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."