III

I do not know that the bird has taught me any valuable lesson.

Indeed, I do not go to Nature to be taught. I go for enjoyment and

companionship. I go to bathe in her as in a sea; I go to give my

eyes and ears and all my senses a free, clean field and to tone up

my spirits by her "primal sanities." If the bird has not preached to

me, it has added to the resources of my life, it has widened the

field of my interests, it has afforded me another beautiful object

to love, and has helped make me feel more at home in this world. To

take the birds out of my life would be like lopping off so many

branches from the tree: there is so much less surface of leafage to

absorb the sunlight and bring my spirits in contact with the vital

currents. We cannot pursue any natural study with love and

enthusiasm without the object of it becoming a part of our lives.

The birds, the flowers, the trees, the rocks, all become linked with

our lives and hold the key to our thoughts and emotions.

Not till the bird becomes a part of your life can its coming and its

going mean much to you. And it becomes a part of your life when you

have taken heed of it with interest and affection, when you have

established associations with it, when it voices the spring or the

summer to you, when it calls up the spirit of the woods or the

fields or the shore. When year after year you have heard the veery

in the beech and birch woods along the trout streams, or the wood

thrush May after May in the groves where you have walked or sat, and

the bobolink summer after summer in the home meadows, or the vesper

sparrow in the upland pastures where you have loitered as a boy or

mused as a man, these birds will really be woven into the texture of

your life.

What lessons the birds have taught me I cannot recall; what a joy

they have been to me I know well. In a new place, amid strange

scenes, theirs are the voices and the faces of old friends. In

Bermuda the bluebirds and the catbirds and the cardinals seemed to

make American territory of it. Our birds had annexed the island

despite the Britishers.

For many years I have in late April seen the red-poll warbler,

perhaps for only a single day, flitting about as I walked or worked.

It is usually my first warbler, and my associations with it are very

pleasing. But I really did not know how pleasing until, one March

day, when I was convalescing from a serious illness in one of our

sea-coast towns, I chanced to spy the little traveler in a vacant

lot along the street, now upon the ground, now upon a bush, nervous

and hurried as usual, uttering its sharp chip, and showing the white

in its tail. The sight gave me a real home feeling. It did me more

good than the medicine I was taking. It instantly made a living link

with many past springs. Anything that calls up a happy past, how it

warms the present! There, too, that same day I saw my first

meadowlark of the season in a vacant lot, flashing out the white

quills in her tail, and walking over the turf in the old, erect,

alert manner. The sight was as good as a letter from home, and

better: it had a flavor of the wild and of my boyhood days on the

old farm that no letter could ever have.

The spring birds always awaken a thrill wherever I am. The first

bobolink I hear flying over northward and bursting out in song now

and then, full of anticipation of those broad meadows where he will

soon be with his mate; or the first swallow twittering joyously

overhead, borne on a warm southern breeze; or the first high-hole

sounding out his long, iterated call from the orchard or field--how

all these things send a wave of emotion over me!

Pleasures of another kind are to find a new bird, and to see an old

bird in a new place, as I did recently in the old sugar-bush where I

used to help gather and boil sap as a boy. It was the logcock, or

pileated woodpecker, a rare bird anywhere, and one I had never seen

before on the old farm. I heard his loud cackle in a maple tree, saw

him flit from branch to branch for a few moments, and then launch

out and fly toward a distant wood. But he left an impression with me

that I should be sorry to have missed.

Nature stimulates our aesthetic and our intellectual life and to a

certain extent our religious emotions, but I fear we cannot find

much support for our ethical system in the ways of wild Nature. I

know our artist naturalist, Ernest Thompson Seton, claims to find

what we may call the biological value of the Ten Commandments in the

lives of the wild animals; but I cannot make his reasoning hold

water, at least not much of it. Of course the Ten Commandments are

not arbitrary laws. They are largely founded upon the needs of the

social organism; but whether they have the same foundation in the

needs of animal life apart from man, apart from the world of moral

obligation, is another question. The animals are neither moral nor

immoral: they are unmoral; their needs are all physical. It is true

that the command against murder is pretty well kept by the higher

animals. They rarely kill their own kind: hawks do not prey upon

hawks, nor foxes prey upon foxes, nor weasels upon weasels; but

lower down this does not hold. Trout eat trout, and pickerel eat

pickerel, and among the insects young spiders eat one another, and

the female spider eats her mate, if she can get him. There is but

little, if any, neighborly love among even the higher animals. They

treat one another as rivals, or associate for mutual protection. One

cow will lick and comb another in the most affectionate manner, and

the next moment savagely gore her. Hate and cruelty for the most

part rule in the animal world. A few of the higher animals are

monogamous, but by far the greater number of species are polygamous

or promiscuous. There is no mating or pairing in the great bovine

tribe, and none among the rodents that I know of, or among the bear

family, or the cat family, or among the seals. When we come to the

birds, we find mating, and occasional pairing for life, as with the

ostrich and perhaps the eagle.

As for the rights of property among the animals, I do not see how we

can know just how far those rights are respected among individuals

of the same species. We know that bees will rob bees, and that ants

will rob ants; but whether or not one chipmunk or one flying

squirrel or one wood mouse will plunder the stores of another I do

not know. Probably not, as the owner of such stores is usually on

hand to protect them. Moreover, these provident little creatures all

lay up stores in the autumn, before the season of scarcity sets in,

and so have no need to plunder one another. In case the stores of

one squirrel were destroyed by some means, and it were able to

dispossess another of its hoard, would it not in that case be a

survival of the fittest, and so conducive to the well-being of the

race of squirrels?

I have never known any of our wild birds to steal the

nesting-material of another bird of the same kind, but I have known

birds to try to carry off the material belonging to other species.

But usually the rule of might is the rule of right among the

animals. As to most of the other commandments,--of coveting, of

bearing false witness, of honoring the father and the mother, and so

forth,--how can these apply to the animals or have any biological

value to them? Parental obedience among them is not a very definite

thing. There is neither obedience nor disobedience, because there

are no commands. The alarm-cries of the parents are quickly

understood by the young, and their actions imitated in the presence

of danger, all of which of course has a biological value.

The instances which Mr. Seton cites of animals fleeing to man for

protection from their enemies prove to my mind only how the greater

fear drives out the lesser. The hotly pursued animal sees a possible

cover in a group of men and horses or in an unoccupied house, and

rushes there to hide. What else could the act mean? So a hunted deer

or sheep will leap from a precipice which, under ordinary

circumstances, it would avoid. So would a man. Fear makes bold in

such cases.

I certainly have found "good in everything,"--in all natural

processes and products,--not the "good" of the Sunday-school books,

but the good of natural law and order, the good of that system of

things out of which we came and which is the source of our health

and strength. It is good that fire should burn, even if it consumes

your house; it is good that force should crush, even if it crushes

you; it is good that rain should fall, even if it destroys your

crops or floods your land. Plagues and pestilences attest the

constancy of natural law. They set us to cleaning our streets and

houses and to readjusting our relations to outward nature. Only in a

live universe could disease and death prevail. Death is a phase of

life, a redistributing of the type. Decay is another kind of growth.

Yes, good in everything, because law in everything, truth in

everything, the sequence of cause and effect in everything, and it

may all be good to me if on the right principles I relate my life to

it. I can make the heat and the cold serve me, the winds and the

floods, gravity and all the chemical and dynamical forces, serve me,

if I take hold of them by the right handle. The bad in things arises

from our abuse or misuse of them or from our wrong relations to

them. A thing is good or bad according as it stands related to my

constitution. We say the order of nature is rational; but is it not

because our reason is the outcome of that order? Our well-being

consists in learning it and in adjusting our lives to it. When we

cross it or seek to contravene it, we are destroyed. But Nature in

her universal procedures is not rational, as I am rational when I

weed my garden, prune my trees, select my seed or my stock, or arm

myself with tools or weapons. In such matters I take a short cut to

that which Nature reaches by a slow, roundabout, and wasteful

process. How does she weed her garden? By the survival of the

fittest. How does she select her breeding-stock? By the law of

battle; the strongest rules. Hers, I repeat, is a slow and wasteful

process. She fertilizes the soil by plowing in the crop. She cannot

take a short cut. She assorts and arranges her goods by the law of

the winds and the tides. She builds up with one hand and pulls down

with the other. Man changes the conditions to suit the things.

Nature changes the things to suit the conditions. She adapts the

plant or the animal to its environment. She does not drain her

marshes; she fills them up. Hers is the larger reason--the reason of

the All. Man's reason introduces a new method; it cuts across,

modifies, or abridges the order of Nature. I do not see design in

Nature in the old ideological sense; but I see everything working to

its own proper end, and that end is foretold in the means. Things

are not designed; things are begotten. It is as if the final plan of

a man's house, after he had begun to build it, should be determined

by the winds and the rains and the shape of the ground upon which it

stands. The eye is begotten by those vibrations in the ether called

light, the ear by those vibrations in the air called sound, the

sense of smell by those emanations called odors. There are probably

other vibrations and emanations that we have no senses for because

our well-being does not demand them.

We think it reasonable that a stone should fall and that smoke

should rise because we have never known either of them to do the

contrary. We think it reasonable that fire should burn and that

frost should freeze, because this accords with universal experience.

Thus, there is a large order of facts that are reasonable because

they are invariable: the same effect always follows the same cause.

Our reason is developed and disciplined by observing the order of

Nature; and yet human rationality is of another order from the

rationality of Nature. Man learns from Nature how to master and

control her. He turns her currents into new channels; he spurs her

in directions of his own. Nature has no economic or scientific

rationality. She progresses by the method of trial and error. Her

advance is symbolized by that of the child learning to walk. She

experiments endlessly. Evolution has worked all around the horizon.

In feeling her way to man she has produced thousands of other forms

of life. The globe is peopled as it is because the creative energy

was blind and did not at once find the single straight road to man.

Had the law of variation worked only in one direction, man might

have found himself the sole occupant of the universe. Behold the

varieties of trees, of shrubs, of grasses, of birds, of insects,

because Nature does not work as man does, with an eye single to one

particular end. She scatters, she sows her seed upon the wind, she

commits her germs to the waves and the floods. Nature is indifferent

to waste, because what goes out of one pocket goes into another. She

is indifferent to failure, because failure on one line means success

on some other.