period of courtship, or preliminary to the match-making, is the spring
musical festival and reunion of the goldfinches, which often lasts for
days, through rain and shine. In April or May, apparently all the
goldfinches from a large area collect in the top of an elm or a maple
and unite in a prolonged musical festival. Is it a contest among the
males for the favor of the females, or is it the spontaneous
expression of the gladness of the whole clan at the return of the
season of life and love? The birds seem to pair soon after, and
doubtless the concert of voices has some reference to that event.
There is one other human practice often attributed to the lower
animals that I must briefly consider, and that is the practice, under
certain circumstances, of poisoning their young. One often hears of
caged young birds being fed by their parents for a few days and then
poisoned; or of a mother fox poisoning her captive young when she
finds that she cannot liberate him; and such stories obtain ready
credence with the public, especially with the young. To make these
stories credible, one must suppose a school of pharmacy, too, in the
woods.
"The worst thing about these poisoning stories," writes a friend of
mine, himself a writer of nature-books, "is the implied appreciation
of the full effect and object of poison--the comprehension by the fox,
for instance, that the poisoned meat she may be supposed to find was
placed there for the object of killing herself (or some other fox),
and that she may apply it to another animal for that purpose.
Furthermore, that she understands the nature of death--that it brings
'surcease of sorrow,' and that death is better than captivity for her
young one. How did she acquire all this knowledge? Where was her
experience of its supposed truth obtained? How could she make so fine
and far-seeing a judgment, wholly out of the range of brute affairs,
and so purely philosophical and humanly ethical? It violates every
instinct and canon of natural law, which is for the preservation of
life at all hazards. This is simply the human idea of 'murder.'
Animals kill one another for food, or in rivalry, or in blind ferocity
of predatory disposition; but there is not a particle of evidence that
they 'commit murder' for ulterior ends. It is questionable whether
they comprehend the condition called death, or its nature, in any
proper sense."
On another occasion I laughed at a recent nature writer for his
credulity in half-believing the story told him by a fisherman, that
the fox catches crabs by using his tail as a bait; and yet I read in
Romanes that Olaus, in his account of Norway, says he has seen a fox
do this very thing among the rocks on the sea-coast.[3] One would like
to cross-question Olaus before accepting such a statement. One would
as soon expect a fox to put his brush in the fire as in the water.
When it becomes wet and bedraggled, he is greatly handicapped as to
speed. There is no doubt that rats will put their tails into jars that
contain liquid food they want, and then lick them off, as Romanes
proved; but the rat's tail is not a brush, nor in any sense an
ornament. Think what the fox-and-crab story implies! Now the fox is
entirely a land animal, and lives by preying upon land creatures,
which it follows by scent or sight. It can neither see nor smell crabs
in the deep water, where crabs are usually found. How should it know
that there are such things as crabs? How should it know that they can
be taken with bait and line or by fishing for them? When and how did
it get this experience? This knowledge belongs to man alone. It comes
through a process of reasoning that he alone is capable of. Man alone
of land animals sets traps and fishes. There is a fish called the
angler (_Lophius piscatorius_), which, it is said on doubtful
authority, by means of some sort of appendages on its head angles for
small fish; but no competent observer has reported any land animal
doing so. Again, would a crab lay hold of a mass of fur like a fox's
tail?--even if the tail could be thrust deep enough into the water,
which is impossible. Crabs, when not caught with hand-nets, are
usually taken in water eight or ten feet deep. They are baited and
caught with a piece of meat tied to a string, but cannot be lifted to
the surface till they are eating the meat, and then a dip-net is
required to secure them. The story, on the whole, is one of the most
preposterous that ever gained credence in natural history.
[3] A book published in London in 1783, entitled _A
Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar and the
Present State of the Several Kingdoms of the World_, among
other astonishing natural history notes, makes this statement
about the white and red fox of Norway: "They have a
particular way of drawing crabs ashore by dipping their tails
in the water, which the crab lays hold of."
Good observers are probably about as rare as good poets. Accurate
seeing,--an eye that takes in the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth,--how rare indeed it is! So few persons know or can tell
exactly what they see; so few persons can draw a right inference from
an observed fact; so few persons can keep from reading their own
thoughts and preconceptions into what they see; only a person with the
scientific habit of mind can be trusted to report things as they are.
Most of us, in observing the wild life about us, see more or see less
than the truth. We see less when our minds are dull, or preoccupied,
or blunted by want of interest. This is true of most country people.
We see more when we read the lives of the wild creatures about us in
the light of our human experience, and impute to the birds and beasts
human motives and methods. This is too often true of the eager city
man or woman who sallies out into the country to study nature.
The tendency to sentimentalize nature has, in our time, largely taken
the place of the old tendency to demonize and spiritize it. It is
anthropomorphism in another form, less fraught with evil to us, but
equally in the way of a clear understanding of the life about us.
VII
DEVIOUS PATHS
There is no better type or epitome of wild nature than the
bird's-nest--something built, and yet as if it grew, a part of the
ground, or of the rock, or of the branch upon which it is placed;
beginning so coarsely, so irregularly, and ending so finely and
symmetrically; so unlike the work of hands, and yet the result of a
skill beyond hands; and when it holds its complement of eggs, how
pleasing, how suggestive!
The bird adapts means to an end, and yet so differently from the way
of man,--an end of which it does not know the value or the purpose. We
know it is prompted to it by the instinct of reproduction. When the
woodpecker in the fall excavates a lodge in a dry limb, we know he is
prompted to it by the instinct of self-preservation, but the birds
themselves obey the behests of nature without knowledge.
A bird's-nest suggests design, and yet it seems almost haphazard; the
result of a kind of madness, yet with method in it. The hole the
woodpecker drills for its cell is to the eye a perfect circle, and
the rim of most nests is as true as that of a cup. The circle and the
sphere exist in nature; they are mother forms and hold all other
forms. They are easily attained; they are spontaneous and inevitable.
The bird models her nest about her own breast; she turns round and
round in it, and its circular character results as a matter of course.
Angles, right lines, measured precision, so characteristic of the
works of man, are rarely met with in organic nature.
Nature reaches her ends by devious paths; she loiters, she meanders,
she plays by the way; she surely "arrives," but it is always in a
blind, hesitating, experimental kind of fashion. Follow the tunnels of
the ants or the crickets, or of the moles and the weasels,
underground, or the courses of the streams or the paths of the animals
above ground--how they turn and hesitate, how wayward and undecided
they are! A right line seems out of the question.
The oriole often weaves strings into her nest; sometimes she binds and
overhands the part of the rim where she alights in going in, to make
it stronger, but it is always done in a hit-or-miss, childish sort of
way, as one would expect it to be; the strings are massed, or snarled,
or left dangling at loose ends, or are caught around branches; the
weaving and the sewing are effective, and the whole nest is a marvel
of blind skill, of untaught intelligence; yet how unmethodical, how
delightfully irregular, how unmistakably a piece of wild nature!
Sometimes the instinct of the bird is tardy, and the egg of the bird
gets ripe before the nest is ready; in such a case the egg is of
course lost. I once found the nest of the black and white creeping
warbler in a mossy bank in the woods, and under the nest was an egg of
the bird. The warbler had excavated the site for her nest, dropped her
egg into it, and then gone on with her building. Instinct is not
always inerrant. Nature is wasteful, and plays the game with a free
hand. Yet what she loses on one side she gains on another; she is like
that least bittern Mr. Frank M. Chapman tells about. Two of the
bittern's five eggs had been punctured by the long-billed marsh wren.
When the bird returned to her nest and found the two eggs punctured,
she made no outcry, showed no emotion, but deliberately proceeded to
eat them. Having done this, she dropped the empty shells over the side
of the nest, together with any straws that had become soiled in the
process, cleaned her bill, and proceeded with her incubation. This was
Nature in a nut-shell,--or rather egg-shell,--turning her mishaps to
some good account. If the egg will not make a bird, it will make food;
if not food, then fertilizer.
Among nearly all our birds, the female is the active business member
of the partnership; she has a turn for practical affairs; she chooses
the site of the nest, and usually builds it unaided. The life of the
male is more or less a holiday or picnic till the young are hatched,
when his real cares begin, for he does his part in feeding them. One
may see the male cedar-bird attending the female as she is busy with
her nest-building, but never, so far as I have observed, assisting
her. One spring I observed with much interest a phoebe-bird building
her nest not far from my cabin in the woods. The male looked on
approvingly, but did not help. He perched most of the time on a
mullein stalk near the little spring run where Phoebe came for mud.
In the early morning hours she made her trips at intervals of a minute
or two. The male flirted his tail and called encouragingly, and when
she started up the hill with her load he would accompany her part way,
to help her over the steepest part, as it were, then return to his
perch and watch and call for her return. For an hour or more I
witnessed this little play in bird life, in which the female's part
was so primary and the male's so secondary. There is something in such
things that seems to lend support to Professor Lester F. Ward's
contention, as set forth in his "Pure Sociology," that in the natural
evolution of the two sexes the female was first and the male second;
that he was made from her rib, so to speak, and not she from his.
With our phalarope and a few Australian birds, the position of the two
sexes as indicated above is reversed, the females having the
ornaments and bright colors and doing the courting, while the male
does the incubating. In a few cases also the female is much the more
masculine, noisy, and pugnacious. With some of our common birds, such
as the woodpeckers, the chickadee, and the swallows, both sexes take
part in nest-building.
It is a very pretty sight to witness a pair of wood thrushes building
their nest. Indeed, what is there about the wood thrush that is not
pleasing? He is a kind of visible embodied melody. Some birds are so
sharp and nervous and emphatic in their movements, as the common
snowbird or junco, the flashing of whose white tail quills expresses
the character of the bird. But all the ways of the wood thrush are
smooth and gentle, and suggest the melody of its song. It is the only
bird thief I love to see carrying off my cherries. It usually takes
only those dropped upon the ground by other birds, and with the red or
golden globe impaled upon its beak, its flight across the lawn is a
picture delightful to behold. One season a pair of them built a nest
in a near-by grove; morning after morning, for many mornings, I used
to see the two going to and from the nest, over my vineyard and
currant patch and pear orchard, in quest of, or bringing material for,
the structure. They flew low, the female in the lead, the male just
behind in line with her, timing his motions to hers, the two making a
brown, gently undulating line, very pretty to look upon, from my
neighbor's field where they obtained the material, to the tree that
held the nest. A gentle, gliding flight, hurried but hushed, as it
were, and expressive of privacy and loving preoccupation. The male
carried no material; apparently he was simply the escort of his mate;
but he had an air of keen and joyous interest. He never failed to
attend her each way, keeping about a yard behind her, and flying as if
her thought were his thought and her wish his wish. I have rarely seen
anything so pretty in bird life. The movements of all our thrushes
except the robin give one this same sense of harmony,--nothing sharp
or angular or abrupt. Their gestures are as pleasing as their notes.
One evening, while seated upon my porch, I had convincing proof that
musical or song contests do take place among the birds. Two wood
thrashes who had nests near by sat on the top of a dead tree and
pitted themselves against each other in song for over half an hour,
contending like champions in a game, and certainly affording the
rarest treat in wood thrush melody I had ever had. They sang and sang
with unwearied spirit and persistence, now and then changing position
or facing in another direction, but keeping within a few feet of each
other. The rivalry became so obvious and was so interesting that I
finally made it a point not to take my eyes from the singers. The
twilight deepened till their forms began to grow dim; then one of the
birds could stand the strain no longer, the limit of fair competition
had been reached, and seeming to say, "I will silence you, anyhow," it
made a spiteful dive at its rival, and in hot pursuit the two
disappeared in the bushes beneath the tree. Of course I would not say
that the birds were consciously striving to outdo each other in song;
it was the old feud between males in the love season, not a war of
words or of blows, but of song. Had the birds been birds of brilliant
plumage, the rivalry would probably have taken the form of strutting
and showing off their bright colors and ornaments.
An English writer on birds, Edmund Selous; describes a similar song
contest between two nightingales. "Jealousy," he says, "did not seem
to blind them to the merit of each other's performance. Though often
one, upon hearing the sweet, hostile strains, would burst forth
instantly itself,--and here there was no certain mark of
appreciation,--yet sometimes, perhaps quite as often, it would put its
head on one side and listen with exactly the appearance of a musical
connoisseur, weighing, testing, and appraising each note as it issued
from the rival bill. A curious, half-suppressed expression would
steal, or seem to steal (for Fancy may play her part in such matters),
over the listening bird, and the idea appear to be, 'How exquisite
would be those strains were they not sung by ----, and yet I must
admit that they are exquisite.'" Fancy no doubt does play a part in
such matters. It may well be doubted if birds are musical
connoisseurs, or have anything like human appreciation of their own or
of each other's songs. My reason for thinking so is this: I have heard
a bobolink with an instrument so defective that its song was broken
and inarticulate in parts, and yet it sang with as much apparent joy
and abandon as any of its fellows. I have also heard a hermit thrush
with a similar defect or impediment that appeared to sing entirely to
its own satisfaction. It would be very interesting to know if these
poor singers found mates as readily as their more gifted brothers. If
they did, the Darwinian theory of "sexual selection" in such matters,
according to which the finer songster would carry off the female,
would fall to the ground. Yet it is certain that it is during the
mating and breeding season that these "song combats" occur, and the
favor of the female would seem to be the matter in dispute. Whether or
not it be expressive of actual jealousy or rivalry, we have no other
words to apply to it.
A good deal of light is thrown upon the ways of nature as seen in the
lives of our solitary wasps, so skillfully and charmingly depicted by
George W. Peckham and his wife in their work on those insects. So
whimsical, so fickle, so forgetful, so fussy, so wise, and yet so
foolish, as these little people are! such victims of routine and yet
so individual, such apparent foresight and yet such thoughtlessness,
at such great pains and labor to dig a hole and build a cell, and then
at times sealing it up without storing it with food or laying the egg,
half finishing hole after hole, and then abandoning them without any
apparent reason; sometimes killing their spiders, at other times only
paralyzing them; one species digging its burrow before it captures its
game, others capturing the game and then digging the hole; some of
them hanging the spider up in the fork of a weed to keep it away from
the ants while they work at their nest, and running to it every few
minutes to see that it is safe; others laying the insect on the ground
while they dig; one species walking backward and dragging its spider
after it, and when the spider is so small that it carries it in its
mandible, still walking backward as if dragging it, when it would be
much more convenient to walk forward. A curious little people, leading
their solitary lives and greatly differentiated by the solitude,
hardly any two alike, one nervous and excitable, another calm and
unhurried; one careless in her work, another neat and thorough; this
one suspicious, that one confiding; Ammophila using a pebble to pack
down the earth in her burrow, while another species uses the end of
her abdomen,--verily a queer little people, with a lot of wild nature
about them, and a lot of human nature, too.
I think one can see how this development of individuality among the
solitary wasps comes about. May it not be because the wasps are
solitary? They live alone. They have no one to imitate; they are
uninfluenced by their fellows. No community interests override or
check individual whims or peculiarities. The innate tendency to
variation, active in all forms of life, has with them full sway. Among
the social bees or wasps one would not expect to find those
differences between individuals. The members of a colony all appear
alike in habits and in dispositions. Colonies differ, as every
bee-keeper knows, but probably the members composing it differ very
little. The community interests shape all alike. Is it not the same in
a degree among men? Does not solitude bring out a man's peculiarities
and differentiate him from others? The more one lives alone, the more
he becomes unlike his fellows. Hence the original and racy flavor of
woodsmen, pioneers, lone dwellers in Nature's solitudes. Thus isolated
communities develop characteristics of their own. Constant
intercommunication, the friction of travel, of streets, of books, of
newspapers, make us all alike; we are, as it were, all pebbles upon
the same shore, washed by the same waves.
Among the larger of vertebrate animals, I think, one might reasonably
expect to find more individuality among those that are solitary than
among those that are gregarious; more among birds of prey than among
water-fowl, more among foxes than among prairie-dogs, more among
moose than among sheep or buffalo, more among grouse than among quail.
But I do not know that this is true.
Yet among none of these would one expect to find the diversity of
individual types that one finds among men. No two dogs of the same
breed will be found to differ as two men of the same family often
differ. An original fox, or wolf, or bear, or beaver, or crow, or
crab,--that is, one not merely different from his fellows, but
obviously superior to them, differing from them as a master mind
differs from the ordinary mind,--I think, one need not expect to find.
It is quite legitimate for the animal-story writer to make the most of
the individual differences in habits and disposition among the
animals; he has the same latitude any other story writer has, but he
is bound also by the same law of probability, the same need of
fidelity to nature. If he proceed upon the theory that the wild
creatures have as pronounced individuality as men have, that there are
master minds among them, inventors and discoverers of new ways, born
captains and heroes, he will surely "o'erstep the modesty of nature."
The great diversity of character and capacity among men doubtless
arises from their greater and more complex needs, relations, and
aspirations. The animals' needs in comparison are few, their relations
simple, and their aspirations _nil_. One cannot see what could give
rise to the individual types and exceptional endowments that are
often claimed for them. The law of variation, as I have said, would
give rise to differences, but not to a sudden reversal of race habits,
or to animal geniuses.
The law of variation is everywhere operative--less so now, no doubt,
than in the earlier history of organic life on the globe. Yet Nature
is still experimenting in her blind way, and hits upon many curious
differences and departures. But I suppose if the race of man were
exterminated, man would never arise again. I doubt if the law of
evolution could ever again produce him, or any other species of
animal.
This principle of variation was no doubt much more active back in
geologic time, during the early history of animal life upon the globe,
than it is in this late age. And for the reason that animal life was
less adapted to its environment than it is now, the struggle for life
was sharper. Perfect adaptation of any form of life to the conditions
surrounding it seems to check variability. Animal and plant life seem
to vary more in this country than in England because the conditions of
life are harder. The extremes of heat and cold, of wet and dry, are
much greater. It has been found that the eggs of the English sparrow
vary in form and color more in the United States than in Great
Britain. Certain American shells are said to be more variable than the
English. Among our own birds it has been found that the "migratory
species evince a greater amount of individual variation than do
non-migrating species" because they are subject to more varying
conditions of food and climate. I think we may say, then, if there
were no struggle for life, if uniformity of temperature and means of
subsistence everywhere prevailed, there would be little or no
variation and no new species would arise. The causes of variation seem
to be the inequality and imperfection of things; the pressure of life
is unequally distributed, and this is one of Nature's ways that
accounts for much that we see about us.
VIII
WHAT DO ANIMALS KNOW?
After the discussion carried on in the foregoing chapters touching the
general subject of animal life and instinct, we are prepared, I think,
to ask with more confidence, What do animals know?
The animals unite such ignorance with such apparent knowledge, such
stupidity with such cleverness, that in our estimate of them we are
likely to rate their wit either too high or too low. With them,
knowledge does not fade into ignorance, as it does in man; the
contrast is like that between night and day, with no twilight between.
So keen one moment, so blind the next!
Think of the ignorance of the horse after all his long association
with man; of the trifling things along the street at which he will
take fright, till he rushes off in a wild panic of fear, endangering
his own neck and the neck of his driver. One would think that if he
had a particle of sense he would know that an old hat or a bit of
paper was harmless. But fear is deeply implanted in his nature; it has
saved the lives of his ancestors countless times, and it is still one
of his ruling passions.