[Illustration]
The taxidermist preparing a bird specimen for the museum sometimes has
to deal with one whose plumage is soiled or stained. He may have to
wash it with water. Then, to dry the plumage, fluff it, and help in
arranging the plumage so it will lie smooth and natural, he may use a
powder: corn meal, sawdust, plaster, or plaster and potato starch may
be worked into the feathers, then dusted out again. It is interesting
that birds themselves use and have used long before taxidermists a
similar method of using dust in dressing their feathers, a fact that
anyone who has watched domestic hens for any length of time must be
aware.
A DIRTY BATH Recently I watched a house sparrow dusting by the railway
track in the city of Chicago. The dust may have been in part "clean"
earth, but in part it was soot, city dust, and soft-coal debris. The
sparrows here were dingy, all had their plumage heavily impregnated
with city grime, and looked very different from the sparrows in the
country. And this sparrow I was watching when it had finished dusting
was the worst of the lot. These city sparrows, even when they bathe in
water, seem never to get much of the grime out of their feathers.
This reminded me that Oscar Heinroth once wrote that birds do not bathe
to get themselves clean, but bathe as an aid in bringing their feathers
into order and making them lie smoothly. Perhaps he is right. Certainly
my sparrow did nothing to clean himself.
It is in arid countries, plains and deserts especially, where many of
the birds take only dust baths. In more humid regions water bathing
is the rule. But some birds do both, like our flicker and our house
sparrow, bathing now in water, now in sand.
In northern climates, when the land is held in the grip of winter,
the water frozen over, and the earth covered with snow, neither dust
nor water bathing is possible. Then, it has been recorded, some birds
find a substitute in snow. Among other cases, in Alaska the hawk owl
has been seen to perch in the snow on the tops of telephone poles,
and go through the motions of bathing; in England a rook was recorded
as bathing "in crisp powdery snow as if it were taking a bath in dust
or water"; and in New England in midwinter juncos have been recorded
bathing "in light dry snow, just as other sparrows take dust baths in
hot weather."
The snow evidently is used as a substitute for dust in these northern
latitudes.