Here’s to the stranger, so lately a ranger,
Who came from far over seas;—
Whatever the weather, still in high feather,
At top of the windy trees!
Here’s to the darling,—brave English Starling,
Stays the long winter through;
He would not leave us, would not bereave us,—
Not he, though our own birds do!
Cold weather pinches—flown are the finches,
Thrushes and warblers too!
Here’s to the darling, here’s to the Starling,—
English Starling true!
—Edith M. Thomas, in _Bird-Lore_.
X
SOME MISCHIEF-MAKERS
_Crows and Jays, Starlings and Grackles_
The children came back very promptly after the mid-morning recess,
considering the attraction offered outside. Though cheeks and all
available pockets fairly bulged with apples, they had sufficient
appetite to enjoy the crisp cookies, plates of which were set at
intervals on the plain-topped table in the playroom, together with
pitchers of milk or a delicious drink of Ann’s invention compounded of
oranges and lemons and sweetened with honey.
Gray Lady breakfasted at eight, but she knew very well that most of the
folk of the Hill Country had their first meal at six, except perhaps in
the dead of winter, so that a bit of luncheon between that time and noon
was what Goldilocks called “a comfy necessity.”
“Now tell me what birds you saw this morning, and what they were doing,”
said Gray Lady, as soon as the children had settled down. “Sarah Barnes,
you may begin.”
“We didn’t see anything new, that is nothing much; but, oh, such a lot
of common birds in flocks, Crows and Blue Jays and Blackbirds; why,
there were enough Blackbirds to make it dark for a minute when they
picked up and flew over the tumble-down old house over there in the
corner. Of course, those birds aren’t very interesting, ’cause we all
know about them, and I guess even Zella, who hasn’t lived here long, can
tell a Crow or a Jay and Blackbird when she sees one.”
“Yes, ma’am, Lady, I know him Crow,” cried Zella, in delight at having
some information to impart, “for my papa he plant corn seed in the lot.
Crows they come push it out vit de nose and eat him. Then my papa and my
brudder shoot bang! bang! but they not get him, ’cause him too wise. My
Grossmutter say von time Crows was people, bad thief people, and they
was made in birds to shame dem, but dey made bad thief birds, too, and
dey kept wise like dey was people yet, so dey is hard catching. Den papa
he made of ole clothes a man, and sat him the fence on, and the Crows
dey comes on trees near away, and dey looks so at the mans and dey
laughs together, but dey not come no more very near yet.”
“Yes; I see that Zella knows and sees the Crow as almost every one who
owns a bit of land sees and knows him, but there are sides to these
birds that are so common hereabouts that perhaps you do not know, for I
did not at your age, and it is only of late years that the wise men have
been trying to find good points in some birds that have been always
called bad. What they have discovered goes to prove what an unfortunate
thing it is for any one, bird or person, to get a bad name.”
“My Grandma says a bad name sticks just like fly-paper,” said Ruth
Barnes, eagerly, “’cause even if you can peel it off you, it always
somehow feels as if it was there.”
At this every one laughed, because almost every child at one time or
another had been through some sort of an experience with sticky
fly-paper, and little Bobbie chuckled so long that Gray Lady asked him
what he knew about fly-paper, and thus drew forth the explanation that
his father had sat on a sheet of fly-paper in the dark best parlor one
Sunday morning when he was waiting for the family to get ready to drive
to church, and nobody noticed until he, being a deacon, got up _to pass
the plate_!
“What were the Crows and Jays and Blackbirds in the orchard doing,
Tommy; did you notice?” asked Gray Lady, as she arranged some papers
between the leaves of her scrap-book.
“The Jays were hanging around your lunch-counter in the old apple tree,
that is, most of them; some seemed to be bringing acorns or some sort of
big seeds from the river-woods way, and taking them into the attic of
the old Swallow Chimney house. I never saw so many Jays at once; I
counted sixteen of them,” said Tommy.
“The Crows and Grackles were walking on the ground, some in the grass
meadow, and some in the open ploughed field, and they were all searching
about as if they had lost something, and they kept picking and eating
all the time.”
“Were they eating corn that had dropped, or rye?” asked Gray Lady.
“Oh, no, there wasn’t any corn there, and the rye isn’t sown yet. They
were eating bugs and things like that, I guess,” said Tommy, to whom a
new idea had come as he spoke.
“That is precisely what I hoped that one of you would see for
yourself—the fact that both of these birds eat many things besides corn
and grain.
“By the way, what kind of Blackbirds were they?—for we have three sorts
that are very common here. The Red-winged, those with red shoulders that
come in such numbers about the swampy meadows early in spring. The
Cowbird of the pastures who is smaller than the Red-wing, with a brown
head, neck, and breast, the rest of him being gloomy black, with what
Goldilocks calls all the ‘soap-bubble colours’ glistening over it,
though the Wise Men call this ‘iridescence.’
“Then there is the Crow-Blackbird or Purple Grackle, the largest of the
three, who is quite a foot in length from tail-tip to point of beak.
This Blackbird has glistening jet feathers, with all the beautiful
rainbow colours on his back and wings, that almost form bars of metallic
hue, and he is a really beautiful bird that we should certainly
appreciate better if it were not so common. Now, of course, it is one
step on the way to bird knowledge if you can say surely this is a
Blackbird, but it is necessary to go on then and say _which_ Blackbird.”
“They were the Purple Grackle kind,” said Tommy, immediately, “for they
were bigger than Cowbirds, and they had handsome shiny feathers, and
they did just creak and grackle like everything while they walked
around.”
“Very good,” said Gray Lady; “now I think that there are several things
that you do not know about these birds, whom it is perfectly safe to
call ‘mischief-makers’ and undesirable garden friends, though our best
knowledge will not allow us to condemn them altogether as criminals, as
was once the custom.”
At this moment Jim Crow, who had been on an excursion first to the room,
then, by way of the branches of an overhanging sugar-maple, quite down
to the orchard lunch-counter and back, had crept in at the window
unobserved, walked across the floor to the work-table, about which the
girls sat, and, going under it, was concealed by the cloth. At this
moment Eliza Clausen dropped her thimble. It rolled under the table, and
as she stooped to get it she was just in time to see Jim seize it in his
beak and half fly, half scramble to the back of Goldilocks’ chair, with
his prize held fast.
“Oh, my thimble! Jim’ll swallow it!” she wailed, and the boys, with one
impulse, started in pursuit. They could not have done a worse thing,
for, seeing himself cornered, Jim’s hiding instinct came to his aid, and
sidling along to the unceiled side of the attic, he quickly dropped the
thimble between the studs, and you could hear it rattle down to the next
story. Then he took refuge behind his mistress’ chair, from which he
peeped inquisitively, with the sidewise look peculiar to Crows, so that
it was impossible not to laugh at his quizzical expression.
“Do not worry about the thimble, Eliza,” said Gray Lady, “for those you
are wearing for the sewing lessons are not prize thimbles, but merely
penny affairs. This gives you a chance to see some of the little bits of
mischief that a tame young Crow can do in his first season, so that you
can imagine what a wild, old, wise, leader Crow can plot and plan in
other ways. You all know the Crow, or rather, to be exact, the American
Crow, for there is the Fish Crow and a southern relation, the Florida
Crow, and in all there are twenty-five different kinds in North America
alone. This Common Crow is very plentiful here, as he is in almost all
parts of the United States, where he makes his home from the Mexican
border up to the fur countries.
“But do you know that this Crow is cousin to the Blue Jay?”
“How funny! What makes them cousins?—for they don’t look a bit alike,
and they’re not the same colour or anything,” said Sarah, Tommy, and
Dave, almost together.
“Yes, that is true, but colour and feathers have nothing to do with bird
relationship any more than coloured hair has to do with human families,
and you can see that here among yourselves. The Baltimore Oriole,
Meadowlark, Bobolink, and Purple Grackle all belong in one family, and
yet how unlike they seem. It is the construction of the bird’s body and
its habits and traits that serve the Wise Men as guides to their
grouping, and in these traits the two are much alike, for Mr. Chapman,
who knows all about these birds, whether as museum specimens, where he
can study their bones, or as wild birds in the trees, where he watches
them day in and day out, says, ‘Our Crows and Jays inhabit wooded
regions, and, although they shift about to a limited extent, they are
resident throughout the year, except at the northern limits of their
range. They are omnivorous feeders, taking fruits, seeds, insects, eggs,
nestlings, etc. Crows and Jays exhibit marked traits of character and
are possessed of unusual intelligence. Some scientists place them at the
top of the tree of bird-life, and if their mental development be taken
into consideration they have undoubted claim to high rank.’
“You see, also, that here is a Wise Man who believes that birds have
intelligence that implies thinking, and this is different from the mere
inherited instinct that teaches animals how to obtain food,
self-protection, etc. There are people who believe that they are the
only wise animals, and deny that birds and beasts can think; while there
are others who try to make these birds and beasts think on the same
lines as ourselves rather than in their own way. Both these are wrong;
both are like blind men that lead others into a ditch and leave them
there. The only way for you and me to do is to watch out for ourselves,
look carefully, and be very sure that we see what is, and not merely
what we would like to see.
“Now I will tell you what I, myself, have seen and know, and what
others, whose word is guaranteed by the Wise Men, have seen concerning
Crows and Jays. When I was a child, twenty-five years ago, riding my
pony, I wandered all over the country-side with my father, and I knew
every Crow roost and Hawk’s nest for miles, and for many years after I
watched their comings and goings. Late last winter, when I came back to
the dear home to live, I went out to the nearest of the old Crow roosts
in the cedar woods yonder across the river (you can see the tree-tops
plainly from this window), and, in spite of time and changes, a flock of
Crows was still there.
“To be sure, the flock was smaller, and there were fewer Cedars, many
having been turned into fence and gate posts. But the Crows, big, black,
solemn things as they are, seemed to give me a welcome.
“The life of the Crow is dull if judged, perhaps, from the standpoint of
the birds that make long journeys, such as the Swallows, Humming-birds,
and the Night Hawk (that isn’t a Hawk at all), who nest in the far North
and go back to spend the winter in Central or South America.
“Yet all we stay-at-home people know how much can happen even here in
Fair Meadows township, and, if we extend our territory from salt water,
or the southeast, to the hickory woods beyond the Grist-Mill on the
northwest, there is room enough for happenings that would make an
exciting life for any pair of Crows. For in considering Crows, we must
take the life of a pair, one of their good traits being their personal
and race fidelity, and when they mate, it is usually for life.
“It is middle autumn now; what are the Crows doing? All through August
and early fall they have been feeding good on grasshoppers,
caterpillars, locusts, and cutworms. This flock that roost in the cedar
woods are doing that which occupies most of a bird’s time in season and
out, working for a living, and in doing this they are searching the
grass meadows and ploughed fields for insects of every sort and
description.
“Their time of mischief is over for the year. The corn is cut and
stacked; they may if they please tear the husks from the cobs and then
reach the corn, but they are not fond of tough, dry corn, though, of
course, they eat it when really hungry. But just now there is plenty to
be gleaned from the field, and when the winter hungry time comes, the
good corn will be stored safe in the granaries.
“Every night, before sunset, the Crows of the flock leave the various
feeding-places in twos and threes, and flap across country in a
leisurely fashion toward the roost, where they spend their nights all
the year except during the nesting season. They return thus in little
parties, if there is no cause for fear, but should a man with a gun, a
large Owl, or other suspicious object appear, either the Crow on the
watch, for there is always one of these who guards the destiny of the
flock, gives a signal by a sharp quavering Ca-ca-w or, if this seems too
rash, the leader will simply take to wing and slip away silently, and,
no matter how quietly the leader slips away, the rest of the flock know
it and rise at once. How do they know this?”
“Maybe they smell, just as our rabbit hounds do when they start out
after things that no one else sees or knows about,” said Tommy Todd.
“No, birds are not guided by scent as animals are,” said Gray Lady;
“scent is held to the ground by moisture; it would be difficult to
follow when it is blown about by air. Birds are led by their sight,
which is many times keener than that of man or the lower animals. Then,
too, they have another sense more fully developed than other animals,
and that is what is called the ‘sense of direction.’ Knowing the spot to
which they would go, they are able to reach it in the quickest, most
direct manner, so that ‘as the Crow flies’ has come to mean the most
direct way of reaching a place.
“When morning comes they leave the roost, and, breaking up into parties,
begin the search for food again. As the supply near home gives out, they
go farther and farther afield, sometimes going down to the shore, where
they pick up clams, mussels, and any scraps of sea-food that they can
find.
“After the corn has been taken in, they find scattered kernels of that
and other grain left in the field, but at the first snowfall hard times
set in for the Crow. He cannot search the bark crevices for insects like
the small tree-trunk birds with slender bills; people do not welcome him
to their farm-yards and scatter grain for him, or leave him free to
glean, as they do the other winter birds. It is at this time, when the
hand of man is turned against him, that the Crow really works in man’s
interest by catching meadow-mice and many other small destructive
animals.
“At this time, the Crow eats frozen apples, poison-ivy berries, acorns,
beech and chestnuts, and the like. But now he grows poor and thin and
his voice is querulous, and from November to March the Crow is put to it
for a living. ‘Poor as a Crow’ is an apt saying.