The time is not far distant when the bottom of the sea will be the only
place where primeval wildness will not have been defiled or destroyed by
man. He may sail his ships above, he may peer downward, even dare to
descend a few feet in a suit of rubber or a submarine boat, or he may
scratch a tiny furrow for a few yards with a dredge: but that is all.
When that time comes, the animals and birds which survive will be only
those which have found a way to adapt themselves to man's encroaching,
all-pervading civilisation. The time was when our far-distant ancestors
had, year in and year out, to fight for very existence against the wild
creatures about them. They then gained the upper hand, and from that time
to the present the only question has been, how long the wild creatures of
the earth could hold out.
The wolf, the bison, the beaver fought the battle out at once to all but
the bitter end. The crow, the muskrat, the fox have more than held their
own, by reason of cunning, hiding or quickness of sight; but they cannot
hope for this to last. The English sparrow has won by sheer audacity; but
most to be admired are those creatures which have so changed their habits
that some product of man's invention serves them as well as did their
former wilderness home. The eave swallow and barn swallow and the chimney
swift all belie their names in the few wild haunts still uninvaded by man.
The first two were originally cliff and bank haunters, and the latter's
home was a lightning-hollowed tree.
But the nighthawks which soar and boom above our city streets, whence come
they? Do they make daily pilgrimages from distant woods? The city
furnishes no forest floor on which they may lay their eggs. Let us seek a
wide expanse of flat roof, high above the noisy, crowded streets. Let it
be one of those tar and pebble affairs, so unpleasant to walk upon, but so
efficient in shedding water. If we are fortunate, as we walk slowly across
the roof, a something, like a brownish bit of wind-blown rubbish, will
roll and tumble ahead of us. It is a bird with a broken wing, we say. How
did it ever get up here? We hasten forward to pick it up, when, with a
last desperate flutter, it topples off the edge of the roof; but instead
of falling helplessly to the street, the bird swings out above the
house-tops, on the white-barred pinions of a nighthawk. Now mark the place
where first we observed the bird, and approach it carefully, crawling on
hands and knees. Otherwise we will very probably crush the two mottled
bits of shell, so exactly like pebbles in external appearance, but
sheltering two little warm, beating hearts. Soon the shells will crack,
and the young nighthawks will emerge,--tiny fluffs,--in colour the very
essence of the scattered pebbles.
In the autumn they will all pass southward to the far distant tropics, and
when spring again awakens, the instinct of migration will lead them, not
to some mottled carpet of moss and rocks deep in the woods, but to the
tarred roof of a house in the very heart of a great city.
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