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.