"School of Nature Study" would eagerly adopt: A very severe drouth
reigned throughout the land; food was probably scarce, and was
becoming scarcer; the bird foresaw her inability to care for four
young ones, and so reduced the possible number by ejecting one of the
eggs from the nest. This sounds pretty and plausible, and so credits
the bird with the wisdom that the public is so fond of believing it
possesses. Something like this wisdom often occurs among the hive bees
in seasons of scarcity; they will destroy the unhatched queens. But
birds have no such foresight, and make no such calculations. In cold,
backward seasons, I think, birds lay fewer eggs than when the season
is early and warm, but that is not a matter of calculation on their
part; it is the result of outward conditions.
A great many observers and nature students at the present time are
possessed of the notion that the birds and beasts instruct their
young, train them and tutor them, much after the human manner. In the
familiar sight of a pair of crows foraging with their young about a
field in summer, one of our nature writers sees the old birds giving
their young a lesson in flying. She says that the most important thing
that the elders had to do was to teach the youngsters how to fly.
This they did by circling about the pasture, giving a peculiar call
while they were followed by their flock--all but one. This was a
bobtailed crow, and he did not obey the word of command. His mother
took note of his disobedience and proceeded to discipline him. He
stood upon a big stone, and she came down upon him and knocked him off
his perch. "He squawked and fluttered his wings to keep from falling,
but the blow came so suddenly that he had not time to save himself,
and he fell flat on the ground. In a minute he clambered back upon his
stone, and I watched him closely. The next time the call came to fly
he did not linger, but went with the rest, and so long as I could
watch him he never disobeyed again." I should interpret this fact of
the old and young crows flying about a field in summer quite
differently. The young are fully fledged, and are already strong
flyers, when this occurs. They do not leave the nest until they can
fly well and need no tutoring. What the writer really saw was what any
one may see on the farm in June and July: she saw the parent crows
foraging with their young in a field The old birds flew about,
followed by their brood, clamorous for the food which their parents
found. The bobtailed bird, which had probably met with some accident,
did not follow, and the mother returned to feed it; the young crow
lifted its wings and flapped them, and in its eagerness probably fell
off its perch; then when its parent flew away, it followed.
I think it highly probable that the sense or faculty by which animals
find their way home over long stretches of country, and which keeps
them from ever being lost as man so often is, is a faculty entirely
unlike anything man now possesses. The same may be said of the faculty
that guides the birds back a thousand miles or more to their old
breeding-haunts. In caged or housed animals I fancy this faculty soon
becomes blunted. President Roosevelt tells in his "Ranch Life" of a
horse he owned that ran away two hundred miles across the plains,
swimming rivers on the way to its old home. It is very certain, I
think, that this homing feat is not accomplished by the aid of either
sight or scent, for usually the returning animal seems to follow a
comparatively straight line. It is, or seems to be, a consciousness of
direction that is as unerring as the magnetic needle. Reason,
calculation, and judgment err, but these primary instincts of the
animal seem almost infallible.
In Bronx Park in New York a grebe and a loon lived together in an
inclosure in which was a large pool of water. The two birds became
much attached to each other and were never long separated. One winter
day on which the pool was frozen over, except a small opening in one
end of it, the grebe dived under the ice and made its way to the far
end of the pool, where it remained swimming about aimlessly for some
moments. Presently the loon missed its companion, and with an apparent
look of concern dived under the ice and joined it at the closed end of
the pool. The grebe seemed to be in distress for want of air. Then the
loon settled upon the bottom, and with lifted beak sprang up with much
force against the ice, piercing it with its dagger-like bill, but not
breaking it. Down to the bottom it went again, and again hurled itself
up against the ice, this time shattering it and rising to the surface,
where the grebe was quick to follow. Now it looked as if the loon had
gone under the ice to rescue its friend from a dangerous situation,
for had not the grebe soon found the air, it must have perished, and
persons who witnessed the incident interpreted it in this way. It is
in such cases that we are so apt to read our human motives and
emotions into the acts of the lower animals. I do not suppose the loon
realized the danger of its companion, nor went under the ice to rescue
it. It followed the grebe because it wanted to be with it, or to share
in any food that might be detaining it there, and then, finding no
air-hole, it proceeded to make one, as it and its ancestors must often
have done before. All our northern divers must be more or less
acquainted with ice, and must know how to break it. The grebe itself
could doubtless have broken the ice had it desired to. The birds and
the beasts often show much intelligence, or what looks like
intelligence, but, as Hamerton says, "the moment we think of them as
_human_, we are lost."
A farmer had a yearling that sucked the cows. To prevent this, he put
on the yearling a muzzle set full of sharpened nails. These of course
pricked the cows, and they would not stand to be drained of their
milk. The next day the farmer saw the yearling rubbing the nails
against a rock in order, as he thought, to dull them so they would not
prick the cows! How much easier to believe that the beast was simply
trying to get rid of the awkward incumbrance upon its nose. What can a
calf or a cow know about sharpened nails, and the use of a rock to
dull them? This is a kind of outside knowledge--outside of their needs
and experiences--that they could not possess.
An Arizona friend of mine lately told me this interesting incident
about the gophers that infested his cabin when he was a miner. The
gophers ate up his bread. He could not hide it from them or put it
beyond their reach. Finally, he bethought him to stick his loaf on the
end of a long iron poker that he had, and then stand up the poker in
the middle of his floor. Still, when he came back to his cabin, he
would find his loaf eaten full of holes. One day, having nothing to
do, he concluded to watch and see how the gophers reached the bread,
and this was what he saw: The animals climbed up the side of his log
cabin, ran along one of the logs to a point opposite the bread, and
then sprang out sidewise toward the loaf, which each one struck, but
upon which only one seemed able to effect a lodgment. Then this one
would cling to the loaf and act as a stop to his fellows when they
tried a second time, his body affording them the barrier they
required. My friend felt sure that this leader deliberately and
consciously aided the others in securing a footing on the loaf. But I
read the incident differently. This successful jumper aided his
fellows without designing it. The exigencies of the situation
compelled him to the course he pursued. Having effected a lodgment
upon the impaled loaf, he would of course cling to it when the others
jumped so as not to be dislodged, thereby, willy nilly, helping them
to secure a foothold. The coöperation was inevitable, and not the
result of design.
The power to see straight is the rarest of gifts; to see no more and
no less than is actually before you; to be able to detach yourself and
see the thing as it actually is, uncolored or unmodified by your own
sentiments or prepossessions. In short, to see with your reason as
well as with your perceptions, that is to be an observer and to read
the book of nature aright.
XIV
GATHERED BY THE WAY
I. THE TRAINING OF WILD ANIMALS
I was reminded afresh of how prone we all are to regard the actions of
the lower animals in the light of our own psychology on reading "The
Training of Wild Animals," by Bostock, a well-known animal-trainer.
Bostock evidently knows well the art of training animals, but of the
science of it he seems to know very little. That is, while he is a
successful trainer, his notions of animal psychology are very crude.
For instance, on one page he speaks of the lion as if it were endowed
with a fair measure of human intelligence, and had notions, feelings,
and thoughts like our own; on the next page, when he gets down to real
business, he lays bare its utter want of these things. He says a lion
born and bred in captivity is more difficult to train than one caught
from the jungle. Then he gives rein to his fancy. "Such a lion does
not fear man; he knows his own power. He regards man as an inferior,
with an attitude of disdain and silent hauteur." "He accepts his food
as tribute, and his care as homage due." "He is aristocratic in his
independence." "Deep in him--so deep that he barely realizes its
existence--slumbers a desire for freedom and an unutterable longing
for the blue sky and the free air." When his training is begun, "he
meets it with a reserved majesty and silent indifference, as though he
had a dumb realization of his wrongs." All this is a very human way of
looking at the matter, and is typical of the way we all--most of
us--speak of the lower animals, defining them to ourselves in terms of
our own mentality, but it leads to false notions about them. We look
upon an animal fretting and struggling in its cage as longing for
freedom, picturing to itself the joy of the open air and the free
hills and sky, when the truth of the matter undoubtedly is that the
fluttering bird or restless fox or lion simply feels discomfort in
confinement. Its sufferings are physical, and not mental. Its
instincts lead it to struggle for freedom. It reacts strongly against
the barriers that hold it, and tries in every way to overcome them.
Freedom, as an idea, or a conception of a condition of life, is, of
course, beyond its capacity.
Bostock shows how the animal learns entirely by association, and not
at all by the exercise of thought or reason, and yet a moment later
says: "The animal is becoming amenable to the mastery of man, and in
doing so his own reason is being developed," which is much like saying
that when a man is practicing on the flying trapeze his wings are
being developed. The lion learns slowly through association--through
repeated sense impressions. First a long stick is put into his cage.
If this is destroyed, it is replaced by another, until he gets used to
it and tolerates its presence. Then he is gently rubbed with it at the
hands of his keeper. He gets used to this and comes to like it. Then
the stick is baited with a piece of meat, and in taking the meat the
animal gets still better acquainted with the stick, and so ceases to
fear it. When this stage is reached, the stick is shortened day by
day, "until finally it is not much longer than the hand." The next
step is to let the hand take the place of the stick in the stroking
process. "This is a great step taken, for one of the most difficult
things is to get any wild animal to allow himself to be touched with
the human hand." After a time a collar with a chain attached is
slipped around the lion's neck when he is asleep. He is now chained to
one end of the cage. Then a chair is introduced into the cage;
whereupon this king of beasts, whose reason is being developed, and
who has such clear notions of inferior and superior, and who knows his
own powers, usually springs for the chair, seeking to demolish it. His
tether prevents his reaching it, and so in time he tolerates the
chair. Then the trainer, after some preliminary feints, walks into the
cage and seats himself in the chair. And so, inch by inch, as it were,
the trainer gets control of the animal and subdues him to his
purposes, not by appealing to his mind, for he has none, but by
impressions upon his senses.
"Leopards, panthers, and jaguars are all trained in much the same
manner," and in putting them through their tricks one invariable order
must be observed: "Each thing done one day must be done the next day
in exactly the same way; there must be no deviation from the rule."
Now we do not see in this fact the way of a thinking or reflecting
being, but rather the way of a creature governed by instinct or
unthinking intelligence. An animal never _learns_ a trick in the sense
that man learns it, never sees through it or comprehends it, has no
image of it in its mind, and no idea of the relations of the parts of
it to one another; it does it by reason of repetition, as a creek
wears its channel, and probably has no more self-knowledge or
self-thought than the creek has. This, I think, is quite contrary to
the popular notion of animal life and mentality, but it is the
conclusion that I, at least, cannot avoid after making a study of the
subject.
II. AN ASTONISHED PORCUPINE
One summer, while three young people and I were spending an afternoon
upon a mountain-top, our dogs treed a porcupine. At my suggestion the
young man climbed the tree--not a large one--to shake the animal down.
I wished to see what the dogs would do with him, and what the
"quill-pig" would do with the dogs. As the climber advanced the
rodent went higher, till the limb he clung to was no larger than one's
wrist. This the young man seized and shook vigorously. I expected to
see the slow, stupid porcupine drop, but he did not. He only tightened
his hold. The climber tightened his hold, too, and shook the harder.
Still the bundle of quills did not come down, and no amount of shaking
could bring it down. Then I handed a long pole up to the climber, and
he tried to punch the animal down. This attack in the rear was
evidently a surprise; it produced an impression different from that of
the shaking. The porcupine struck the pole with his tail, put up the
shield of quills upon his back, and assumed his best attitude of
defense. Still the pole persisted in its persecution, regardless of
the quills; evidently the animal was astonished: he had never had an
experience like this before; he had now met a foe that despised his
terrible quills. Then he began to back rapidly down the tree in the
face of his enemy. The young man's sweetheart stood below, a highly
interested spectator. "Look out, Sam, he's coming down!" "Be quick,
he's gaining on you!" "Hurry, Sam!" Sam came as fast as he could, but
he had to look out for his footing, and his antagonist did not. Still,
he reached the ground first, and his sweetheart breathed more easily.
It looked as if the porcupine reasoned thus: "My quills are useless
against a foe so far away; I must come to close quarters with him."
But, of course, the stupid creature had no such mental process, and
formed no such purpose. He had found the tree unsafe, and his instinct
now was to get to the ground as quickly as possible and take refuge
among the rocks. As he came down I hit him a slight blow over the nose
with a rotten stick, hoping only to confuse him a little, but much to
my surprise and mortification he dropped to the ground and rolled down
the hill dead, having succumbed to a blow that a woodchuck or a coon
would hardly have regarded at all. Thus does the easy, passive mode of
defense of the porcupine not only dull his wits, but it makes frail
and brittle the thread of his life. He has had no struggles or battles
to harden and toughen him.
That blunt nose of his is as tender as a baby's, and he is snuffed out
by a blow that would hardly bewilder for a moment any other forest
animal, unless it be the skunk, another sluggish non-combatant of our
woodlands. Immunity from foes, from effort, from struggle is always
purchased with a price.
Certain of our natural history romancers have taken liberties with the
porcupine in one respect: they have shown him made up into a ball and
rolling down a hill. One writer makes him do this in a sportive mood;
he rolls down a long hill in the woods, and at the bottom he is a
ragged mass of leaves which his quills have impaled--: an apparition
that nearly frightened a rabbit out of its wits. Let any one who
knows the porcupine try to fancy it performing a feat like this!
Another romancer makes his porcupine roll himself into a ball when
attacked by a panther, and then on a nudge from his enemy roll down a
snowy incline into the water. I believe the little European hedgehog
can roll itself up into something like a ball, but our porcupine does
not. I have tried all sorts of tricks with him, and made all sorts of
assaults upon him, at different times, and I have never yet seen him
assume the globular form. It would not be the best form for him to
assume, because it would partly expose his vulnerable under side. The
one thing the porcupine seems bent upon doing at all times is to keep
right side up with care. His attitude of defense is crouching close to
the ground, head drawn in and pressed down, the circular shield of
large quills upon his back opened and extended as far as possible, and
the tail stretched back rigid and held close upon the ground. "Now
come on," he says, "if you want to." The tail is his weapon of active
defense; with it he strikes upward like lightning, and drives the
quills into whatever they touch. In his chapter called "In Panoply of
Spears," Mr. Roberts paints the porcupine without taking any liberties
with the creature's known habits. He portrays one characteristic of
the porcupine very felicitously: "As the porcupine made his resolute
way through the woods, the manner of his going differed from that of
all the other kindreds of the wild. He went not furtively. He had no
particular objection to making a noise. He did not consider it
necessary to stop every little while, stiffen himself to a monument of
immobility, cast wary glances about the gloom, and sniff the air for
the taint of enemies. He did not care who knew of his coming, and he
did not greatly care who came. Behind his panoply of biting spears he
felt himself secure, and in that security he moved as if he held in
fee the whole green, shadowy, perilous woodland world."
III. BIRDS AND STRINGS
A college professor writes me as follows:--
"Watching this morning a robin attempting to carry off a string, one
end of which was caught in a tree, I was much impressed by his utter
lack of sense. He could not realize that the string was fast, or that
it must be loosened before it could be carried off, and in his efforts
to get it all in his bill he wound it about a neighboring limb. If as
little sense were displayed in using other material for nests, there
would be no robins' nests. It impressed me more than ever with the
important part played by instinct."
Who ever saw any of our common birds display any sense or judgment in
the handling of strings? Strings are comparatively a new thing with
birds; they are not a natural product, and as a matter of course
birds blunder in handling them. The oriole uses them the most
successfully, often attaching her pensile nest to the branch by their
aid. But she uses them in a blind, childish way, winding them round
and round the branch, often getting them looped over a twig or
hopelessly tangled, and now and then hanging herself with them, as is
the case with other birds. I have seen a sparrow, a cedar-bird, and a
robin each hung by a string it was using in the building of its nest.
Last spring, in Spokane, a boy brought me a desiccated robin, whose
feet were held together by a long thread hopelessly snarled. The boy
had found it hanging to a tree.
I have seen in a bird magazine a photograph of an oriole's nest that
had a string carried around a branch apparently a foot or more away,
and then brought back and the end woven into the nest. It was given as
a sample of a well-guyed nest, the discoverer no doubt looking upon it
as proof of an oriole's forethought in providing against winds and
storms. I have seen an oriole's nest with a string carried around a
leaf, and another with a long looped string hanging free. All such
cases simply show that the bird was not master of her material; she
bungled; the trailing string caught over the leaf or branch, and she
drew both ends in and fastened them regardless of what had happened.
The incident only shows how blindly instinct works.
Twice I have seen cedar-birds, in their quest for nesting-material,
trying to carry away the strings that orioles had attached to
branches. According to our sentimental "School of Nature Study," the
birds should have untied and unsnarled the strings in a human way, but
they did not; they simply tugged at them, bringing their weight to
bear, and tried to fly away with the loose end.
In view of the ignorance of birds with regard to strings, how can we
credit the story told by one of our popular nature writers of a pair
of orioles that deliberately impaled a piece of cloth upon a thorn in
order that it might be held firmly while they pulled out the threads?
When it came loose, they refastened it. The story is incredible for
two reasons: (1) the male oriole does not assist the female in
building the nest; he only furnishes the music; (2) the whole
proceeding implies an amount of reflection and skill in dealing with a
new problem that none of our birds possess. What experience has the
race of orioles had with cloth, that any member of it should know how
to unravel it in that way? The whole idea is absurd.
IV. MIMICRY
To what lengths the protective resemblance theory is pushed by some of
its expounders! Thus, in the neighborhood of Rio Janeiro there are two
species of hawks that closely resemble each other, but one eats only
insects and the other eats birds. Mr. Wallace thinks that the
bird-eater mimics the insect-eater, so as to deceive the birds, which
are not afraid of the latter. But if the two hawks look alike, would
not the birds come to regard them both as bird-eaters, since one of
them does eat birds? Would they not at once identify the harmless one
with their real enemy and thus fear them both alike? If the latter
were newcomers and vastly in the minority, then the ruse might work
for a while. But if there were ten harmless hawks around to one
dangerous one, the former would quickly suffer from the character of
the latter in the estimation of the birds. Birds are instinctively
afraid of all hawk kind.
Wallace thinks it may be an advantage to cuckoos, a rather feeble
class of birds, to resemble the hawks, but this seems to me
far-fetched. True it is, if the sheep could imitate the wolf, its
enemies might keep clear of it. Why, then, has not this resemblance
been brought about? Our cuckoo is a feeble and defenseless bird also,
but it bears no resemblance to the hawk. The same can be said of
scores of other birds.
Many of these close resemblances among different species of animals
are no doubt purely accidental, or the result of the same law of
variation acting under similar conditions. We have a hummingbird moth
that so closely in its form and flight and manner resembles a
hummingbird, that if this resemblance brought it any immunity from
danger it would be set down as a clear case of mimicry. There is such
a moth in England, too, where no hummingbird is found. Why should not
Nature repeat herself in this way? This moth feeds upon the nectar of
flowers like the hummingbird, and why should it not have the
hummingbird's form and manner?
Then there are accidental resemblances in nature, such as the
often-seen resemblance of knots of trees and of vegetables to the
human form, and of a certain fungus to a part of man's anatomy. We
have a fly that resembles a honey-bee. In my bee-hunting days I used
to call it the "mock honey-bee." It would come up the wind on the
scent of my bee box and hum about it precisely like a real bee. Of
course it was here before the honey-bee, and has been evolved quite
independently of it. It feeds upon the pollen and nectar of flowers
like the true bee, and is, therefore, of similar form and color. The
honey-bee has its enemies; the toads and tree-frogs feed upon it, and
the kingbird captures the slow drone.
When an edible butterfly mimics an inedible or noxious one, as is
frequently the case in the tropics, the mimicker is no doubt the
gainer.
It makes a big difference whether the mimicker is seeking to escape
from an enemy, or seeking to deceive its prey. I fail to see how, in
the latter case, any disguise of form or color could be brought about.