THE MOTHER MURRE
I hear the bawling of my neighbor’s cow. Her calf was carried off
yesterday, and since then, during the long night, and all day long,
her insistent woe has made our hillside melancholy. But I shall not
hear her to-night, not from this distance. She will lie down to-night
with the others of the herd, and munch her cud. Yet, when the rattling
stanchions grow quiet and sleep steals along the stalls, she will turn
her ears at every small stirring; she will raise her head to listen
and utter a low, tender _moo_. Her full udder hurts; but her cud is
sweet. She is only a cow.
Had she been a wild cow, or had she been out with her calf in a wild
pasture, the mother-love in her would have lived for six months. Here
in the barn she will be forced to forget her calf in a few hours, and
by morning her mother-love shall utterly have died.
There is a mother-principle alive in all nature that never dies. This
is different from mother-love. The oak tree responds to the
mother-principle, and bears acorns. It is a law of life. The
mother-love or passion, on the other hand, occurs only among the
higher animals. It is very common; and yet, while it is one of the
strongest, most interesting, most beautiful of animal traits, it is at
the same time the most individual and variable of all animal traits.
This particular cow of my neighbor’s that I hear lowing, is an
entirely gentle creature ordinarily, but with a calf at her side she
will pitch at any one who approaches her. And there is no other cow in
the herd that mourns so long after her calf. The mother in her is
stronger, more enduring, than in any of the other nineteen cows in the
barn. My own cow hardly mourns at all when her calf is taken away. She
might be an oak tree losing its acorns, or a crab losing her hatching
eggs, so far as any show of love is concerned.
The female crab attaches her eggs to her swimmerets and carries them
about with her for their protection as the most devoted of mothers;
yet she is no more conscious of them, and feels no more for them, than
the frond of a cinnamon fern feels for its spores. She is a mother,
without the love of the mother.
In the spider, however, just one step up the animal scale from the
crab, you find the mother-love or passion. Crossing a field the other
day, I came upon a large female spider of the hunter family, carrying
a round white sack of eggs, half the size of a cherry, attached to her
spinnerets. Plucking a long stem of grass, I detached the sack of eggs
without bursting it. Instantly the mother turned and sprang at the
grass-stem, fighting and biting until she got to the sack, which she
seized in her strong jaws and made off with as fast as her long, rapid
legs would carry her.
I laid the stem across her back and again took the sack away. She came
on for it, fighting more fiercely than before. Once more she seized
it; once more I forced it from her jaws, while she sprang at the
grass-stem and tried to tear it to pieces. She must have been fighting
for two minutes when, by a regrettable move on my part, one of her
legs was injured. She did not falter in her fight. On she rushed for
the sack as fast as I pulled it away. She would have fought for that
sack, I believe, until she had not one of her eight legs to stand on,
had I been cruel enough to compel her. It did not come to this, for
suddenly the sack burst, and out poured, to my amazement, a myriad of
tiny brown spiderlings. Before I could think what to do that mother
spider had rushed among them and caused them to swarm upon her,
covering her, many deep, even to the outer joints of her long legs. I
did not disturb her again, but stood by and watched her slowly move
off with her encrusting family to a place of safety.
I had seen these spiders try hard to escape with their egg-sacks
before, but had never tested the strength of their purpose. For a time
after this experience I made a point of taking the sacks away from
every spider I found. Most of them scurried off to seek their own
safety; one of them dropped her sack of her own accord; some of them
showed reluctance to leave it; some of them a disposition to fight;
but none of them the fierce, consuming mother-fire of the one with the
hurt leg.
Among the fishes, much higher animal forms than the spiders, we find
the mother-love only in the _males_. It is the male stickleback that
builds the nest, then goes out and _drives_ the female in to lay her
eggs, then straightway drives her out to prevent her eating them, then
puts himself on guard outside the nest to protect them from other
sticklebacks and other enemies, until the young shall hatch and be
able to swim away by themselves. Here he stays for a month, without
eating or sleeping, so far as we know.
It is the male toadfish that crawls into the nest-hole and takes
charge of the numerous family. He may dig the hole, too, as the male
stickleback builds the nest. I do not know as to that. But I have
raised many a stone in the edge of the tide along the shore of Naushon
Island in Buzzard’s Bay, to find the under surface covered with round,
drop-like, amber eggs, and in the shallow cavity beneath, an old male
toadfish, slimy and croaking, and with a countenance ugly enough to
turn a prowling eel to stone. The female deposits the eggs, glues them
fast with much nicety to the under surface of the rock, as a female
might, and finishes her work. Departing at once, she leaves the coming
brood to the care of the male, who from this time, without relief or
even food in all probability, assumes the rôle and all the
responsibilities of mother, and must consequently feel all the
mother-love.
Something like this is true of the common hornpout, or catfish, I
believe, though I have never seen it recorded, and lack the chance at
present of proving my earlier observations. I think it is father
catfish that takes charge of the brood, of the swarm of kitten
catfish, from the time the spawn is laid.
A curious sharing of mother qualities by male and female is shown in
the Surinam toads of South America, where the male, taking the newly
deposited eggs, places them upon the back of the female. Here, glued
fast by their own adhesive jelly, they are soon surrounded by cells
grown of the skin of the back, each cell capped by a lid. In these
cells the eggs hatch, and the young go through their metamorphoses,
apparently absorbing some nourishment through the skin of their
mother. Finally they break through the lids of their cells and hop
away. They might as well be toadstools upon a dead stump, so far as
motherly care or concern goes, for, aside from allowing the male to
spread the eggs upon her back, she is no more a mother to them than
the dead stump is to the toadstools. She is host only to the little
parasites.
I do not know of any mother-love among the reptiles. The
mother-passion, so far as my observation goes, plays no part whatever
in the life of reptiles. Whereas, passing on to the birds, the
mother-passion becomes by all odds the most interesting thing in
bird-life.
And is not the mother-passion among the mammals even more interesting?
It is as if the watcher in the woods went out to see the mother animal
only. It is her going and coming that we follow; her faring, foraging,
and watch-care that let us deepest into the secrets of wild animal
life.
On one of the large estates here in Hingham, a few weeks ago, a fox
was found to be destroying poultry. The time of the raids, and their
boldness, were proof enough that the fox must be a female with young.
Poisoned meat was prepared for her, and at once the raids ceased. A
few days later one of the workmen of the estate came upon the den of a
fox, at the mouth of which lay dead a whole litter of young ones. They
had been poisoned. The mother had not eaten the prepared food herself,
but had carried it home to her family. They must have died in the
burrow, for it was evident from the signs that she had dragged them
into the fresh air to revive them, and deposited them gently on the
sand by the hole. Then in her perplexity she had brought various
tidbits of mouse and bird and rabbit, which she placed at their noses
to tempt them to wake up out of their strange sleep and eat. No one
knows how long she watched beside the lifeless forms, nor what her
emotions were. She must have left the neighborhood soon after,
however, for no one has seen her since about the estate.
The bird mother is the bravest, tenderest, most appealing thing one
ever comes upon in the fields. It is the rare exception, but we
sometimes find the real mother wholly lacking among the birds, as in
the case of our notorious cowbird, who sneaks about, watching her
chance, when some smaller bird is gone, to drop her egg into its nest.
The egg must be laid, the burden of the race has been put upon the
bird, but not the precious burden of the child. She lays eggs; but is
not a mother.
The same is true of the European cuckoos, but not quite true, in spite
of popular belief, of our American cuckoos. For our birds (both
species) build rude, elementary nests as a rule, and brood their eggs.
Occasionally they may use a robin’s or a catbird’s nest, in order to
save labor. So undeveloped is the mother in the cuckoo that if you
touch her eggs she will leave them--abandon her rude nest and eggs as
if any excuse were excuse enough for an escape from the cares of
motherhood. How should a bird with so little mother-love ever learn to
build a firm-walled, safe, and love-lined nest?
The great California condor is a most faithful and anxious mother; the
dumb affection of both parent birds, indeed, for their single
offspring is pathetically human. On the other hand, the mother in the
turkey buzzard is so evenly balanced against the vulture in her that I
have known a brooding bird to be so upset by the sudden approach of a
man as to rise from off her eggs and devour them instantly, greedily,
and make off on her serenely soaring wings into the clouds.
Such mothers, however, are not the rule. The buzzard, the cuckoo, and
the cowbird are the striking exceptions. The flicker will keep on
laying eggs as fast as one takes them from the nest-hole, until she
has no more eggs to lay. The quail will sometimes desert her nest if
even a single egg is so much as touched, but only because she knows
that she has been discovered and must start a new nest, hidden in some
new place, for safety. She is a wise and devoted mother, keeping her
brood with her as a “covey” all winter long.
One of the most striking cases of mother-love which has ever come
under my observation, I saw in the summer of 1912 on the bird
rookeries of the Three-Arch Rocks Reservation off the coast of Oregon.
We were making our slow way toward the top of the outer rock. Through
rookery after rookery of birds we climbed until we reached the edge of
the summit. Scrambling over this edge, we found ourselves in the midst
of a great colony of nesting murres--hundreds of them--covering this
steep rocky part of the top.
As our heads appeared above the rim, many of the colony took wing and
whirred over us out to sea, but most of them sat close, each bird upon
its egg or over its chick, loath to leave, and so expose to us the
hidden treasure.
The top of the rock was somewhat cone-shaped, and in order to reach
the peak and the colonies on the west side we had to make our way
through this rookery of the murres. The first step among them, and
the whole colony was gone, with a rush of wings and feet that sent
several of the top-shaped eggs rolling, and several of the young birds
toppling over the cliff to the pounding waves and ledges far below.
We stopped, but the colony, almost to a bird, had bolted, leaving
scores of eggs and scores of downy young squealing and running
together for shelter, like so many beetles under a lifted board.
But the birds had not every one bolted, for here sat two of the colony
among the broken rocks. These two had not been frightened off. That
both of them were greatly alarmed, any one could see from their open
beaks, their rolling eyes, their tense bodies on tiptoe for flight.
Yet here they sat, their wings out like props, or more like gripping
hands, as if they were trying to hold themselves down to the rocks
against their wild desire to fly.
And so they were, in truth, for under their extended wings I saw
little black feet moving. Those two mother murres were not going to
forsake their babies! No, not even for these approaching monsters,
such as they had never before seen, clambering over their rocks.
What was different about these two? They had their young ones to
protect. Yes, but so had every bird in the great colony its young one,
or its egg, to protect, yet all the others had gone. Did these two
have more mother-love than the others? And hence, more courage, more
intelligence?
We took another step toward them, and one of the two birds sprang into
the air, knocking her baby over and over with the stroke of her wing,
and coming within an inch of hurling it across the rim to be battered
on the ledges below. The other bird raised her wings to follow, then
clapped them back over her baby. Fear is the most contagious thing in
the world; and that flap of fear by the other bird thrilled her, too,
but as she had withstood the stampede of the colony, so she caught
herself again and held on.
She was now alone on the bare top of the rock, with ten thousand
circling birds screaming to her in the air above, and with two men
creeping up to her with a big black camera that clicked ominously. She
let the multitude scream, and with threatening beak watched the two
men come on. A motherless baby, spying her, ran down the rock
squealing for his life. She spread a wing, put her bill behind him
and shoved him quickly in out of sight with her own baby. The man with
the camera saw the act, for I heard his machine click, and I heard him
say something under his breath that you would hardly expect a mere man
and a game-warden to say. But most men have a good deal of the mother
in them; and the old bird had acted with such decision, such courage,
such swift, compelling instinct, that any man, short of the wildest
savage, would have felt his heart quicken at the sight.
“Just how compelling might that mother-instinct be?” I wondered. “Just
how much would that mother-love stand?” I had dropped to my knees, and
on all fours had crept up within about three feet of the bird. She
still had chance for flight. Would she allow me to crawl any nearer?
Slowly, very slowly, I stretched forward on my hands, like a
measuring-worm, until my body lay flat on the rocks, and my fingers
were within three _inches_ of her. But her wings were twitching, a
wild light danced in her eyes, and her head turned toward the sea.
For a whole minute I did not stir. I was watching--and the wings again
began to tighten about the babies, the wild light in the eyes died
down, the long, sharp beak turned once more toward me.
Then slowly, very slowly, I raised my hand, touched her feathers with
the tip of one finger--with two fingers--with my whole hand, while
the loud camera click-clacked, click-clacked hardly four feet away!
It was a thrilling moment. I was not killing anything. I had no
long-range rifle in my hands, coming up against the wind toward an
unsuspecting creature hundreds of yards away. This was no wounded
leopard charging me; no mother-bear defending with her giant might a
captured cub. It was only a mother-bird, the size of a wild duck, with
swift wings at her command, hiding under those wings her own and
another’s young, and her own boundless fear!
For the second time in my life I had taken captive with my bare hands
a free wild bird. No, I had not taken her captive. She had made
herself a captive; she had taken herself in the strong net of her
mother-love.
And now her terror seemed quite gone. At the first touch of my hand I
think she felt the love restraining it, and without fear or fret she
let me reach under her and pull out the babies. But she reached after
them with her bill to tuck them back out of sight, and when I did not
let them go, she sidled toward me, quacking softly, a language that I
perfectly understood, and was quick to respond to. I gave them back,
fuzzy and black and white. She got them under her, stood up over them,
pushed her wings down hard around them, her stout tail down hard
behind them, and together with them pushed in an abandoned egg that
was close at hand. Her own baby, some one else’s baby, and some one
else’s forsaken egg! She could cover no more; she had not feathers
enough. But she had heart enough; and into her mother’s heart she had
already tucked every motherless egg and nestling of the thousands of
frightened birds, screaming and wheeling in the air high over her
head.