"Forest and Stream" the results of his experiments with a variety of
birds taken from the nest while very young and reared in captivity;
among them meadowlarks, red-winged blackbirds, brown thrashers, blue
jays, wood thrushes, catbirds, flickers, woodpeckers, and several
others. Did they receive any parental instruction? Not a bit of it,
and yet at the proper age they flew, perched, called, and sang like
their wild fellows--all except the robins and the red-winged
blackbirds: these did not sing the songs of their species, but sang a
medley made up of curious imitations of human and other sounds. And
the blue jay never learned to sing "the sweet gurgling roulade of the
wild jays," though it gave the blue jay call correctly. Mr. Keyser's
experiment was interesting and valuable, but his sagacity fails him
when interpreting the action of the jay in roosting in an exposed
place after it had been given its liberty. He thinks this showed how
little instinct can be relied on, and how much the bird needed
parental instruction. Could he not see that the artificial life of the
bird in the cage had demoralized its instincts, and that acquired
habits had supplanted native tendencies? The bird had learned to be
unafraid in the cage, and why should it be afraid out of the cage?
This reminds me of a letter from a correspondent: he had a tame crow
that was not afraid of a gun; therefore he concluded that the old
crows must instill the fear of guns into their young! Why should the
crow be afraid of a gun, if it had learned not to be afraid of the
gunner?
I have seen a young chickadee fly late in the day from the nest in the
cavity of a tree straight to a pear-tree, where it perched close to
the trunk and remained unregarded by its parents till next morning.
But no doubt its parents had given it minute directions before it left
the nest how to fly and where to perch!
That animals learn by experience in a limited way is very certain. Yet
that old birds build better nests or sing better than young ones it
would be hard to prove, though it seems reasonable that it should be
so.
Rarely does one see nests of the same species of varying degrees of
excellence--that is, first nests in the spring. The second nest of any
species is likely to be a more hurried and incomplete affair. Some
species are at all times poor nest-builders, as the cuckoos and the
pigeons. Other birds are good nest-builders, as the orioles, the
thrushes, the finches, the warblers, the hummingbirds, and one never
finds an inferior specimen of the nests of any of these birds. There
is probably no more improvement in this respect among birds than there
is among insects.
I have no proof that wild birds improve in singing. One does not hear
a vireo, or a finch, or a thrush, or a warbler that is noticeably
inferior as a songster to its fellows; their songs are all alike,
except in the few rare cases when one hears a master songster among
its kind; but whether this mastery is natural or acquired, who shall
tell?
What birds learn about migration, if anything, I do not see that we
have any means of finding out.
It has been observed of birds reared under artificial conditions that
the young males practice a long time before they sing well. That this
is true of wild birds, there is no proof. What birds and animals learn
by experience is greater cunning. Does not even an old trout know more
about hooks than a young one? Birds of any kind that are much hunted
become wilder, even though they have not had the experience of being
shot. Ask any duck or grouse or quail hunter if this is not so. Our
ruffed grouse learns to fly with a corkscrew motion where it is much
fired at on the wing. How wary and cautious the fox becomes in regions
where it is much trapped and hunted! Even the woodchuck becomes very
wild on the farms where it is much shot at, and this wildness extends
to its young. In his "Wilderness Hunter" President Roosevelt says the
same thing of the big game of the Rockies. Antelope and deer can be
lured near the concealed hunter by the waving of a small flag till
they are shot at a few times. Then they see through the trick. "The
burnt child fears the fire." Animals profit by experience in this way;
they learn what not to do. In the accumulation of positive knowledge,
so far as we know, they make little or no progress. Birds and beasts
will adapt themselves more or less to their environment, but plants
and trees will do that, too. The rats in Jamaica have learned to nest
in trees to escape the mongoose, but this is only the triumph of the
instinct of self-preservation. The mongoose has not yet learned to
climb trees; the pressure of need is not yet great enough. It is said
that in districts subject to floods moor-hens often build in trees.
All animals will change their habits under pressure of necessity; man
changes his without this pressure. The Duke of Argyll saw a bald eagle
seize a fish in the stream--an unusual proceeding; but the eagle was
doubtless very hungry, and there was no osprey near upon whom to levy
tribute.
Romanes found that rats would get certain semi-liquid foods out of a
bottle with their tails, as a cat will get milk out of a jar with her
paw, but neither ever progresses so far as to use any sort of tool for
the purpose, or to tip the vessel over. Animals practice concealment
to secure their prey, but not deception, as man does. They do not use
lures or disguises, or traps or poison.
There is, of course, no limit to the variety and adaptiveness of
nature taken as a whole, but each species is hedged about by
impassable limitations. The ouzel is akin to the thrushes, and yet it
lives along and in the water. Does it ever take to the fields and
woods, and live on fruit and land-insects, and nest in trees like
other thrushes? So with all birds and beasts. They vary constantly,
but not in one lifetime, and the sum of these variations, accumulated
through natural selection, as Darwin has shown, gives rise, in the
course of long periods of time, to new species.
As I have already said, domestic animals vary more than wild ones.
Every farmer and poultry-grower knows that some hens are better with
chickens than others--more motherly, more careful--and rear a greater
number of their brood. The same is true of sows with pigs. Some sows
will eat their pigs, and wild animals in cages often destroy their
young. Some ewes will not own their lambs, and occasionally a cow will
not own her calf. (Such cases show perverted or demoralized
instinct.) Similar to these are the strange friendships that sometimes
occur among the domestic animals, as that of a sheep with a cow, a
goose with a horse, or a hen adopting kittens. In a state of nature
these curious attachments probably never spring up. Instinct is likely
to be more or less demoralized when animal life touches human life.
With the wild creatures we sometimes see one instinct overcoming
another, as when fear drives a bird to desert its nest, or when the
instinct of migration leads a pair of swallows to desert their
unfledged young.
A great many young birds come to grief by leaving the nest before they
can fly. In such cases, I suppose, they disobey the parental
instructions! I find it easier to believe that instinct is at fault,
or that one instinct has overcome another; something has disturbed or
alarmed the young birds, and the fear of danger has led them to
attempt flight before their wings were strong enough. Once, when I was
climbing up to the nest of a broad-winged hawk, the young took fright
and launched out in the air, coming to the ground only a few rods
away.
Instinct, natural prompting, is the main matter, after all. It makes
up at least nine tenths of the lives of all our wild neighbors. How
much has fear had to do in shaping their lives and in perpetuating
them! And "fear of any particular enemy," says Darwin, "is certainly
an instinctive quality." It has been said that kittens confined in a
box, and which have never known a dog, will spit and put up their
backs at a hand that has just stroked a dog,--even before their eyes
are opened, one authority says, but this I doubt. My son's tame gray
squirrel had never seen chestnuts, nor learned about them in the
school of the woods, and yet when he was offered some, he fairly
danced with excitement; he put his paws eagerly around them and drew
them to him, and chattered, and looked threateningly at all about him.
Does man know his proper food in the same way? The child has only the
instinct to eat, and will put anything into its mouth.
How the instinctive wildness of the turkey crops out in the young! Let
the mother turkey while hovering her brood give the danger-signal, and
the young will run from under her and hide in the grass. Why? To give
her a chance to fly and decoy away the enemy. I think young chickens
will do the same. Young partridges hatched under a hen run away at
once. Pheasants in England reared under a domestic fowl are as wild as
in a state of nature. Some California quail hatched under a bantam hen
in the Zoo in New York did not heed the calls of their foster-mother
at all the first week, but at her alarm-note they instantly squatted,
showing that the danger-cry of a fowl is a kind of universal language
that all species understand. One may prove this at any time by
arousing the fears of any wild bird: how all the other birds catch the
alarm! Charles St. John says that in Scotland the stag you are
stalking is sure to be put to flight if it hears the alarm-cry of the
cock-grouse. You see it is more important that the wild creatures
should understand the danger-signals of one another than that they
should understand the rest of their language.
To what extent animals reason, or show any glimmering of what we call
reason, is a much-debated question among animal psychologists, and I
shall have more to say upon the subject later on. Dogs undoubtedly
show gleams of reason, and other animals in domestication, such as the
elephant and the monkey. One does not often feel like questioning
Darwin's conclusions, yet the incident of the caged bear which he
quotes, that pawed the water in front of its cage to create a current
that should float within its reach a piece of bread that had been
placed there, does not, in my judgment, show any reasoning about the
laws of hydrostatics. The bear would doubtless have pawed a cloth in
the same way, vaguely seeking to draw the bread within reach. But when
an elephant blows through his trunk upon the ground _beyond_ an object
which he wants, but which is beyond his reach, so that the rebounding
air will drive it toward him, he shows something very much like
reason.
Instinct is a kind of natural reason,--reason that acts without proof
or experience. The principle of life in organic nature seeks in all
ways to express and to perpetuate itself. It finds many degrees of
expression and fulfillment in the vegetable world; it finds higher
degrees of expression and fulfillment in the animal world, reaching
its highest development in man.
That the animals, except those that have been long associated with
man, and they only in occasional gleams and hints, are capable of any
of our complex mental processes, that they are capable of an act of
reflection, of connecting cause and effect, of putting this and that
together, is to me void of proof. Why, there are yet savage tribes in
which the woman is regarded as the sole parent of the child. When the
mother is sick at childbirth, the father takes to his bed and feigns
the illness he does not feel, in order to establish his relationship
to the child. It is not at all probable that the males of any species
of animals, or the females either, are guided or influenced in their
actions by the desire for offspring, or that they possess anything
like knowledge of the connection between their love-making and their
offspring. This knowledge comes of reflection, and reflection the
lower animals are not capable of. But I shall have more to say upon
this point in another chapter, entitled "What do Animals Know?" I will
only say here that animals are almost as much under the dominion of
absolute nature, or what we call instinct, innate tendency, habit of
growth, as are the plants and trees. Their lives revolve around three
wants or needs--the want of food, of safety, and of offspring. It is
in securing these ends that all their wit is developed. They have no
wants outside of these spheres, as man has. Their social wants and
their love of beauty, as in some of the birds, are secondary. It is
quite certain that the animals that store up food for the winter do
not take any thought of the future. Nature takes thought for them and
gives them their provident instinct. The jay, by his propensity to
carry away and hide things, plants many of our oak and chestnut trees,
but who dares say that he does this on purpose, any more than that the
insects cross-fertilize the flowers on purpose? Sheep do not take
thought of the wool upon their backs that is to protect them from the
cold of winter, nor does the fox of his fur. In the tropics sheep
cease to grow wool in three or four years.
All the lower animals, so far as I know, swim the first time they find
themselves in the water. They do not have to be taught: it is a matter
of instinct. It is what we should expect from our knowledge of their
lives. Not so with man; he must learn to swim as he learns so many
other things. The stimulus of the water does not at once set in motion
his legs and arms in the right way, as it does the animal's legs; his
powers of reason and reflection paralyze him--his brain carries him
down. Not until he has learned to resign himself to the water as the
animal does, and to go on all fours, can he swim. As soon as the boy
ceases to struggle against his tendency to sink, assumes the
horizontal position, and strikes out as the animal does, with but one
thought, and that to apply his powers of locomotion to the medium
about him, he swims as a matter of course. It is said that children
have sometimes been known to swim when thrown into the water. Their
animal instincts were not thwarted by their powers of reflection.
Doubtless this never happened to a grown person. Moreover, is it not
probable that the specific gravity of the hairless human body is
greater than that of the hair-covered animal, and that it sinks, while
that of the cat or dog floats? This, with the erect position of man,
makes swimming with him an art that must be acquired.
There is no better illustration of the action of instinct as opposed
to conscious intelligence than is afforded by the parasitic
birds,--the cuckoo in Europe and the cowbird in this country,--birds
that lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. Darwin speculates as
to how this instinct came about, but whatever may have been its
genesis, it is now a fixed habit among these birds. Moreover, the
instinct of the blind young alien, a day or two after it is hatched,
to throw or crowd its foster-brothers out of the nest is a strange and
anomalous act, and is as untaught and unreasoned as anything in
vegetable life. But when our yellow warbler, finding this strange egg
of the cowbird in her nest, proceeds to bury it by putting another
bottom in the nest and carrying up the sides to correspond, she shows
something very much like sense and judgment, though of a clumsy kind.
How much simpler and easier it would be to throw out the strange egg!
I have known the cowbird herself to carry an egg from a nest in which
she wished to deposit one of her own. Again, how stupid and ludicrous
it seems on the part of the mother sparrow, or warbler, or vireo, when
she goes about toiling desperately to satisfy the hunger of her big
clamorous bantling of a cowbird, never suspecting that she has been
imposed upon!
Of course the line that divides man from the lower orders is not a
straight line. It has many breaks and curves and deep indentations.
The man-like apes, as it were, mark where the line rises up into the
domain of man. Furthermore, the elephant and the dog, especially as we
know them in domestication, encroach upon man's territory.
Men are born with aptitudes for different things, but the art and the
science of them all they have to learn; proficiency comes with
practice. Man must learn to spin his web, to build his house, to sing
his song, to know his food, to sail his craft, to find his way--things
that the animals know "from the jump." The animal inherits its
knowledge and its skill: man must acquire his by individual effort;
all he inherits is capacity in varying degrees for these things. The
animal does rational things without an exercise of reason. It is
intelligent as nature is intelligent. It does not know that it knows,
or how it knows, while man does. Man's knowledge is the light of his
mind that shines on many and widely different objects, while the
knowledge of animals cannot be symbolized by the term "light" at all.
The animal acts blindly so far as any conscious individual
illumination or act of judgment is concerned. It does the thing
unwittingly, because it must. Confront it with a new condition, and it
has no resources to meet that condition. The animal knows what
necessity taught its progenitors, and it knows that only as a
spontaneous impulse to do certain things.
Instinct, I say, is a great matter, and often shames reason. It adapts
means to an end, it makes few or no mistakes, it takes note of times
and seasons, it delves, it bores, it spins, it weaves, it sews, it
builds, it makes paper, it constructs a shelter, it navigates the air
and the water, it is provident and thrifty, it knows its enemies, it
outwits its foes, it crosses oceans and continents without compass, it
foreshadows nearly all the arts and trades and occupations of mankind,
it is skilled without practice, and wise without experience. How it
arose, what its genesis was, who can tell? Probably natural selection
has been the chief agent in its development. If natural selection has
developed and sharpened the claws of the cat and the scent of the
fox, why should it not develop and sharpen their wits also? The remote
ancestors of the fox or of the crow were doubtless less shrewd and
cunning than the crows and the foxes of to-day. The instinctive
intelligence of an animal of our time is the sum of the variations
toward greater intelligence of all its ancestors. What man stores in
language and in books--the accumulated results of experience--the
animals seem to have stored in instinct. As Darwin says, a man cannot,
on his first trial, make a stone hatchet or a canoe through his power
of imitation. "He has to learn his work by practice; a beaver, on the
other hand, can make its dam or canal, and a bird its nest, as well or
nearly as well, and a spider its wonderful web quite as well, the
first time it tries as when old and experienced."
An animal shows intelligence, as distinct from instinct, when it takes
advantage of any circumstance that arises at the moment, when it finds
new ways, whether better or not, as when certain birds desert their
old nesting-sites, and take up with new ones afforded by man. This
act, at least, shows power of choice. The birds and beasts all quickly
avail themselves of any new source of food supply. Their wits are
probably more keen and active here than in any other direction. It is
said that in Oklahoma the coyotes have learned to tell ripe
watermelons from unripe ones by scratching upon them. If they have
not, they probably will. Eating is the one thing that engrosses the
attention of all creatures, and the procuring of food has been a great
means of education to all.
I notice that certain of the wood-folk--mice and squirrels and
birds--eat mushrooms. If I would eat them, I must learn how to
distinguish the edible from the poisonous ones. I have no special
sense to guide me in the matter, as doubtless the squirrels have.
Their instinct is sure where my reason fails. It would be very
interesting to know if they ever make a mistake in this matter.
Domestic animals sometimes make mistakes as to their food because
their instinct has been tampered with and is by no means as sure as
that of the wild creatures. It is said that sheep will occasionally
eat laurel and St. John's-wort, which are poisonous to them. In the
far West I was told that the horses sometimes eat a weed called the
loco-weed that makes them crazy. I have since learned that the
buffaloes and cattle with a strain of the buffalo blood never eat this
weed.
The imitation among the lower animals to which I have referred is in
no sense akin to teaching. The boy does not learn arithmetic by
imitation. To teach is to bring one mind to act upon another mind; it
is the result of a conscious effort on the part of both teacher and
pupil. The child, says Darwin, has an instinctive tendency to speak,
but not to brew, or bake, or write. The child comes to speak by
imitation, as does the parrot, and then learns the meaning of words,
as the parrot does not.
I am convinced there is nothing in the notion that animals consciously
teach their young. Is it probable that a mere animal reflects upon the
future any more than it does upon the past? Is it solicitous about the
future well-being of its offspring any more than it is curious about
its ancestry? Persons who think they see the lower animals training
their young consciously or unconsciously supply something to their
observations; they read their own thoughts or preconceptions into what
they see. Yet so trained a naturalist and experienced a hunter as
President Roosevelt differs with me in this matter. In a letter which
I am permitted to quote, he says:--
"I have not the slightest doubt that there is a large amount of
_unconscious_ teaching by wood-folk of their offspring. In
unfrequented places I have had the deer watch me with almost as much
indifference as they do now in the Yellowstone Park. In frequented
places, where they are hunted, young deer and young mountain sheep, on
the other hand,--and of course young wolves, bobcats, and the
like,--are exceedingly wary and shy when the sight or smell of man is
concerned. Undoubtedly this is due to the fact that from their
earliest moments of going about they learn to imitate the unflagging
watchfulness of their parents, and by the exercise of some associative
or imitative quality they grow to imitate and then to share the alarm
displayed by the older ones at the smell or presence of man. A young
deer that has never seen a man feels no instinctive alarm at his
presence, or at least very little; but it will undoubtedly learn to
associate extreme alarm with his presence from merely accompanying its
mother, if the latter feels such alarm. I should not regard this as
schooling by the parent any more than I should so regard the instant
flight of twenty antelope who had not seen a hunter, because the
twenty-first has seen him and has instantly run. Sometimes a deer or
an antelope will deliberately give an alarm-cry at sight of something
strange. This cry at once puts every deer or antelope on the alert;
but they will be just as much on the alert if they witness nothing but
an exhibition of fright and flight on the part of the first deer or
antelope, without there being any conscious effort on its part to
express alarm.
"Moreover, I am inclined to think that on certain occasions, rare
though they may be, there is a conscious effort at teaching. I have
myself known of one setter dog which would thrash its puppy soundly if
the latter carelessly or stupidly flushed a bird. Something similar
may occur in the wild state among such intelligent beasts as wolves
and foxes. Indeed, I have some reason to believe that with both of
these animals it does occur--that is, that there is conscious as well
as unconscious teaching of the young in such matters as traps."
Probably the President and I differ more in the meaning we attach to
the same words than in anything else. In a subsequent letter he says:
"I think the chief difference between you and me in the matter is one
of terminology. When I speak of unconscious teaching, I really mean
simply acting in a manner which arouses imitation."
Imitation is no doubt the key to the whole matter. The animals
unconsciously teach their young by their example, and in no other way.
But I must leave the discussion of this subject for another chapter.
VI
ANIMAL COMMUNICATION