valley in the spring of
1875. All day they streamed across the sky. One purpose seemed to
animate every flock and every bird. It was as if all had orders to
move to the same point. The pigeons came only when there was
beech-mast in the woods. How did they know we had had a beech-nut
year? It is true that a few straggling bands were usually seen some
days in advance of the blue myriads: were these the scouts, and did
they return with the news of the beech-nuts? If so, how did they
communicate the intelligence and set the whole mighty army in motion?
The migrations among the four-footed animals that sometimes occur over
a large, part of the country--among the rats, the gray squirrels, the
reindeer of the north--seem to be of a similar character. How does
every individual come to share in the common purpose? An army of men
attempting to move without leaders and without a written or spoken
language becomes a disorganized mob. Not so the animals. There seems
to be a community of mind among them in a sense that there is not
among men. The pressure of great danger seems to develop in a degree
this community of mind and feeling among men. Under strong excitement
we revert more or less to the animal state, and are ruled by instinct.
It may well be that telepathy--the power to project one's mental or
emotional state so as to impress a friend at a distance--is a power
which we have carried over from our remote animal ancestors. However
this may be, it is certain that the sensitiveness of birds and
quadrupeds to the condition of one another, their sense of a common
danger, of food supplies, of the direction of home under all
circumstances, point to the possession of a power which is only
rudimentary in us.
Some observers explain these things on the theory that the flocks of
birds have leaders, and that their surprising evolutions are guided by
calls or signals from these leaders, too quick or too fine for our
eyes or ears to catch. I suppose they would explain the movements of
the schools of fish and the simultaneous movements of a large number
of land animals on the same theory. I cannot accept this explanation.
It is harder for me to believe that a flock of birds has a code of
calls or signals for all its evolutions--now right, now left, now
mount, now swoop--which each individual understands on the instant, or
that the hosts of the wild pigeons had their captains and signals,
than to believe that out of the flocking instinct there has grown some
other instinct or faculty, less understood, but equally potent, that
puts all the members of a flock in such complete rapport with one
another that the purpose and the desire of one become the purpose and
the desire of all. There is nothing in this state of things analogous
to a military organization. The relation among the members of the
flock is rather that of creatures sharing spontaneously the same
subconscious or psychic state, and acted upon by the same hidden
influence, in a way and to a degree that never occur among men.
The faculty or power by which animals find the way home over or across
long stretches of country is quite as mysterious and incomprehensible
to us as the spirit of the flock to which I refer. A hive of bees
evidently has a collective purpose and plan that does not emanate from
any single individual or group of individuals, and which is understood
by all without outward communication.
Is there anything which, without great violence to language, may be
called a school of the woods? In the sense in which a playground is a
school--a playground without rules or methods or a director--there is
a school of the woods. It is an unkept, an unconscious school or
gymnasium, and is entirely instinctive. In play the young of all
animals, no doubt, get a certain amount of training and disciplining
that helps fit them for their future careers; but this school is not
presided over or directed by parents, though they sometimes take part
in it. It is spontaneous and haphazard, without rule or system; but
is, in every case, along the line of the future struggle for life of
the particular bird or animal. A young marsh hawk which we reared used
to play at striking leaves or bits of bark with its talons; kittens
play with a ball, or a cob, or a stick, as if it were a mouse, dogs
race and wrestle with one another as in the chase; ducks dive and
sport in the water; doves circle and dive in the air as if escaping
from a hawk; birds pursue and dodge one another in the same way; bears
wrestle and box; chickens have mimic battles; colts run and leap;
fawns probably do the same thing; squirrels play something like a game
of tag in the trees; lambs butt one another and skip about the rocks;
and so on.
In fact, nearly all play, including much of that of man, takes the
form of mock battle, and is to that extent an education for the
future. Among the carnivora it takes also the form of the chase. Its
spring and motive are, of course, pleasure, and not education; and
herein again is revealed the cunning of nature--the power that
conceals purposes of its own in our most thoughtless acts. The cat and
the kitten play with the live mouse, not to indulge the sense of
cruelty, as some have supposed, but to indulge in the pleasure of the
chase and unconsciously to practice the feat of capture. The cat
rarely plays with a live bird, because the recapture would be more
difficult, and might fail. What fisherman would not like to take his
big fish over and over again, if he could be sure of doing it, not
from cruelty, but for the pleasure of practicing his art? For further
light on the subject of the significance of the play of animals, I
refer the reader to the work of Professor Karl Groos called "The Play
of Animals."
One of my critics has accused me of measuring all things by the
standard of my little farm--of thinking that what is not true of
animal life there is not true anywhere. Unfortunately my farm _is_
small--hardly a score of acres--and its animal life very limited. I
have never seen even a porcupine upon it; but I have a hill where one
might roll down, should one ever come my way and be in the mood for
that kind of play.[1] I have a few possums, a woodchuck or two, an
occasional skunk, some red squirrels and rabbits, and many kinds of
song-birds. Foxes occasionally cross my acres; and once, at least, I
saw a bald eagle devouring a fish in one of my apple-trees. Wild
ducks, geese, and swans in spring and fall pass across the sky above
me. Quail and grouse invade my premises, and of crows I have, at least
in bird-nesting time, too many.
[1] See comment on the story here alluded to on page 244.
But I have a few times climbed over my pasture wall and wandered into
distant fields. Once upon a time I was a traveler in Asia for the
space of two hours--an experience that ought to have yielded me some
startling discoveries, but did not. Indeed, the wider I have traveled
and observed nature, the more I am convinced that the wild creatures
behave just about the same in all parts of the country; that is, under
similar conditions. What one observes truly about bird or beast upon
his farm of ten acres, he will not have to unlearn, travel as wide or
as far as he will. Where the animals are much hunted, they are of
course much wilder and more cunning than where they are not hunted. In
the Yellowstone National Park we found the elk, deer, and mountain
sheep singularly tame; and in the summer, so we were told, the bears
board at the big hotels. The wild geese and ducks, too, were tame; and
the red-tailed hawk built its nest in a large dead oak that stood
quite alone near the side of the road. With us the same hawk hides its
nest in a tree in the dense woods, because the farmers unwisely hunt
and destroy it. But the cougars and coyotes and bobcats were no tamer
in the park than they are in other places where they are hunted.
Indeed, if I had elk and deer and caribou and moose and bears and
wildcats and beavers and otters and porcupines on my farm, I should
expect them to behave just as they do in other parts of the country
under like conditions: they would be tame and docile if I did not
molest them, and wild and fierce if I did. They would do nothing out
of character in either case.
Your natural history knowledge of the East will avail you in the West.
There is no country, says Emerson, in which they do not wash the pans
and spank the babies; and there is no country where a dog is not a
dog, or a fox a fox, or where a hare is ferocious, or a wolf lamblike.
The porcupine behaves in the Rockies just as he does in the
Catskills; the deer and the moose and the black bear and the beaver
of the Pacific slope are almost identical in their habits and traits
with those of the Atlantic slope.
In my observations of the birds of the far West, I went wrong in my
reckoning but once: the Western meadowlark has a new song. How or
where he got it is a mystery; it seems to be in some way the gift of
those great, smooth, flowery, treeless, dimpled hills. But the swallow
was familiar, and the robin and the wren and the highhole, while the
woodchuck I saw and heard in Wyoming might have been the "chuck" of my
native hills. The eagle is an eagle the world over. When I was a boy I
saw, one autumn day, an eagle descend with extended talons upon the
backs of a herd of young cattle that were accompanied by a
cosset-sheep and were feeding upon a high hill. The object of the
eagle seemed to be to separate the one sheep from the cattle, or to
frighten them all into breaking their necks in trying to escape him.
But neither result did he achieve. In the Yellowstone Park, President
Roosevelt and Major Pitcher saw a golden eagle trying the same tactics
upon a herd of elk that contained one yearling. The eagle doubtless
had his eye upon the yearling, though he would probably have been
quite satisfied to have driven one of the older ones down a precipice.
His chances of a dinner would have been equally good.
There is one particular in which the bird families are much more human
than our four-footed kindred. I refer to the practice of courtship.
The male of all birds, so far as I know, pays suit to the female and
seeks to please and attract her.[2] This the quadrupeds do not do;
there is no period of courtship among them, and no mating or pairing
as among the birds. The male fights for the female, but he does not
seek to win her by delicate attentions. If there are any exceptions to
this rule, I do not know them. There seems to be among the birds
something that is like what is called romantic love. The choice of
mate seems always to rest with the female,[2] while among the mammals
the female shows no preference at all.
[2] Except in the case of certain birds of India and Australia.
Among our own birds, the prettiest thing I know of attending the
period of courtship, or preliminary to the match-making, is the spring
musical festival and reunion of the goldfinches, which often lasts for
days, through rain and shine. In April or May, apparently all the
goldfinches from a large area collect in the top of an elm or a maple
and unite in a prolonged musical festival. Is it a contest among the
males for the favor of the females, or is it the spontaneous
expression of the gladness of the whole clan at the return of the
season of life and love? The birds seem to pair soon after, and
doubtless the concert of voices has some reference to that event.
There is one other human practice often attributed to the lower
animals that I must briefly consider, and that is the practice, under
certain circumstances, of poisoning their young. One often hears of
caged young birds being fed by their parents for a few days and then
poisoned; or of a mother fox poisoning her captive young when she
finds that she cannot liberate him; and such stories obtain ready
credence with the public, especially with the young. To make these
stories credible, one must suppose a school of pharmacy, too, in the
woods.
"The worst thing about these poisoning stories," writes a friend of
mine, himself a writer of nature-books, "is the implied appreciation
of the full effect and object of poison--the comprehension by the fox,
for instance, that the poisoned meat she may be supposed to find was
placed there for the object of killing herself (or some other fox),
and that she may apply it to another animal for that purpose.
Furthermore, that she understands the nature of death--that it brings
'surcease of sorrow,' and that death is better than captivity for her
young one. How did she acquire all this knowledge? Where was her
experience of its supposed truth obtained? How could she make so fine
and far-seeing a judgment, wholly out of the range of brute affairs,
and so purely philosophical and humanly ethical? It violates every
instinct and canon of natural law, which is for the preservation of
life at all hazards. This is simply the human idea of 'murder.'
Animals kill one another for food, or in rivalry, or in blind ferocity
of predatory disposition; but there is not a particle of evidence that
they 'commit murder' for ulterior ends. It is questionable whether
they comprehend the condition called death, or its nature, in any
proper sense."
On another occasion I laughed at a recent nature writer for his
credulity in half-believing the story told him by a fisherman, that
the fox catches crabs by using his tail as a bait; and yet I read in
Romanes that Olaus, in his account of Norway, says he has seen a fox
do this very thing among the rocks on the sea-coast.[3] One would like
to cross-question Olaus before accepting such a statement. One would
as soon expect a fox to put his brush in the fire as in the water.
When it becomes wet and bedraggled, he is greatly handicapped as to
speed. There is no doubt that rats will put their tails into jars that
contain liquid food they want, and then lick them off, as Romanes
proved; but the rat's tail is not a brush, nor in any sense an
ornament. Think what the fox-and-crab story implies! Now the fox is
entirely a land animal, and lives by preying upon land creatures,
which it follows by scent or sight. It can neither see nor smell crabs
in the deep water, where crabs are usually found. How should it know
that there are such things as crabs? How should it know that they can
be taken with bait and line or by fishing for them? When and how did
it get this experience? This knowledge belongs to man alone. It comes
through a process of reasoning that he alone is capable of. Man alone
of land animals sets traps and fishes. There is a fish called the
angler (_Lophius piscatorius_), which, it is said on doubtful
authority, by means of some sort of appendages on its head angles for
small fish; but no competent observer has reported any land animal
doing so. Again, would a crab lay hold of a mass of fur like a fox's
tail?--even if the tail could be thrust deep enough into the water,
which is impossible. Crabs, when not caught with hand-nets, are
usually taken in water eight or ten feet deep. They are baited and
caught with a piece of meat tied to a string, but cannot be lifted to
the surface till they are eating the meat, and then a dip-net is
required to secure them. The story, on the whole, is one of the most
preposterous that ever gained credence in natural history.
[3] A book published in London in 1783, entitled _A
Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar and the
Present State of the Several Kingdoms of the World_, among
other astonishing natural history notes, makes this statement
about the white and red fox of Norway: "They have a
particular way of drawing crabs ashore by dipping their tails
in the water, which the crab lays hold of."
Good observers are probably about as rare as good poets. Accurate
seeing,--an eye that takes in the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth,--how rare indeed it is! So few persons know or can tell
exactly what they see; so few persons can draw a right inference from
an observed fact; so few persons can keep from reading their own
thoughts and preconceptions into what they see; only a person with the
scientific habit of mind can be trusted to report things as they are.
Most of us, in observing the wild life about us, see more or see less
than the truth. We see less when our minds are dull, or preoccupied,
or blunted by want of interest. This is true of most country people.
We see more when we read the lives of the wild creatures about us in
the light of our human experience, and impute to the birds and beasts
human motives and methods. This is too often true of the eager city
man or woman who sallies out into the country to study nature.
The tendency to sentimentalize nature has, in our time, largely taken
the place of the old tendency to demonize and spiritize it. It is
anthropomorphism in another form, less fraught with evil to us, but
equally in the way of a clear understanding of the life about us.
VII
DEVIOUS PATHS
There is no better type or epitome of wild nature than the
bird's-nest--something built, and yet as if it grew, a part of the
ground, or of the rock, or of the branch upon which it is placed;
beginning so coarsely, so irregularly, and ending so finely and
symmetrically; so unlike the work of hands, and yet the result of a
skill beyond hands; and when it holds its complement of eggs, how
pleasing, how suggestive!
The bird adapts means to an end, and yet so differently from the way
of man,--an end of which it does not know the value or the purpose. We
know it is prompted to it by the instinct of reproduction. When the
woodpecker in the fall excavates a lodge in a dry limb, we know he is
prompted to it by the instinct of self-preservation, but the birds
themselves obey the behests of nature without knowledge.
A bird's-nest suggests design, and yet it seems almost haphazard; the
result of a kind of madness, yet with method in it. The hole the
woodpecker drills for its cell is to the eye a perfect circle, and
the rim of most nests is as true as that of a cup. The circle and the
sphere exist in nature; they are mother forms and hold all other
forms. They are easily attained; they are spontaneous and inevitable.
The bird models her nest about her own breast; she turns round and
round in it, and its circular character results as a matter of course.
Angles, right lines, measured precision, so characteristic of the
works of man, are rarely met with in organic nature.
Nature reaches her ends by devious paths; she loiters, she meanders,
she plays by the way; she surely "arrives," but it is always in a
blind, hesitating, experimental kind of fashion. Follow the tunnels of
the ants or the crickets, or of the moles and the weasels,
underground, or the courses of the streams or the paths of the animals
above ground--how they turn and hesitate, how wayward and undecided
they are! A right line seems out of the question.
The oriole often weaves strings into her nest; sometimes she binds and
overhands the part of the rim where she alights in going in, to make
it stronger, but it is always done in a hit-or-miss, childish sort of
way, as one would expect it to be; the strings are massed, or snarled,
or left dangling at loose ends, or are caught around branches; the
weaving and the sewing are effective, and the whole nest is a marvel
of blind skill, of untaught intelligence; yet how unmethodical, how
delightfully irregular, how unmistakably a piece of wild nature!
Sometimes the instinct of the bird is tardy, and the egg of the bird
gets ripe before the nest is ready; in such a case the egg is of
course lost. I once found the nest of the black and white creeping
warbler in a mossy bank in the woods, and under the nest was an egg of
the bird. The warbler had excavated the site for her nest, dropped her
egg into it, and then gone on with her building. Instinct is not
always inerrant. Nature is wasteful, and plays the game with a free
hand. Yet what she loses on one side she gains on another; she is like
that least bittern Mr. Frank M. Chapman tells about. Two of the
bittern's five eggs had been punctured by the long-billed marsh wren.
When the bird returned to her nest and found the two eggs punctured,
she made no outcry, showed no emotion, but deliberately proceeded to
eat them. Having done this, she dropped the empty shells over the side
of the nest, together with any straws that had become soiled in the
process, cleaned her bill, and proceeded with her incubation. This was
Nature in a nut-shell,--or rather egg-shell,--turning her mishaps to
some good account. If the egg will not make a bird, it will make food;
if not food, then fertilizer.
Among nearly all our birds, the female is the active business member
of the partnership; she has a turn for practical affairs; she chooses
the site of the nest, and usually builds it unaided. The life of the
male is more or less a holiday or picnic till the young are hatched,
when his real cares begin, for he does his part in feeding them. One
may see the male cedar-bird attending the female as she is busy with
her nest-building, but never, so far as I have observed, assisting
her. One spring I observed with much interest a phoebe-bird building
her nest not far from my cabin in the woods. The male looked on
approvingly, but did not help. He perched most of the time on a
mullein stalk near the little spring run where Phoebe came for mud.
In the early morning hours she made her trips at intervals of a minute
or two. The male flirted his tail and called encouragingly, and when
she started up the hill with her load he would accompany her part way,
to help her over the steepest part, as it were, then return to his
perch and watch and call for her return. For an hour or more I
witnessed this little play in bird life, in which the female's part
was so primary and the male's so secondary. There is something in such
things that seems to lend support to Professor Lester F. Ward's
contention, as set forth in his "Pure Sociology," that in the natural
evolution of the two sexes the female was first and the male second;
that he was made from her rib, so to speak, and not she from his.
With our phalarope and a few Australian birds, the position of the two
sexes as indicated above is reversed, the females having the
ornaments and bright colors and doing the courting, while the male
does the incubating. In a few cases also the female is much the more
masculine, noisy, and pugnacious. With some of our common birds, such
as the woodpeckers, the chickadee, and the swallows, both sexes take
part in nest-building.
It is a very pretty sight to witness a pair of wood thrushes building
their nest. Indeed, what is there about the wood thrush that is not
pleasing? He is a kind of visible embodied melody. Some birds are so
sharp and nervous and emphatic in their movements, as the common
snowbird or junco, the flashing of whose white tail quills expresses
the character of the bird. But all the ways of the wood thrush are
smooth and gentle, and suggest the melody of its song. It is the only
bird thief I love to see carrying off my cherries. It usually takes
only those dropped upon the ground by other birds, and with the red or
golden globe impaled upon its beak, its flight across the lawn is a
picture delightful to behold. One season a pair of them built a nest
in a near-by grove; morning after morning, for many mornings, I used
to see the two going to and from the nest, over my vineyard and
currant patch and pear orchard, in quest of, or bringing material for,
the structure. They flew low, the female in the lead, the male just
behind in line with her, timing his motions to hers, the two making a
brown, gently undulating line, very pretty to look upon, from my
neighbor's field where they obtained the material, to the tree that
held the nest. A gentle, gliding flight, hurried but hushed, as it
were, and expressive of privacy and loving preoccupation. The male
carried no material; apparently he was simply the escort of his mate;
but he had an air of keen and joyous interest. He never failed to
attend her each way, keeping about a yard behind her, and flying as if
her thought were his thought and her wish his wish. I have rarely seen
anything so pretty in bird life. The movements of all our thrushes
except the robin give one this same sense of harmony,--nothing sharp
or angular or abrupt. Their gestures are as pleasing as their notes.
One evening, while seated upon my porch, I had convincing proof that
musical or song contests do take place among the birds. Two wood
thrashes who had nests near by sat on the top of a dead tree and
pitted themselves against each other in song for over half an hour,
contending like champions in a game, and certainly affording the
rarest treat in wood thrush melody I had ever had. They sang and sang
with unwearied spirit and persistence, now and then changing position
or facing in another direction, but keeping within a few feet of each
other. The rivalry became so obvious and was so interesting that I
finally made it a point not to take my eyes from the singers. The
twilight deepened till their forms began to grow dim; then one of the
birds could stand the strain no longer, the limit of fair competition
had been reached, and seeming to say, "I will silence you, anyhow," it
made a spiteful dive at its rival, and in hot pursuit the two
disappeared in the bushes beneath the tree. Of course I would not say
that the birds were consciously striving to outdo each other in song;
it was the old feud between males in the love season, not a war of
words or of blows, but of song. Had the birds been birds of brilliant
plumage, the rivalry would probably have taken the form of strutting
and showing off their bright colors and ornaments.
An English writer on birds, Edmund Selous; describes a similar song
contest between two nightingales. "Jealousy," he says, "did not seem
to blind them to the merit of each other's performance. Though often
one, upon hearing the sweet, hostile strains, would burst forth
instantly itself,--and here there was no certain mark of
appreciation,--yet sometimes, perhaps quite as often, it would put its
head on one side and listen with exactly the appearance of a musical
connoisseur, weighing, testing, and appraising each note as it issued
from the rival bill. A curious, half-suppressed expression would
steal, or seem to steal (for Fancy may play her part in such matters),
over the listening bird, and the idea appear to be, 'How exquisite
would be those strains were they not sung by ----, and yet I must
admit that they are exquisite.'" Fancy no doubt does play a part in
such matters. It may well be doubted if birds are musical
connoisseurs, or have anything like human appreciation of their own or
of each other's songs. My reason for thinking so is this: I have heard
a bobolink with an instrument so defective that its song was broken
and inarticulate in parts, and yet it sang with as much apparent joy
and abandon as any of its fellows. I have also heard a hermit thrush
with a similar defect or impediment that appeared to sing entirely to
its own satisfaction. It would be very interesting to know if these
poor singers found mates as readily as their more gifted brothers. If
they did, the Darwinian theory of "sexual selection" in such matters,
according to which the finer songster would carry off the female,
would fall to the ground. Yet it is certain that it is during the
mating and breeding season that these "song combats" occur, and the
favor of the female would seem to be the matter in dispute. Whether or
not it be expressive of actual jealousy or rivalry, we have no other
words to apply to it.
A good deal of light is thrown upon the ways of nature as seen in the
lives of our solitary wasps, so skillfully and charmingly depicted by
George W. Peckham and his wife in their work on those insects. So
whimsical, so fickle, so forgetful, so fussy, so wise, and yet so
foolish, as these little people are! such victims of routine and yet
so individual, such apparent foresight and yet such thoughtlessness,
at such great pains and labor to dig a hole and build a cell, and then
at times sealing it up without storing it with food or laying the egg,
half finishing hole after hole, and then abandoning them without any
apparent reason; sometimes killing their spiders, at other times only
paralyzing them; one species digging its burrow before it captures its
game, others capturing the game and then digging the hole; some of
them hanging the spider up in the fork of a weed to keep it away from
the ants while they work at their nest, and running to it every few
minutes to see that it is safe; others laying the insect on the ground
while they dig; one species walking backward and dragging its spider
after it, and when the spider is so small that it carries it in its
mandible, still walking backward as if dragging it, when it would be
much more convenient to walk forward. A curious little people, leading
their solitary lives and greatly differentiated by the solitude,
hardly any two alike, one nervous and excitable, another calm and
unhurried; one careless in her work, another neat and thorough; this
one suspicious, that one confiding; Ammophila using a pebble to pack
down the earth in her burrow, while another species uses the end of
her abdomen,--verily a queer little people, with a lot of wild nature
about them, and a lot of human nature, too.
I think one can see how this development of individuality among the
solitary wasps comes about. May it not be because the wasps are
solitary? They live alone. They have no one to imitate; they are
uninfluenced by their fellows. No community interests override or
check individual whims or peculiarities. The innate tendency to
variation, active in all forms of life, has with them full sway. Among
the social bees or wasps one would not expect to find those
differences between individuals. The members of a colony all appear
alike in habits and in dispositions. Colonies differ, as every
bee-keeper knows, but probably the members composing it differ very
little. The community interests shape all alike. Is it not the same in
a degree among men? Does not solitude bring out a man's peculiarities
and differentiate him from others? The more one lives alone, the more
he becomes unlike his fellows. Hence the original and racy flavor of
woodsmen, pioneers, lone dwellers in Nature's solitudes. Thus isolated
communities develop characteristics of their own. Constant
intercommunication, the friction of travel, of streets, of books, of
newspapers, make us all alike; we are, as it were, all pebbles upon
the same shore, washed by the same waves.
Among the larger of vertebrate animals, I think, one might reasonably
expect to find more individuality among those that are solitary than
among those that are gregarious; more among birds of prey than among
water-fowl, more among foxes than among prairie-dogs, more among
moose than among sheep or buffalo, more among grouse than among quail.
But I do not know that this is true.
Yet among none of these would one expect to find the diversity of
individual types that one finds among men. No two dogs of the same
breed will be found to differ as two men of the same family often
differ. An original fox, or wolf, or bear, or beaver, or crow, or
crab,--that is, one not merely different from his fellows, but
obviously superior to them, differing from them as a master mind
differs from the ordinary mind,--I think, one need not expect to find.
It is quite legitimate for the animal-story writer to make the most of
the individual differences in habits and disposition among the
animals; he has the same latitude any other story writer has, but he
is bound also by the same law of probability, the same need of
fidelity to nature. If he proceed upon the theory that the wild
creatures have as pronounced individuality as men have, that there are
master minds among them, inventors and discoverers of new ways, born
captains and heroes, he will surely "o'erstep the modesty of nature."
The great diversity of character and capacity among men doubtless
arises from their greater and more complex needs, relations, and
aspirations. The animals' needs in comparison are few, their relations
simple, and their aspirations _nil_. One cannot see what could give
rise to the individual types and exceptional endowments that are
often claimed for them. The law of variation, as I have said, would
give rise to differences, but not to a sudden reversal of race habits,
or to animal geniuses.
The law of variation is everywhere operative--less so now, no doubt,
than in the earlier history of organic life on the globe. Yet Nature
is still experimenting in her blind way, and hits upon many curious
differences and departures. But I suppose if the race of man were
exterminated, man would never arise again. I doubt if the law of
evolution could ever again produce him, or any other species of
animal.
This principle of variation was no doubt much more active back in
geologic time, during the early history of animal life upon the globe,
than it is in this late age. And for the reason that animal life was
less adapted to its environment than it is now, the struggle for life
was sharper. Perfect adaptation of any form of life to the conditions
surrounding it seems to check variability. Animal and plant life seem
to vary more in this country than in England because the conditions of
life are harder. The extremes of heat and cold, of wet and dry, are
much greater. It has been found that the eggs of the English sparrow
vary in form and color more in the United States than in Great
Britain. Certain American shells are said to be more variable than the
English. Among our own birds it has been found that the "migratory
species evince a greater amount of individual variation than do
non-migrating species" because they are subject to more varying
conditions of food and climate. I think we may say, then, if there
were no struggle for life, if uniformity of temperature and means of
subsistence everywhere prevailed, there would be little or no
variation and no new species would arise. The causes of variation seem
to be the inequality and imperfection of things; the pressure of life
is unequally distributed, and this is one of Nature's ways that
accounts for much that we see about us.
VIII
WHAT DO ANIMALS KNOW?
After the discussion carried on in the foregoing chapters touching the
general subject of animal life and instinct, we are prepared, I think,
to ask with more confidence, What do animals know?
The animals unite such ignorance with such apparent knowledge, such
stupidity with such cleverness, that in our estimate of them we are
likely to rate their wit either too high or too low. With them,
knowledge does not fade into ignorance, as it does in man; the
contrast is like that between night and day, with no twilight between.
So keen one moment, so blind the next!
Think of the ignorance of the horse after all his long association
with man; of the trifling things along the street at which he will
take fright, till he rushes off in a wild panic of fear, endangering
his own neck and the neck of his driver. One would think that if he
had a particle of sense he would know that an old hat or a bit of
paper was harmless. But fear is deeply implanted in his nature; it has
saved the lives of his ancestors countless times, and it is still one
of his ruling passions.
I have known a cow to put her head between two trees in the woods--a
kind of natural stanchion--and not have wit enough to get it out
again, though she could have done so at once by lifting her head to a
horizontal position. But the best instance I know of the grotesque
ignorance of a cow is given by Hamerton in his "Chapters on Animals."
The cow would not "give down" her milk unless she had her calf before
her. But her calf had died, so the herdsman took the skin of the calf,
stuffed it with hay, and stood it up before the inconsolable mother.
Instantly she proceeded to lick it and to yield her milk. One day, in
licking it, she ripped open the seams, and out rolled the hay. This
the mother at once proceeded to eat, without any look of surprise or
alarm. She liked hay herself, her acquaintance with it was of long
standing, and what more natural to her than that her calf should turn
out to be made of hay! Yet this very cow that did not know her calf
from a bale of hay would have defended her young against the attack of
a bear or a wolf in the most skillful and heroic manner; and the horse
that was nearly frightened out of its skin by a white stone, or by the
flutter of a piece of newspaper by the roadside, would find its way
back home over a long stretch of country, or find its way to water in
the desert, with a certainty you or I could not approach.
The hen-hawk that the farm-boy finds so difficult to approach with his
gun will yet alight upon his steel trap fastened to the top of a pole
in the fields. The rabbit that can be so easily caught in a snare or
in a box-trap will yet conceal its nest and young in the most
ingenious manner. Where instinct or inherited knowledge can come into
play, the animals are very wise, but new conditions, new problems,
bring out their ignorance.
A college girl told me an incident of a red squirrel she had observed
at her home in Iowa that illustrates how shallow the wit of a squirrel
is when confronted by new conditions. This squirrel carried nuts all
day and stored them in the end of a drainpipe that discharged the
rain-water upon the pavement below. The nuts obeyed the same law that
the rain-water did, and all rolled through the pipe and fell upon the
sidewalk. In the squirrel's experience, and in that of his forbears,
all holes upon the ground were stopped at the far end, or they were
like pockets, and if nuts were put in them they stayed there. A hollow
tube open at both ends, that would not hold nuts--this was too much
for the wit of the squirrel. But how wise he is about the nuts
themselves!
Among the lower animals the ignorance of one is the ignorance of all,
and the knowledge of one is the knowledge of all, in a sense in which
the same is not true among men. Of course some are more stupid than
others of the same species, but probably, on the one hand, there are
no idiots among them, and, on the other, none is preëminent in wit.
Animals take the first step in knowledge--they perceive things and
discriminate between them; but they do not take the second
step--combine them, analyze them, and form concepts and judgments.
So that, whether animals know much or little, I think we are safe in
saying that what they know in the human way, that is, from a process
of reasoning, is very slight.
The animals all have in varying degrees perceptive intelligence. They
know what they see, hear, smell, feel, so far as it concerns them to
know it. They know their kind, their mates, their enemies, their food,
heat from cold, hard from soft, and a thousand other things that it is
important that they should know, and they know these things just as we
know them, through their perceptive powers.
We may ascribe intelligence to the animals in the same sense in which
we ascribe it to a child, as the perception of the differences or of
the likenesses and the relations of things--that is, perceptive
intelligence, but not reasoning intelligence. When the child begins to
"notice things," to know its mother, to fear strangers, to be
attracted by certain objects, we say it begins to show intelligence.
Development in this direction goes on for a long time before it can
form any proper judgment about things or take the step of reason.
If we were to subtract from the sum of the intelligence of an animal
that which it owes to nature or inherited knowledge, the amount left,
representing its own power of thought, would be very small. Darwin
tells of a pike in an aquarium separated by plate-glass from fish
which were its proper food, and that the pike, in trying to capture
the fish, would often dash with such violence against the glass as to
be completely stunned. This the pike did for three months before it
learned caution. After the glass was removed, the pike would not
attack those particular fishes, but would devour others that were
introduced. It did not yet understand the situation, but merely
associated the punishment it had received with a particular kind of
fish.
During the mating season the males of some of our birds may often be
seen dashing themselves against a window, and pecking and fluttering
against the pane for hours at a time, day after day. They take their
own images reflected in the glass to be rival birds, and are bent upon
demolishing them. They never comprehend the mystery of the glass,
because glass is not found in nature, and neither they nor their
ancestors have had any experience with it.
Contrast these incidents with those which Darwin relates of the
American monkeys. When the monkeys had cut themselves once with any
sharp tool, they would not touch it again, or else would handle it
with the greatest caution. They evinced the simpler forms of reason,
of which monkeys are no doubt capable.
Animals are wise as Nature is wise; they partake, each in its own
measure, of that universal intelligence, or mind-stuff, that is
operative in all things--in the vegetable as well as in the animal
world. Does the body, or the life that fills it, reason when it tries
to get rid of, or to neutralize the effects of, a foreign substance,
like a bullet, by encysting it? or when it thickens the skin on the
hand or on any other part of the body, even forming special pads
called callosities, as a result of the increased wear or friction?
This may be called physiological intelligence.
But how blind this intelligence is at times, or how wanting in
judgment, may be seen when it tries to develop a callosity upon the
foot as a result of the friction of the shoe, and overdoes the matter
and produces the corn. The corn is a physiological blunder. Or see an
unexpected manifestation of this intelligence when we cut off the
central and leading shoot of a spruce or of a pine tree, and
straightway one of the lateral and horizontal branches rises up, takes
the place of the lost leader, and carries the tree upward; or in the
roots of a tree working their way through the ground much like molten
metal, parting and uniting, taking the form of whatever object they
touch, shaping themselves to the rock, flowing into its seams, the
better to get a grip upon the earth and thus maintain an upright
position.
In the animal world this foresight becomes psychic intelligence,
developing in man the highest form of all, reasoned intelligence. When
an animal solves a new problem or meets a new condition as effectually
as the tree or the body does in the cases I have just cited, we are
wont to ascribe to it powers of reason. Reason we may call it, but it
is reason not its own.
This universal or cosmic intelligence makes up by far the greater part
of what animals know. The domestic animals, such as the dog, that have
long been under the tutelage of man, of course show more independent
power of thought than the uneducated beasts of the fields and woods.
The plant is wise in all ways to reproduce and perpetuate itself; see
the many ingenious devices for scattering seed. In the animal world
this intelligence is most keen and active in the same direction. The
wit of the animal comes out most clearly in looking out for its food
and safety. We are often ready to ascribe reason to it in feats shown
in these directions.
In man alone does this universal intelligence or mind-stuff reach out
beyond these primary needs and become aware of itself. What the plant
or the animal does without thought or rule, man takes thought about.
He considers his ways, I noticed that the scallops in the shallow
water on the beach had the power to anchor themselves to stones or to
some other object, by putting out a little tough but elastic cable
from near the hinge, and that they did so when the water was rough;
but I could not look upon It as an act of conscious or individual
intelligence on the part of the bivalve. It was as much an act of the
general intelligence to which I refer as was its hinge or its form.
But when the sailor anchors his ship, that is another matter. He
thinks about it, he reasons from cause to effect, he sees the storm
coming, he has a fund of experience, and his act is a special
individual act.
The muskrat builds its house instinctively, and all muskrats build
alike. Man builds his house from reason and forethought. Savages build
as nearly alike as the animals, but civilized man shows an endless
variety. The higher the intelligence, the greater the diversity.
The sitting bird that is so solicitous to keep its eggs warm, or to
feed and defend its young, probably shows no more independent and
individual intelligence than the plant that strives so hard to mature
and scatter its seed. A plant will grow toward the light; a tree will
try to get from under another tree that overshadows it; a willow will
run its roots toward the water: but these acts are the results of
external stimuli alone.
When I go to pass the winter in a warmer climate, the act is the
result of calculation and of weighing pros and cons. I can go, of I
can refrain from going. Not so with the migrating birds. Nature plans
and thinks for them; it is not an individual act on the part of each;
it is a race instinct: they must go; the life of the race demands it.
Or when the old goose covers up her nest, or the rabbit covers her
young with a blanket of hair and grass of her own weaving, I do not
look upon these things as independent acts of intelligence: it is the
cunning of nature; it is a race instinct.
Animals, on the whole, know what is necessary for them to know--what
the conditions of life have taught their ancestors through countless
generations. It is very important, for instance, that amphibians shall
have some sense that shall guide them to the water; and they have such
a sense. It is said that young turtles and crocodiles put down
anywhere will turn instantly toward the nearest water. It is certain
that the beasts of the field have such a sense much more fully
developed than has man. It is of vital importance that birds should
know how to fly, how to build their nests, how to find their proper
food, and when and where to migrate, without instruction or example,
otherwise the race might become extinct.
Richard Jefferies says that most birds'-nests need a structure around
them like a cage to keep the young from falling out or from leaving
the nest prematurely. Now, if such a structure were needed, either the
race of birds would have failed, or the structure would have been
added. Since neither has happened, we are safe in concluding it is not
needed.
We are not warranted in attributing to any wild, untrained animal a
degree of intelligence that its forbears could not have possessed. The
animals for the most part act upon inherited knowledge, that is,
knowledge that does not depend upon instruction or experience. For
instance, the red squirrels near me seem to know that chestnut-burs
will open if cut from the tree and allowed to lie upon the ground. At
least, they act upon this theory. I do not suppose this fact or
knowledge lies in the squirrel's mind as it would in that of a man--as
a deduction from facts of experience or of observation. The squirrel
cuts off the chestnuts because he is hungry for them, and because his
ancestors for long generations have cut them off in the same way. That
the air or sun will cause the burs to open is a bit of knowledge that
I do not suppose he possesses in the sense in which we possess it: he
is in a hurry for the nuts, and does not by any means always wait for
the burs to open; he frequently chips them up and eats the pale nuts.
The same squirrel will bite into the limbs of a maple tree in spring
and suck the sap. What does he know about maple trees and the spring
flow of sap? Nothing as a mental concept, as a bit of concrete
knowledge. He often finds the sap flowing from a crack or other wound
in the limbs of a maple, and he sips it and likes it. Then he sinks
his teeth into the limb, as his forbears undoubtedly did.
When I was a boy and saw, as I often did on my way to school, where a
squirrel had stopped on his course through the woods and dug down
through two or three feet of snow, bringing up a beech-nut or an
acorn, I used to wonder how he knew the nut was there. I am now
convinced that he smelled it.
Why should he not? It stands the squirrel in hand to smell nuts; they
are his life. He knows a false nut from a good one without biting into
it. Try the experiment upon your tame chipmunk or caged gray squirrel,
and see if this is not so. The false or dead nut is lighter, and most
persons think this fact guides the squirrel. But this, it seems to me,
implies an association of ideas beyond the reach of instinct. A young
squirrel will reject a worthless nut as promptly as an old one will.
Again the sense of smell is the guide; the sound-meated nut has an
odor which the other has not. All animals are keen and wise in
relation to their food and to their natural enemies. A red squirrel
will chip up green apples and pears for the seeds at the core: can he
know, on general principles, that these fruits contain seeds? Does not
some clue to them reach his senses?
I have known gray squirrels to go many hundred yards in winter across
fields to a barn that contained grain in the sheaf. They could have
had no other guide to the grain than the sense of smell. Watch a
chipmunk or any squirrel near at hand: as a friend of mine observed,
he seems to be smelling with his whole body; his abdomen fairly
palpitates with the effort.
The coon knows when the corn is in the milk, gaining that knowledge,
no doubt, through his nose. At times he seems to know enough, too, to
cut off his foot when caught in a trap, especially if the foot becomes
frozen; but if you tell me he will treat his wound by smearing it with
pitch or anything else, or in any way except by licking it, I shall
discredit you. The practice of the art of healing by the application
of external or foreign substances is a conception entirely beyond the
capacity of any of the lower animals. If such a practice had been
necessary for the continuance of the species, it would probably have
been used. The knowledge it implies could not be inherited; it must
needs come by experience. When a fowl eats gravel or sand, is it
probable that the fowl knows what the practice is for, or has any
notion at all about the matter? It has a craving for the gravel, that
is all. Nature is wise for it.
The ostrich is described by those who know it intimately as the most
stupid and witless of birds, and yet before leaving its eggs exposed
to the hot African sun, the parent bird knows enough to put a large
pinch of sand on the top of each of them, in order, it is said, to
shade and protect the germ, which always rises to the highest point of
the egg. This act certainly cannot be the result of knowledge, as we
use the term; the young ostrich does it as well as the old. It is the
inherited wisdom of the race, or instinct.
A sitting bird or fowl turns its eggs at regular intervals, which has
the effect of keeping the yolk from sticking to the shell. Is this act
the result of knowledge or of experience? It is again the result of
that untaught knowledge called instinct. Some kinds of eggs hatch in
two weeks, some in three, others in four. The mother bird has no
knowledge of this period. It is not important that she should have. If
the eggs are addled or sterile, she will often continue to sit beyond
the normal period. If the continuance of the species depended upon her
knowing the exact time required to hatch her eggs, as it depends upon
her having the incubating fever, of course she would know exactly, and
would never sit beyond the required period.
But what shall we say of Mrs. Annie Martin's story, in her "Home Life
on an Ostrich Farm," of the white-necked African crow that, in order
to feast upon the eggs of the ostrich, carries a stone high in the air
above them and breaks them by letting it fall? This looks like reason,
a knowledge of the relation of cause and effect. Mrs. Martin says the
crows break tortoise-shells in the same way, and have I not heard of
our own crows and gulls carrying clams and crabs into the air and
dropping them upon the rocks?
If Mrs. Martin's statements are literally true,--if she has not the
failing, so common among women observers, of letting her feeling and
her fancies color her observations,--then her story shows how the
pressure of hunger will develop the wit of a crow.
But the story goes one step beyond my credence. It virtually makes the
crow a tool-using animal, and Darwin knew of but two animals, the
man-like ape and the elephant, that used anything like a tool or
weapon to attain their ends. How could the crow gain the knowledge or
the experience which this trick implies? What could induce it to make
the first experiment of breaking an egg with a falling stone but an
acquaintance with physical laws such as man alone possesses? The first
step in this chain of causation it is easy to conceive of any animal
taking; namely, the direct application of its own powers or weapons to
the breaking of the shell. But the second step,--the making use of a
foreign substance or object in the way described,--that is what
staggers one.
Our own crow has great cunning, but it is only cunning. He is
suspicious of everything that looks like design, that suggests a trap,
even a harmless string stretched around a corn-field. As a natural
philosopher he makes a poor show, and the egg or the shell that he
cannot open with his own beak he leaves behind. Yet even his alleged
method of dropping clams upon the rocks to break the shells does not
seem incredible. He might easily drop a clam by accident, and then,
finding the shell broken, repeat the experiment. He is still only
taking the first step in the sequence of causations.
A recent English nature-writer, on the whole, I think, a good observer
and truthful reporter, Mr. Richard Kearton, tells of an osprey that
did this incredible thing: to prevent its eggs from being harmed by an
enforced exposure to the sun, the bird plunged into the lake, then
rose, and shook its dripping plumage over the nest. The writer
apparently reports this story at second-hand. It is incredible to me,
because it implies a knowledge that the hawk could not possibly
possess.
Such an emergency could hardly arise once in a lifetime to it or its
forbears. Hence the act could not have been the result of inherited
habit, or instinct, and as an original act on the part of the osprey
it is not credible. The bird probably plunged into the lake for a
fish, and then by accident shook itself above the eggs. In any case,
the amount of water that would fall upon the eggs under such
circumstances would be too slight to temper appreciably the heat.
There is little doubt that among certain of our common birds the male,
during periods of excessive heat, has been known to shade the female
with his outstretched wings, and the mother bird to shade her young in
the same way. But this is a different matter. This emergency must
have occurred for ages, and it, again, called only for the first step
from cause to effect, and called for the use of no intermediate agent.
If the robin were to hold a leaf or a branch above his mate at such
times, that would imply reflection.
It is said that elephants in India will besmear themselves with mud as
a protection against insects, and that they will break branches from
the trees and use them to brush away the flies. If this is true, it
shows, I think, something beyond instinct in the elephant; it shows
reflection.
All birds are secretive about their nests, and display great cunning
in hiding them; but whether they know the value of adaptive material,
such as moss, lichens, and dried grass, in helping to conceal them,
admits of doubt, because they so often use the results of our own
arts, as paper, rags, strings, tinsel, in such a reckless way. In a
perfectly wild state they use natural material because it is the
handiest and there is really no other. The phoebe uses the moss on
or near the rocks where she builds; the sparrows, the bobolinks, and
the meadowlarks use the dry grass of the bank or of the meadow bottom
where the nest is placed.
The English writer to whom I have referred says that the wren builds
the outside of its nest of old hay straws when placing it in the side
of a rick, of green moss when it is situated in a mossy bank, and of
dead leaves when in a hedge-row or a bramble-bush, in each case thus
rendering the nest very difficult of detection because it harmonizes
so perfectly with its surroundings, and the writer wonders if this
harmony is the result of accident or of design. He is inclined to
think that it is unpremeditated, as I myself do. The bird uses the
material nearest to hand.
Another case, which this same writer gives at second-hand, of a bird
recognizing the value of protective coloration, is not credible. A
friend of his told him that he had once visited a colony of terns "on
an island where the natural breeding accommodation was so limited that
many of them had conveyed patches of pebbles on to the grass and laid
their eggs thereon."
Here is the same difficulty we have encountered before--one more step
of reasoning than the bird is capable of. As a deduction from observed
facts, a bird, of course, knows nothing about protective coloring; its
wisdom in this respect is the wisdom of Nature, and Nature in animal
life never acts with this kind of foresight. A bird may exercise some
choice about the background of its nest, but it will not make both
nest and background.
Nature learns by endless experiment. Through a long and expensive
process of natural selection she seems to have brought the color of
certain animals and the color of their environment pretty close
together, the better to hide the animals from their enemies and from
their prey, as we are told; but the animals themselves do not know
this, though they may act as if they did. Young terns and gulls
instinctively squat upon the beach, where their colors so harmonize
with the sand and pebbles that the birds are virtually invisible.
Young partridges do the same in the woods, where the eye cannot tell
the reddish tuft of down from the dry leaves. How many gulls and terns
and partridges were sacrificed before Nature learned this trick!
I regard the lower animals as incapable of taking the step from the
fact to the principle. They have perceptions, but not conceptions.
They may recognize a certain fact, but any deduction from that fact to
be applied to a different case, or to meet new conditions, is beyond
them. Wolves and foxes soon learn to be afraid of poisoned meat: just
what gives them the hint it would be hard to say, as the survivors
could not know the poison's deadly effect from experience; their fear
of it probably comes from seeing their fellows suffer and die after
eating it, or maybe through that mysterious means of communication
between animals to which I have referred in a previous article. The
poison probably changes the odor of the meat, and this strange smell
would naturally put them on their guard.
We do not expect rats to succeed in putting a bell on the cat, but if
they were capable of conceiving such a thing, that would establish
their claim to be regarded as reasonable beings. I should as soon
expect a fox or a wolf to make use of a trap to capture its prey as to
make use of poison in any way. Why does not the fox take a stick and
spring the trap he is so afraid of? Simply because the act would
involve a mental process beyond him. He has not yet learned to use
even the simplest implement to attain his end. Then he would probably
be just as afraid of the trap after it was sprung as before. He in
some way associates it with his arch-enemy, man.
Such stories, too, as a chained fox or a coyote getting possession of
corn or other grain and baiting the chickens with it--feigning sleep
till the chicken gets within reach, and then seizing it--are of the
same class, incredible because transcending the inherited knowledge of
those animals. I can believe that a fox might walk in a shallow creek
to elude the hound, because he may inherit this kind of cunning, and
in his own experience he may have come to associate loss of scent with
water. Animals stalk their prey, or lie in wait for it, instinctively,
not from a process of calculation, as man does. If a fox would bait
poultry with corn, why should he not, in his wild state, bait mice and
squirrels with nuts and seeds? Has a ca
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