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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT:

KUTCHIN

VICTOR

WHAT BIRDS HAVE DONE
WITH ME

BY

VICTOR KUTCHIN, M.D.
A BIRD-LOVER

BOSTON

RICHARD G. BADGER

THE GORHAM PRESS
DP

CopyriGHT, 1922, BY Ricwarp G. I

~All Rights Reserved

Made in the United States of America _

The Gorham Press, Boston, U.S.A.

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— Otia659072

TO
GENE STRATTON-PORTER

A true Nature-lover, whose interest in birds is not
in anatomical specimens, but in creatures very
much alive, wonderful for beauty, song
and wings, that have spiritual uplift in
them for human beings; this little
volume about live birds is
gratefully dedicated.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I
II

Vircin SOIL

Mr. TuRvEYDROP AND eae Tounes
CousINs

MotTHERLESS BABIES . CSE
Tue KEEPER OF THE SPRING-HOUSE
Wincs, WINGs, WINGS .

PIRATES :
An O1p Loc ane Was Bia :
Noruinc So SILLy As A GOOsE

A DitsH oF RoBINS

Mr. CHICKADEE . i

THE SONG AND THE SINGER .

Tue Love ELEMENT IN BirpD PROTEC-
TION

Mr. Esau

STUPIDITY STREET .

Jays AND Crows . Se hae Ae
Birps’ CouRTSHIP AND MAarRrIAGE .
Last YeEar’s Birp’s Nest

A SAINT BARTHOLOMEW OF BIRDS
SomME INvisIBLE DEFENDERS .
GETTING ACQUAINTED

THe UNKNOWN PaTHway .

105
119

132
150
160
175
193
207
221
237
246
261

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WHAT BIRDS HAVE DONE
WITH ME

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What Birds Have Done
With Me

CHAPTER I
VIRGIN SOIL

Alice Cary, in her order for a picture, started
out by asking a painter, ‘“‘Has your hand the cun-
ning to draw shapes of things that you never
saw?’ On the face of it, that request is scarcely
less appalling than the demand in olden times for
the interpretation of a forgotten dream. Later
on, we find that she hoped to make the artist see
the desired picture with her eyes, not his own.
Using words for pigments, she is very successful
in reproducing her memory picture, but what the
painter saw was unfortunately never put upon
canvas to constitute an object lesson of what a
blur and daub a picture must be where the artist
is attempting to paint something that he never
actually saw himself.

The libraries and art galleries of the world are

9

10 What Birds Have Done With Me

lumbered up with spoiled reams of paper and
ruined squares of canvas upon which blind men
have attempted to make those who have eyes see
what they never saw themselves. Shakespeare,
strangely enough, in his closing of “The Tem-
pest,’ assured the audience that the actors are
spirits, the play, a baseless fabric, the whole set-
ting of the stage, an unsubstantial pageant that
would leave not a rack behind.

The old preface was a kind of declaration of
superior wisdom on the part of the author who
found it expedient to call his audience to look
over his shoulder while he explained the profun-
dities of his creation. Nevertheless, explana-
tions often require further explanations, and so
on, like a nest of Chinese boxes that turn out,
finally, to have nothing in the last box. On the
other hand, real things may be safely trusted in
the hands of real people, and the rest do not
count.

To one who sees everything as in a picture,
whose mind is actually photographic, memory cor-
responds to a film that may be developed into per-
manent pictures, or rejected and thrown away like
seed that will not grow. With films developed
into permanent pictures, I shall utterly fail unless
I have the cunning to put them together and make
them something like moving pictures; make you,
in fact, see a real forest with trees that sway in

Virgin Soil II

the wind, whose boles are being attacked by ac-
tual wood-choppers, who make the chips fly and
the giants tremble convulsively and go crashing to
earth with the boom of cannons. ‘This, after in-
numerable repetitions, is followed by the smoking
hell of flames that out-rivals the light of the sun,
and literally burns a great hole in the night. This
precedes the coming of the mighty breaking plow
to turn up the virgin soil. It is drawn by four
yoke of oxen, following after each other—a great
centipede walking with many legs. Alas, like the
virgin soil turned up by the first furrow, the mind
also must be virgin soil in order to have such a
picture stamped indelibly upon it. Only the mind
of a boy, waxed to receive and steeled to retain,
would be likely to catch out-line and minutia,
light and shadow, central figures and back-ground,
newness and age, and, robing all in the royal
purple of a first experience, hang it in a temple
not made with hands; a memory picture of such
immortal youth that, in comparison, the baby
faces of the Sistine fresco would seem dim and
old.

“Here they come, Here they come!’’ shouts
the small boy, “‘Better get out of the way if you
don’t want to get run over;’’ That is not a pistol,
that’s the cracking of a whip! ‘‘Get up, Buck,
Get up, Brin; Get up, Mose; Get up, Pete; Get
up, Tom; Get up, Jerry; Get up, Bob; Get up,

12 What Birds Have Done With Me

Harry;” almost sings the driver. Then the plow
man shouts to him, “‘Why the devil don’t you keep
those leaders in line? Do you think I’m marking
out a circus ring?” Straight to the flag; “There,
that’s better!’ and away they go. The small
boy is in pursuit and will never forget that first
furrow. The soft, cool earth at its bottom seemed
to have a kiss and caress for his bare feet at every
step. Round and round they go, the share of the
great plow, sharp as a knife, cutting off roots
bigger than his leg, just like they were cheese.
But sometimes they are too big, and the driver
goes frantic, and running along the line of strain-
ing oxen, whipping, shouting, and swearing, he
finds it no use, they have to leave that particular
root. Sometimes the chain will get caught on a
stump and the big plow will fairly jump out of
the ground, the plowman dropping the handles
and dodging just like he was afraid of it.

The small boy whoops and shouts himself
hoarse, feeling that he is taking part in the grand-
est game ever played on earth. They plowed
six furrows around the great field by noon, and
then turned the cattle out to graze with the yokes
on, so they would not stray too far. Then they
take off the share of the plow that they call the
lay, and proceed to sharpen it by putting it in a
furious fire until it is red hot; then, holding it
with pinchers on a big piece of iron, called an anvil,

Virgin Soil 13
they pound it, and hammer it till it makes your
ears ring. From where they stand, the small boy
can see all over the field, and for the first time he
notices that the furrows look like the paper bor-
der on his own room at home. The yellow border
around the green field looks quite pretty, and he
wonders if the birds would enjoy it if they never
did any more plowing, but just left it as it was.
He does not believe the black-birds that swarmed
around him as they followed the plow, gobbling
up every living thing would, because they were too
greedy to notice anything but something to eat.
He had been too busy before to give more than a
passing thought to the countless forms of life
brought to light by the plow. He had not sup-
posed that so many things lived under ground.
Why did they do it? He would ask his father
about it, and he must not forget to ask him why
each new furrow lapped over on the edge of the
last one as if it had to be held down.

After dinner, he propounded these questions
and was told that the earth was the real home
of every thing; that all that lived had come forth
from it and would ultimately return and slumber
in its bosom. That with regard to the furrows,
they would doubtless remain where they were if
not held down, because so far they had not run
away, and they probably had been turned over
again and again; perhaps by a plow ten times as

14. What Birds Have Done With Me

big as old man Hill’s, drawn by elephants, or
a little plow made out of a single piece of wood
drawn by a buffalo or a donkey, and driven by a
man practically naked. The small boy looked a
bit puzzled, but said, “Yes, thank you, sir,” and
started to run to catch up with old man Hill, the
plow man, and Pete, the oxen driver. The lat-
ter now had a new cracker on his whip. Asa
matter of fact, the urchin had not understood a
word that his father had said to him, but he was —
conscious of a vague, troubled feeling, and when
the plow started again, he began to scrutinize the
living things turned up, to see if among them all,
there were any who would make good play-fel-
lows if he had to come and live in the ground with
them.

If there is such a thing as the fascination of re-
pulsion, it would go far to explain the small boy’s
increasing interest in the creatures from the under-
world, sent scurrying for safety in all directions,
or left helpless in the bottom of the furrow by
what may have seemed to them something a bit
like what an earthquake is to us. Ralph Waldo
Emerson emphasizes the fact, that ‘‘we see what
we look for,” and each thing that he had noticed
in the fore-noon was multiplied by ten in the
afternoon. Ants, worms, grubs, beetles, swarmed
—and one had a thousand legs, as sure as you are
alive. He found only two things that under any

Virgin Soil 15

possible circumstances could have been nice neigh-
bors,—a big white thing that dirt could not make
dirty, appealed to him on account of its utter
helplessness,—and a beetle colored like the rain-
bow, from which it must have fallen.

The king of the purple grackles had clearly sent
out into the high-ways and hedges, and bidden
all his kith and kin and subjects of every kind, to
a great supper that was waiting, and was little
short of royal in its abundance. They were all
there, and simply took possession of the earth
and the fullness thereof,—dignified, and almost
stately, but not too much so to make the most of
their opportunities. It is in the nature of feasts
to make outside folks especially conscious of hun-
ger, and so the robin and the blue-jay came for
their share; and after them, slipping from cover
into the furrow, and gone like a sunbeam, was a
shy brown bird that played the part of Ruth
among the corn.

It was a thoroughly tired urchin that dragged
leaden feet upstairs to bed that night, and found
the dream-land ship with sails unfurled awaiting
him. It “geed” and “thawed” a time or two and
he never knew when it passed the harbor bar and
glided away into the great ocean of forgetful-
ness.

The dawn wind had scarcely commenced to toy
with the freshness of the June morning, a fresh-

16 What Birds Have Done With Me

ness augmented by great drops of dew that at
sun-rise would, for a moment, reflect the sun and
die in a blaze of glory. Before dawn, the small
boy was up and dressing on his way down stairs
to be on hand to help Pete Jackson retrieve the
oxen from the fastnesses of the great swamp, that
lay to the northwest. It was quite certain that
they would go in that direction for water, and the .
lush grass abounding there would meet the re-
quirements of hunger, and weariness would cir-
cumscribe their straying to narrow bounds. With
a rain of dew shaken by the wind from every bush
and tree, and rank marsh grass dripping with
water, our sturdy urchin was soon wet to the
skin,—literally didn’t have a dry thread on him.
But he counted this all joy, and waded shallow
pools, floundered through deep mire, and would
have whooped and shouted with delight, had he
not been afraid of frightening his friends, the
birds. In countless numbers, to the right and left
of them, in front and behind them, strange calls
and rival songs kept him alert to the teeming life
of the wilderness. Anxious to see and hear them
all, he was very, very far from realizing that it
would take a life-time to come to know the life
history of a few of them, well.

Bringing the cattle out of the swamp on the
edge of the highlands, his real education in bird
lore commenced in earnest. An unusually stupid

Virgin Soil 17

brute of an ox that Pete was clubbing along, in-
stead of going around a brush pile on the edge of
an old logging road, blundered through it, send-
ing a mother quail and her callow brood into the
road at their feet. The mother gave one note of
warning and the baby quail neither ran nor flew,
but simply vanished before their very eyes. The
small boy was sure that the ox had stepped on the
mother, as she was turning somersaults rather
than running, so he started after her like a flash,
and in a minute had her in his hands. Pete, con-
vulsed with laughter, came to meet him and ex-
amining the bird found she had lost the first joint
of every toe,—they probably having been frozen
off. What had tickled him so much was to see
the fool thing trying to get them to chase her,
when she was so “‘gol-fired” lame that their slow-
est ox could out-run her. He then, in reply to the
small boy’s question, “Why did she want us to
chase her?” explained the world-old maneuver of
certain mother birds to attract human creatures
away from their nests, and furthermore puzzled
the small boy by the statement that a quail, if
she wanted to, could order her chicks to turn into
dead leaves,—and they did it, too. While the
explanations had taken place, the lad, holding
the mother bird in both hands, had been cudgel-
ling his brain for a name for her. When it came,
it came like a flash—‘‘Good Mrs. Stumpy” ;—

18 What Birds Have Done With Me

and he whispered it softly to himself as he almost
reverentially put her on the ground, and saw her
vanish into the under-growth.

Next morning when they went after the cat-
tle, and for many succeeding mornings, little hands
scattered wheat along the logging road, for a
wild bird that had both a local habitation and a
name.

Before the end of the week, in which the Lord
sent him the quail, and he tasted of the tree of
knowledge at almost the same instant,—isn’t that
a fine mixture?—he did something that goes to
prove that a little knowledge may be a very dan-
gerous thing. The breakers were now on the last
five acres. His interest had not flagged and he
was still in pursuit of the plow and the oxen. The
grackles had come to regard him as part of the
out-fit, and Pete and old Hill proved themselves
to be fine play-fellows. When a thing happened
that came very near sending a foolish little boy
to dwell with those things that live under ground,
where his father had told him everything would
finally return. That he escaped being trampled to
death in the virgin soil in which he had so de-
lighted, by the very oxen he had driven and petted,
both Pete and old Hill agreed was nothing short
of a God’s miracle. Swinging around on the
northeast corner where there was a little sand
knoll, right under the feet of ‘“‘Bob” and “Harry,”

Virgin Soil 19

who were half broken, flighty steers, a gray bird,
a whip-poor-will, started, more gracefully to be
sure, to enact the réle of ‘Good Mrs. Stumpy.”
One glance at her, and keeping his eyes on the spot
where she started her gyrations, the small boy
dashed under the feet of the cattle, to save the
nestlings that were surely going to be trampled to
death. Doubtless only catching a glimpse of him,
and possibly regarding him, when on all-fours, as
some new kind of wild animal, the steers began to
kick and plunge in the utmost terror, and crowd-
ing the leaders out of the furrow, the two head
yokes swung around toward the plow, and what
had been a quiet, orderly breaking team became an
excited and unmanageable bunch of wild cattle;
“beginning to mill” with a small boy out of sight
and in the center of them. According to their
stories, both Pete and old Hill were the rescuers,
but whoever did it, pulled out between trampling
feet, a very dirty and tousled youngster, holding
a bird in each hand, and wonder of wonders, with
the exception of some slight bruises, not hurt at
all. He had given fear no place in his mind,
entirely taken up with the thought of rescuing
the helpless, and after all the scolding and the
final order to keep away from the breaking, not
then nor ever afterward, could he feel, or would
he admit, the slightest regret for what he had
done.

20 What Birds Have Done With Me

Only once did he disobey his father’s order to
keep away from the breaking. At an early hour
the next morning, he hurried out to the field to see
for himself if the mother bird had found the
young at the foot of a near-by stump where he
placed them. Joy of joys, there she was, brood-
ing them just as though nothing had happened.
For several days, the lad went about as if he had
something on his mind, and one evening after
bidding his mother good-night, he returned, and
lifting a puzzled face to hers, asked, ‘‘Mamma,
does a fellow have to be a mother before he can
understand how Mrs. Stumpy and Mrs. Whip-
poor-will feel, when they ask folks to come and
kill ’em if they will just leave their babies alone ?”’
She had at first smiled, but only for an instant,
then she gathered him into her arms with un-
wonted tenderness, and said tremulously, ‘I guess
not, my boy, my little boy!”

CHAPTER II
MR. TURVEYDROP AND HIS FOREIGN COUSINS

That beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is
a half truth, and is a part of a universal law that
makes a mental condition, the measure of external
influences upon us. Every artist knows that fifty
per cent of the effect of a picture is in what may
be termed background. A painting of Liberty
enlightening the world, whose background is a
city market, must of necessity be a failure for the
subject demands, as background, the ocean and
the sky.

Now, it is equally true that we will fail to
understand the influence of a flock of birds upon
the mind of the boy, unless we retrace his steps
far enough to acquaint ourselves with the cir-
cumstances in which the secret of his mental con-
dition lay hidden, when he first beheld them. Be-
tween the age of four and five, he lived for one
year in the country, then three years in the city,
hating it all and longing to get back home—back
to nature.

Then the return. No angel with a flaming
21

22 What Birds Have Done With Me

sword at the gate, and the gate wide open for
any one to enter in and take possession. For four
weeks he believed himself in the Garden of Eden,
and as a mother hen will try to stretch her wings
to cover every thing in sight, so the wings of
his love yearned to gather every living thing be-
neath them. Joy, joy, joy beneath the tender light
of a new heaven, and on the warm palpitating
breast of a new earth,—and then came death and
all his woes. Is the object of life, to teach by ex-
perience? Perhaps, for certain it is that we never
half know a thing till we have thus learned it.
Many a funeral he had seen in the city, and once,
visiting a boy who lived near a cemetery, they,
with a few neighboring boys, had spent half a day
playing I Spy and hiding behind tombstones,
but death never really came home to him till he
looked upon the stark and stiff bodies of some
little pigs that had actually died in his own Eden.
Between the house and the barn, early one morn-
ing, he had met his father, who paused long
enough to say, ‘““Black Sue has eight babies. Have
you seen them?”’

He might have said more, but the boy did not
give him a chance. He was off for the sty, like a
race horse, and in a moment came staggering back,
dumb with horror. He had almost run over them,
for they lay outside the sty all in a row—no cuter
or more innocent babies under heaven, and all

Mr. Turveydrop and His Foreign Cousins 23

quite dead. ‘‘No siree,’’ he wouldn’t cry. They
would think him a fool if he cried over dead pigs,
and never understand that it wasn’t over the pigs,
but was because he had just learned that it was
possible for things to die in Eden. He and Sid
took them over to the sand hill and buried them
in eight separate graves; but toward night, when
the boy thought about it, it seemed cruel to have
separated them in death, so he got Sid, and they
went back and dug a single grave—it was easy
digging—and, lining it well with dead leaves, they
snuggled them up together and covered them well
with leaves, then the dirt; which was all a fellow
could do.

Three days after this, he returned with his
mother from a visit to the hated city, to find that
his yearling heifer, Rosie, Cherry’s calf, was dead, ©
and his brother and the hired man had just skinned
her, and were about to bury her on the sand hill
where he and Sid had buried the little pigs. He
ran to the barn—he had scarcely believed it could
be true, but perhaps it was—but when he got
there, he could not recognize the ghastly thing
that lay there, with a chain around its neck, whose
‘glassy eyes had in them no look of recognition.
He followed the team that dragged the body be-
side the hole in the ground, into which they rolled
it, in a hurry, jumping on the feet to bend them
down so they would not stick out of the dirt when

24. What Birds Have Done With Me

the hole was filled up; all the time laughing and
talking about a dance that had taken place the
night before. He declined to ride one of the
horses, so they each mounted one and rode away,
and left him. If he could have cried it would have
been a lot better. He had had to battle with him-
self not to cry over the little pigs, but this loss
left him dry-eyed and staring. There really had
been a witchery about Rosie, in life, that possibly
went a very little way to strengthen the old classic
myth that Dido was actually turned into such a
Heifer. Over all his domestic pets, she had
reigned supreme. He did not refuse his dinner,
but refused to wash his hands and face. "Way
back in his subconsciousness was a vague feeling
that for him to be too clean, when she was smoth-
ered with dirt, would be a kind of disloyalty.
Then, for a few days, loyalty to her made him
welcome every dirty job about the place, and sin-
cere grief had the effect of transforming a natu-
rally cleanly little fellow, into a very dirty and
unkempt one. Ina nut-shell, here is what he had
in his mind; he had learned in Sunday school that
man was made out of the dust of the earth—it
must have been mud or it would not have stuck
together—in death, we go back into the dirt;
what’s the use to keep clean?

This represents his condition of both mind and
body, on that May morning when he saw his first

Mr. Turveydrop and His Foreign Cousins 25

flock of cedar Waxwings, among the blossoms of
the wild crab apple trees, along the drive. They
were a revelation of beauty and a rebuke to the
unwashed and unkempt of the human family. In
a wide sense, they were of the earth, but not of
the dirt. He could not describe, he could only
feel. Later on, he might have said, ‘Architecture
has been called ‘frozen poetry,’ and my first
glimpse of them made me dimly understand that
I was looking upon incarnate poetry—They were
the living, breathing spirit of harmony that is
back of all musical expression.” That they were
feeding upon blossoms gave him a feeling that
they were scarcely of the earth, surely not earthy
of the earth. Other birds were covered with
feathers; these were robed, uniformed, appareled
by a master hand. Compared to them, many
other birds were frumps, and even a gorgeous
red and green parrot, little more than an Irish
woman out for a holiday. So far as clothes went
with them, every day was Sunday, for they wore
their best three hundred and sixty-five days in the
year, and like the smile of Optimism, they were as’
near perpetual as anything can be in a world of
change. Being convinced that they were going to
remain, he did not, but made a sneak for the
kitchen and scrubbed his hands and face, combed
his hair, brushed his clothes, got a straw hat that
did not have a hole in the crown, and having done

26 ° What Birds Have Done With Me

his best to make himself fit for polite society, he
went back.

Years afterward, on a drowsy Sabbath day, he
found himself listening to a frowsy little parson
droning over a sermon from the text, “Keep your-
selves unspotted from the world,” and sweeping
the window from the central blue of illimitable
space, came the same old crab apple tree, where
he had seen them first, and the identical flock of
Waxwings, and he smiled to himself as he thought,
‘‘Any one of you smug fellows could give this poor
little human, spades and trumps, and beat him in
a sermon on this text, for at least you would look
the part.’ One of the first reader lessons in life
they were created to teach, they had thus neatly
delivered to the boy, and he had made a personal
application thereof, with soap and brush, and
was now back for a second reader lesson. He did
not have long to wait. The second reader class,
and he was it, was ordered to take up the study
of certain wax figures, representing deportment.

That a certain thing has been done in a certain
way, time out of mind, is no reason that it should
be continued; neither is there any sense in not
trying a thing, simply because it never has been
done. In the antiquated, rutty schools, in which
humanity in its youth is guarded from learning
any thing about the wonder world in which it has
its being, it is customary for one individual to

Mr. Turveydrop and His Foreign Cousins 27

teach a class, but with the Wax-wings, to whom
owls might go to school to their considerable
profit, this is all reversed, and the class teaches
the individual. Lady Clara, we have guessed your
secret; we know where you got that repose that
stamps the cast of Vere de Vere. To the Four
Hundred of New York, we send this challenge: in
a contest on Deportment, we will wager a hundred
to one, and enter four Wax-wings against your en-
tire bunch, and if you are not beaten, in addition
to the loss of our wager, we will throw Turvey-
drop e¢ al. into bankruptcy. We are not afraid of
being beaten, for with the Wax-wings, deportment
is a fashion and a passion; and if you must know
it, a trust that can never be dissolved, by any
court lower than the Supreme Court of the Uni-
verse. Long years afterward, when the boy had
grown to manhood, and had married and had a
boy of his own, during an Easter vacation, he
took him down to Mill’s swamp in a search for
early spring Migrants, and the first birds to be
encountered were a flock of twenty-one Wax-
wings, who are winter residents with us. They
were, as always, on dress parade, and quite as
bright and shining as the sun. Don’t think me
sacrilegious if I say that it was Communion Sab-
bath with them, for I don’t mean it in either a
religious or an irreligious way when I call atten-
tion to one of the most curious customs in the

28 What Birds Have Done With Me
bird kingdom. The bird at the head of the line

will pass a worm to his next neighbor, and he to
his neighbor, till it has made the rounds of every
bird in the flock, and has been returned to the one
whose find it was, who proceeds to partake of it
in a slow and sedate and decorous fashion, calcu-
lated to delight the heart of Dr. Fletcher. On
higher ground, not twenty feet from the gaunt
elm on which they were perched, the man and boy
were having something like an interview with the
birds, and the man was curious as to the effect of
it on the mind of the boy. He did not have long
to wait; in the flippant style of the average col-
lege youth came the comment. “Dad, don’t you
think these birds awfully stuck on themselves?”
“Perhaps,” came the rejoinder, ‘“‘but in an age
when misrule is the rule, rather than the excep-
tion, and Flippancy with his cap and bells marches
through the land, past the seats of the mighty
and up to the very throne of God, it’s high time
for us to learn a needful lesson of a bird that
can always be trusted to do things decently and
in order.”” There was a merry twinkle in the
young fellow’s eyes as he put his arm almost
caressingly on his father’s shoulder, and said, “‘I
wanted to get a rise out of you, and that was the
reason I threw the bait.”’

The Bohemian Wax-wing, a first cousin to the
Cedar Wax-wing, is a cosmopolitan fellow, and his

Se ee =

Mr. Turveydrop and His Foreign Cousins 29

visits are few and far between, but unlike angels’
visits, they were formerly thought to presage war,
pestilence, and famine—though, of course, it goes
without the saying that in reality they had no
more connection with the coming of such public
calamities than the striking of your grandfath-
er’s clock. Mysterious and unusual things in the
minds of people who haven’t a thimble full of
sense, always spell evil or devil. In later times,
the Bohemian Wax-wing has been called the
Seven-year Bird, but his ways are too erratic to
be held down to human observation. |
Not so long ago one of these birds of mystery
gave up his life at the hands of a tender hearted
old man, whose eyes grow dimmer, day by day;
and in spite of the fact that it was an accident,
the ghost of the dead bird is likely to follow him
to the very end of life’s journey. Every body
knows what a pest the English sparrow is, and
it had grown quite unbearable to the man. It
could not be kept out of his Martins’ house, it
ate the food he provided for his winter birds, and
fairly swarmed about an old cedar hedge not
four rods from his office window. One day, quite
forgetting all the lessons on deportment taught
him by the Cedar Wax-wing, he lost his temper,
and taking a gun, that he had not fired for years,
he stepped to the door and fired into the hedge
alive with English sparrows. Only one bird fell,

30 What Birds Have Done With Me

and when he picked it up,—Oh, cruel spite !—it
was a Bohemian Wax-wing: he, the last of all men
on earth had reduced this rare and beautiful thing
to supper for a cat, or a bit of carrion, the day
after. That was unbearable, and without the least
knowledge of what final disposition he was to
make of it, he sent the body to a neighboring town
to a taxidermist to be mounted. What a queer no-
tion it is, that to some extent is in us all, that
penance of one kind or another will help us to
right a wrong, or correct a mistake. Acting as
an attorney for all birds, he gave an earnest ap-
peal to a large audience of school children to
spare the birds, and not till on his way to the
station and in front of the shop of the taxidermist,
did he remember that it was here where he had
sent the Wax-wing to be stuffed. He only had
a moment, and acting on impulse he ran in, paid
for the work, took out his card across which was
printed in heavy type, ‘‘A friend of the Birds,”
and above his name wrote, “Killed by the donor
January 13, 1913,” and ordered it sent up to the
School Collection of stuffed birds. Even after
he had thought it over, he said to himself, ‘“‘Yes,
I richly deserve to have Mr. Turvey-drop’s for-
eign cousin announce to all those children that I
am a hypocrite,” but after sleeping on it, he whis-
pered to himself, on waking, “Being a Bohemian
Wax-wing, perhaps he will make the announce-
ment in French or German, and not in English.”’

CHAPTER III
MOTHERLESS BABIES

Adolph Buzze was a Canadian wood-chopper,
the only one left of a gang of his country-men
who had helped denude the township, where the
small boy lived, of the primeval forest; all the
rest had drifted north and westward on the skir-
mish line of advancing settlement. To the small
boy, Adolph became a guide, philosopher, and
friend, and to him, he owed all his boyish knowl-
edge of wood-craft. Born in the woods, always
living in the woods, with eyes of wonder for every
thing passing about him, his knowledge of wood-
folks and wood-land ways was remarkable; now
add to this, wonderful gaity, cheerfulness and
perpetual laughter, and you have a personality
calculated to take captive the heart of a child.
His. limited knowledge of English, added to,
rather than detracted from, the charm of his con-
versation. Here are a few examples. Pointing
to the criss-crossing of all manner of wild animal
tracks in the snow, he would say at the end of a
ripple and laughter:

31

32 What Birds Have Done With Me

“Now, watch ze me read primer book in right
tune,’ and he would unravel the tangle. Again,
pointing to where a fox had made a long leap;
“He say Adolph go buy more long leg.” A duck’s
track would call forth this, or something like it;
“When I try fly, fool like duck walk.”

What he did not know about every living thing
in the wilderness, the small boy did not think
worth knowing. He was always eager to initiate
his pupil into new mysteries,—even to the eat-
ing of a rye-bread sandwich, with frozen ants
between the slices;—followed with shouts of
laughter that woke the echoes, when he got a
glimpse of the small boy’s face, after swallowing
the first mouthful. How can I convey. any ade-
quate idea of the perpetual delight of Adolph’s
cabin, dug into a sharp southern slope, with only
two logs and the slope of its roof to mock at the
north wind that went howling by in impotent
rage? Lying on a bear skin, of a winter night,
before the pulsating red glory of blazing logs,
listening to Adolph’s fiddle that told its own story
of life in the woods, from the earliest chirp of
half-awakened birds to the raucous screech of a
catamount; music so wonderful that it fairly sent
a thrill of swaying motion up among the skins of
animals hanging near the rooftree of the unceiled
room. To this, add marvelous jig dancing, French
songs without number, and stories without end,

Motherless Babies 33

about the old smooth bore rifle with which his
grandfather had killed a whole tribe of Indians,
single-handed, up in Canada,—not to mention a
thousand elk, a thousand bear, a thousand caribou
and buffalo, lynx, and wolves, more numerous
than the stars in the sky. Swans, geese, ducks,
partridges, pigeons, squirrels, and rabbits, he him-
self had gathered in, in numbers beyond the drops
of water in the ocean. Wonder of wonders, it
was with this almost sacred gun that Adolph
taught him to shoot. The instruction was very
excellent, ‘“Hold ze gun down, bring ze gun up,
shoot ze quick.” The world nearly went topsy-
turvy when one day, meeting the little French-
man with a load of wood, beneath which his old
wagon had gone to pieces like the ‘wonderful
shay,” he said to him,

“Ze tell father, I trade ze rifle for ze green
wagon. I even trade quick.”’

He never knew what he said in reply, but study-
ing a Sunday school lesson that night, that hap-
pened to be about Jacob and Esau, he had a clear
vision of what Adolph had offered to do; trade
his birthright for a mess of pottage. When
Adolph had made the proposition, he had thought
him mad, and had not even mentioned it to his
father, and he could scarcely believe his ears at
dawn the next day, when he heard Adolph’s voice
in the yard, talking trade with his father.

34 What Birds Have Done With Me

He heard him say, ‘‘Ze boy shoot ze gun good;
good gun make ze good man. No draw chip with
ze gun, trade, draw ze chip with ze wagon.”

The small boy let no grass grow under his feet
getting down stairs, but before he got there, the
trade had been made. Adolph had traded his
birth-right for the miserable, worn-out, old demo-
crat wagon. Shrieking after Adolph that he could
shoot it whenever he wanted to, when his father
handed him the gun, he hugged it to his breast
and made for his room—literally with a heart too
full for utterance. Driving a couple of nails in
the wall at the foot of his bed, he hung the gun
where he could see it the last thing at night and
the first thing in the morning, and it strangely sup-
plemented the influence of ‘“‘Anderson’s Travels
in Africa.” Like a witch on a broom-stick, the
small boy rode that gun through the darkest cor-
ners of the Dark Continent, and became a killer
compared to whom Samson with his ass’s jaw-
bone was superseded. In his dreams, he shot up
the world and all things therein, and like Alex-
ander, wept that there were no more worlds to
shoot up. The dawn’s first flush and the last red
banner in the evening sky, stood as marking the
place where rivers of blood flowed. It was a lucky
thing that the owner of the ‘‘Green Book,” “An-
derson’s Travels in Africa,” did not come to claim
it, especially had he not been willing to take a

Motherless Babies 35

small boy as well as the book, for he could scarcely
have separated them. There must be some scien-
tific, some psychological explanation of the effect
of this old gun and the bloody account of killing
big game in Africa, upon the mind of a naturally
tender-hearted little chap. Without at all claim-
ing to be a “Daniel come to judgment,” here is a
possible explanation. In every human heart is a
desire for conquest, dominion; the gun gives us
dominion over savage nature,—the power of life
and death—the very attribute of kings. Add to
this, the joy of the chase, a reversion to a savage
ancestor and the universal lust to kill becomes less
mysterious. There being no elephants, or lions
within range, he had to content himself with the
smaller things that the forests of his own coun-
try afforded, insignificant though they were. The
first time he shot the head off a red-winged black-
bird, flaunting on a cat-tail, a hundred yards away,
cutting it away with a bullet, he seemed to grow
a foot; eleven gophers with ten bullets, put him in
the ranks with “Simon Kenton,” that grand In-
dian fighter who never missed. The shooting of
Abe Brulley’s sheep-killing dog, at twenty rods,
taken red-handed, so to speak, and he had con-
quered the earth and must now turn his attention
to the sky for worlds to be subdued. Once more,
he turned to Adolph for help.

‘Want learn shoot on wing? Easy ’nuf. Hold

36 What Birds Have Done With Me

gun under, bring gun up, shoot ze quick. Thou-
san’ misses tell how fast each bird go quick. Easy
Dil, 7

So far, the old smooth bore had been used as
a rifle only, not with fixed ammunition, thank you,
but powder from a flask, a piece of muslin for a
patch, and bullets run from spoons that his sisters
someway lost in setting the table. A half day’s

work for Culver, hoeing corn, and he had am-

munition for wing-shooting that ought to last
a week.

Two of their colts had wandered away and
were with a band of neighbors’ colts down at
Hamilton’s Point. The thought of the way they
might be suffering touched a tender spot in the
small boy’s gizzard, and he was almost tearful
as he begged his father to allow him to go and
salt them. He likely would have wept had his
father not given his consent, for if the truth must
be known, he could not wait another day to try
wing-shooting. The gun was already hidden in
a fence corner out near the little woods, for his
father had clearly repented of his trade with
Adolph, and had shown himself strongly antago-
nistic to his son’s evident ambition to become a
mighty hunter. On one point, he was inflexible,
no wild things must be killed in the breeding sea-
son, hence the gun in the fence-corner. Indeed,
there are few things as rare as a day in June,

a

Motherless Babies a0

and never had a brighter one dawned, to make
glad the earth. If the small boy hadn’t had the
gun, perhaps he wouldn’t have felt so much like
flying, but if it were the cause of that wild ex-
uberance, it held it in check by its own weight,
that pretty effectually kept his feet on the earth.
Only one more field to cross, and he would be
out on the Point, over which ducks flew between
the Lake and inlet, and he would have a try at
them, and get them, too, and people would say
of him as they said of Simon Kenton, ‘Our hunter
never misses.’ No, that was almost too much
to hope,—that he could ever really gain such
deathless fame. There had been a law-suit over
this land, and the previous year it had not been
cultivated at all, but had grown up to weeds,
higher than his head. Suddenly, a great bird
got up almost at his feet. It seems as though
the little Frenchman is at his elbow telling him
what to do, and he does it like a flash, and down
comes the dead thing—not four yards away. Yes,
it was like Kenton, he, too, was destined to have
that glorious reputation, “Our hunter never
missed.” But what are these gray shadows at
his feet, living things turning into dead leaves, as
Pete Jackson had told him Baby Quail could. All
this he sees out of the tail of his eye, as he rushes
to gather up his prize. A Prairie Chicken —
not bad for a first wing-shot, brother Kenton ?—

38 What Birds Have Done With Me

but, as he turns it over, its bare breast throws a
flood of light on the living things turning into
dead leaves, at a note of warning from the mother
bird that he has killed. Instantly, he is in a panic,
a revulsion of feeling sweeps over him that will
break his heart unless he can do something to
stay its fury. Away goes the gun, and the salt
out of the pail, and he is down on his knees
searching everywhere for the motherless chicks.
They elude him, like the phantom shadows we
pursue in unhappy dreams. His thought had
been to capture them all, and put them in the salt
pail and carry them home to be mothered by a
hen; for he knew that old Spot, who wanted to
mother the kitten when the hawks carried away
her own chicks, would take them all. He went
over the ground again and again, and when search
had to be abandoned as hopeless, he had one chick
that he had stepped on with his bare foot and
crushed its life out. When he dropped the dead
mother to pursue the young, she had fallen on
her back with her pitiful naked breast still oozing
blood, calling to the God of all mercies, the small
boy thought, for vengeance. Putting the dead
baby bird upon the pulseless bosom of its mother,
he cast himself down beside both,—a forlorn
little Cain, who could find no place of repentance
though he sought it with tears. A couple of
lines that Kipling wrote long afterward, came

Motherless Babies 39

nearer than anything else ever written to voicing
the speechless agony of his soul.

“Till I lay with naught to hide me,
"Neath the Scorn of All Things Made.”

It must have been to save him from this sense
of blood guiltiness that his father had forbidden
all shooting in the breeding season. To do what
he had done was a crime that the good deeds of
a life-time would scarcely over balance or ex-
piate. A sense of the meanness and shame of
it grew as he buried the mother and the crushed
chick in the same little grave, dug by his naked
hands—hands that seemed anxious to cover up
the stain of blood with the stain of earth. He
- never looked up the colts; making that the object
of the expedition had been a lie, and this is what
it had brought him,—a lasting stain on his very
soul. It was not the gun’s fault, he thought, as
he shouldered it and started the longest way
around to reach home, trudging dully along, feel-
ing that its dead weight was a kind of an expia-
tion. It was long after dark when he reached
home, and hiding the gun in the granary, he crept
supperless up to bed. He undressed by fierce
flashes of lightning that kept nearly a continuous
blaze in the room, and they proved the precursor
of wind, rain, and hail that swept the earth and
also the shuddering soul of the small boy that

40 What Birds Have Done With Me

was out-in all the tempest struggling in vain, to
shield from the merciless fury of the elements,
the helpless things whose mother he had ruth-
lessly slain. Rain and years wash out many
things, but the June day that went down in black-
ness, and the night of storm following, left an
ineffaceable sense of shame and regret that would
only pass with the mouldering back to dust of the
brain upon which it was stamped.

When the very next day his two doves, leaving
a pair of young birds at home, flew down to the
village and were seen picking up grain around
the mill, and were promptly shot by Dr. Coffee,
the small boy felt that his crime was not to pass
unnoticed. Had he been aware of the fact com-
mented on by Shakespeare so many years ago,
when he wrote of sucking doves, he need not have
felt so bad when his squabs both died for want
of the predigested food they get from their par-
ents. About the only fun that the small boy had
at this time was the joy of hating Dr. Coffee, and
there is a good bit of evidence, of a circumstan-
tial character, that would indicate that he never
fully forgave him for killing his doves in the
breeding season. ‘To be sure, he had shot the
Prairie Chicken, but he didn’t know any better
and there was no excuse of that kind to mitigate
the crime of Dr. Coffee, and he would get his
punishment either in this world or the next. For

Motherless Babies | 41

many years, he had a secret hope that every
crowd started by an evangelist for the everlasting
burning, was headed by this enormously fat Doc-
tor, who would have burned grandly; and when
the small boy not only a man himself, but one
growing old, encountered old Dr. Coffee, deafer
than an adder, and boarding at a hotel, because
he was too ugly to live with his children, and
actually feeing the night-clerk, every night, to pull
him out of bed in case of a fire alarm that he
would never hear, he not only was not sorry but
he grinned from ear to ear, still remembering
the doves.

CHAPTER IV
THE KEEPER OF THE SPRING-HOUSE

Directly in front of a new summer hotel on
a hill, and across a public road on the margin of
the lake, was a cheap and impromptu spring
house.

It had a gabled roof, was about six by eight
in size, and was closed in with lattice work, with
the exception of a place for a door on the road
side. The simple affair was scarcely finished,
when the roof was taken possession of by a Belted
Kingfisher, who became known somewhat widely
as ‘“The Keeper of the Spring-house,”’ the name
probably growing out of the fact that he was
rarely caught off duty, from early spring till late
in the fall. In a figurative way, it might be said
of him that he both opened and closed the season;
arriving ahead of the south wind and the first
shy violets, rollicking through the summer and
painted October, and saying a reluctant farewell
when the north wind chased a cloud of reluctant
snow flakes into the black and sullen waters of
the lake.

42

The Keeper of the Spring-House 43

He took possession without so much as, by
your leave, taking the liberty of an old friend,—
for he and the man had known each other all
their lives and what could be more natural, now
that the man had a big house of his own, than
his building a cheap summer affair for a long-
time friend? Anyway the man never questioned
his ownership, and how the Kingfisher hated the
small boy who did. If he had any system of
Theology, he must have classified all boys as the
devil’s imps from the bottomless pit. They in-
vaded twice a day, before nine in the morning
and shortly after four in the afternoon, his house,
and actually attacked the keeper—assaulting him
with volleys of stones. He shrieked his hatred
and impotent rage at them and retreated, routed
by an army of devils; but if they had all been of
his size, he would have watched his chance and
captured them, one by one, and tearing them limb
from limb, fed them to his own nestlings.

He did not hate the man, and indeed he had no
reason to, for neither he nor any of his family
had ever received anything but kindness at his
hands. To be sure, there was a time, when he
had been a boy, and came very near acting like
all boys; but in a way he had never been young,—
if thoughtlessness is the universal badge of youth
—for even his boyish pranks had been seasoned
with a consideration for thé rights of living

44 What Birds Have Done With Me

things, that is not always, alas, characteristic of
mature age. Every Kingfisher on the Lake
knows to this day, how he and his brother had
worked for nearly a whole day to dig out a
grand-father and grand-mother Kingfishers’ nest
in the high bank near “Gray Rock,” and then and
there repented of their evil deeds, and spent a
half day longer to repair the injury they had done.
There is an old and truly scientific saying, that all
life comes from an egg, and perhaps it is a sub-
conscious curiosity, that in some way never leaves
us, about the origin of life, that makes a natural
nest robber of every child. Though only eight
and ten years old, they were wiser than the an-
cients, if there be truth to the story that they
called the Kingfisher a Halcyon, and thought it
made its nest on the water in stormless periods,
from which the term ‘‘Halcyon days” has come
down to us. How these urchins would have
laughed at, and exulted over, those old worthies
if they had known of the myth. To think that
they could never find a single nest when the boys
knew of three or four—what boobies they must
have been—it is likely that we fail to give an idea
of the scorn they would have felt and expressed
picturesquely.

My, but the sun was red hot, and had his eye
directly upon them, when they settled down at
the lure of a possible white egg, whose existence

The Keeper of the Spring-House 45

so far was hearsay, to dig their way back in a
gravelly soil, with a worn-out fire shovel, till the
treasure should be revealed, a reward of both
merit and labor, a veritable prize, for barring the
eggs of the oriole; no others were so hard to get.
Their education had not proceeded far enough
so they could get the stimulus of knowing that
they were digging like ‘badgers’ —the animal on
the coat of arms of their state—which was the
fact; but it is doubtful if even that creature, whose
burrowing ability is undoubted, would have as-
sayed a tunnel in the kind of soil in which they
were working. That beastly fire-shovel—they
quickly christened it ‘Mr. Angleworm,”’ for it
would double up in their hands and twist in any
direction, except straight ahead, when they at-
tempted to force it any distance in the stubborn,
sticky clay. ‘They had scarcely half finished their
task, when they noticed that the sun no longer
looked squarely down upon them, but was watch-
ing them from over his right shoulder, to the west.
They had had no dinner but they did not know it.
They had forgotten the cries of the old birds,
were unmindful of their blistered hands,—in fact,
those hands only itched for one thing, the joy of
grasping the white egg, that could be only a little
way ahead. ‘They had been carrying the dirt out
in their hats, but they could do that no longer,
for they had commenced to strike pellets that

46 What Birds Have Done With Me

reeked of corruption, and made them sick at the
stomach. Necessity is the Mother of invention,
—when they could no longer use their hats, they
tore the lining from the sleeve of an old jacket
they found on the shore, knotted it at one end and
had a sack for their dirt. The horrible, pesti-
lential odor got worse and worse; it strangled,
throttled them, and they could neither quit nor
go on. A merciful providence took the matter
out of their hands; they suddenly heard noises at
the end of the tunnel, and using both hands as a
telescope, beyond a field of carrion fish-bones, they
could see the heads and open mouths of young
birds. One glance into each other’s eyes, and
impelled by a common impulse, they fell over
each other in their efforts to get out of their
tunnel, they rolled over each other in their haste
to get down the bank and bury their perspiring
faces in the friendly water. It was delicious:
stripping off shirt and trousers, they plunged in
bodily, and like a good nurse in sickness, the lake
bathed their bodies,—cooling the blood that for
hours had been almost at fever heat and washing
away the grime from face and hands—but the
odor in their nostrils seemed beyond her, and did
not pass for hours; not, in fact, till sleep, the
great restorer, came with her poppy juice, that
wipes away the world and all things therein.

It began to thunder before morning, and the

The Keeper of the Spring-House 47

first peal roused the ‘‘Deacon,” and if he had not,
in fact, dreamed about them, his first waking
thought was a confused jumble of young Prairie
Chickens and young Kingfishers at the mercy of
the elements. If it rained and the water rushed
down that bank, they would be drowned. They,
the nest robbers, were responsible. ‘Their duty
was clear; it meant he and Hod to the rescue.
He roused his brother, never mind whether it
was by threats or promises, and it was getting
light when they stole out of the house to pilfer
two lengths of stove pipe from the granary, got
a spade, and headed for the lake at a rate called
by military tacticians, a forced march. ‘The two
lengths when joined together were a little too
long, but when a fellow was doing the best he
could, what more could be expected of him! They
talked it over on their way back to the rescue.
How could they know that they would find young
birds ?—and they wouldn’t, either, if those fool
parents hadn't been in such a hurry about getting
to house-keeping. | When they finally got the
stove-pipe in place,—just where the old tunnel
had been, and the earth well packed around it,—
they couldn’t stay to see if the birds would use it
or not, for what had threatened to be a thunder
shower, proved a deluge, and they had to seek
refuge among the trees of the Seminary Land.
It was nearly a week, before they got back to

48 What Birds Have Done With Me

examine their handiwork, and to their delight
they saw the mother bird perched on the end of
the length of stove-pipe,—at peace with all the
world. This was before she spied the boys—or
we could never have used that reference to peace.
In view of all their labors, they felt rather sur-
prised at the nature of the blessing she was call-
ing down upon their heads; but what boy ever
took anything to heart, in the way of personal
abuse! Soon they were laughing at her, and as
boys never feel real well acquainted with a thing
till they have given it a new name, they forthwith
christened her ‘‘Stove-pipe Jinny”; and when the
Papa bird put in an appearance, they dubbed him
“Gluey Bill.”” How boys get names for things is
not easy to tell, but in the name of ‘‘Gluey Bill,”
the reference is obvious enough. ‘The furniture
at home had come from Pennsylvania, and at the
last end of the journey had been drawn by ox
team over seventy miles of corduroy road; hence
the glue pot, that never was known to smell like
a flower, was among the household gods,—and
the Kingfisher’s nest had every such odor on earth
beaten to a frazzle. Surely the Divine Goodness
must have withheld from the baby Kingfisher,
olfactory glands—or that goodness may be ques-
tioned. From “Gluey Bill,” the name, through
some natural stage of contraction, became
“Gooey Bill,” and her name “Jinny Pipe,”—and

The Keeper of the Spring-House 49

so they will remain to man’s last syllable of
recorded time.

Shade of Ike Walton, as a fisherman in com-
parison to either ‘“‘Jinny Pipe” or “Gooey Bill,”
you are as a pollywog to a whale. ‘“‘Patience on
a monument,” come and hire yourself out as an
understudy to the “Keeper of the Spring-house.”
All American Eagles, in the name of common
honesty, I call upon you to dissolve your robbers’
trust, and come and learn from ‘“‘Gooey Bill” how
to get a living on the square; “The Keeper of
the Spring-house”’ would scorn seines, snag lines
or phantom bait,—nothing under-handed about
him. In the gray of the morning, when he comes
sweeping down the shore from the bluffs along
Sherwood Forest, he is sounding his rattle all the
way, and when he hits the roof at his old fishing-
place, he calls to all the little fishes, ‘‘Here I am,
and it’s to be a fair fight and no favor.” When
I read how the Psalmist said all fishermen are
liars, then my Kingfisher is my refuge and a very
present help in trouble; ’tis the ‘“‘Keeper of the
Spring-house” who has made it possible for me
to find a sermon in a fisherman, and consequently
good in everything.

Once upon a time the Man’s Wife and little
daughter, with a party of friends, were out in a
little gasoline boat, and when they started away
the skies were as sweet as Tennyson’s “Dream of

50 What Birds Have Done With Me

Fair Women,” but when rounding “Norwegian
Bay,” on their way home, the engine stopped and
a sudden gale struck them the same instant.
There is no bottom to the lake along the rocks at
“Tone Tree,” toward which the frail craft was
being carried. On the other side of “Sugar
Loaf,’ which is a promontory, the Steamer
“Queen of the Lake,” was also making for home
with her load of passengers,—among whom was
a Bird-Lover watching the shore with a pair of
opera glasses. Suddenly coming directly from
the shore toward the steamer, she saw a King-
fisher, and circling, within ten feet of it, he
uttered an alarm cry and flew toward “Lone
Tree.” Watching the bird, she saw the signals
of distress from the gasoline boat,—and the
steamer put about and arrived just in time for a
neat and spectacular rescue.

When the man heard the story of how the
Kingfisher had seemingly called attention to the
imminent wreck, he with the rest made light of
it; but as a matter of fact, he added it to certain
fancies long hidden in his heart, and as he tells
them now, he wonders if any one will really un-
derstand. To him, all Kingfishers are related
to “Jinny Pipe” and “Gooey Bill’; they are a part
of his youth, and have their place among his early
play-mates. The Kingfisher to the rescue, was
just a coincidence, but a mighty pleasant thing

The Keeper of the Spring-House 51

to remember about an old friend, all the same.
He doesn’t pretend to know what such a bird may
stand for in your life, and he couldn’t make you
understand all it stands for in his. But it’s not
the Robin or the Blue-bird that is the first to
announce to him that Winter has finally capitu-
lated, and is in full retreat; this news comes from
the exultant rattle of the Kingfisher, causing the
child’s heart within the man, to start and trem-
ble, and the welcome he extends is always quite
voiceless, for it is only his heart that says, ‘‘Hello,
‘Jinny Pipe’; Hello, ‘Gooey Bill.’’» And when
the summer is over and gone, and October’s last
picture has faded and the tubes are twisted and
dried, his heart in voiceless farewell always says,
“Good-bye, ‘Jinny Pipe’; Good-bye, ‘Gooey
Bill,’”’ and the talk about the “Keeper of the
Spring-house’’ at such a moment seems as a tale
that is told.

CHAPTER V
WINGS, WINGS, WINGS

Naturally enough we have been so intoxicated
with the splendors of the civilization coming to
the wilderness of Wisconsin, in a little over half
a century, that we have had ears for no adverse
criticism, and eyes for no visions of havoc, piti-
less destruction, and wide desolation wrought by
our conquering world God. We willingly ad-
mit that it seems to be the established order of
the Universe that for something to live, some-
thing must die; however, such an admission does
in no way take from us the natural and inalienable
right to protest to such a law, fundamental though
it be. Civilization not only takes toll of all
weaker forms of life that stand in its way; it does
more, it exterminates, it annihilates, and its word
has gone out to all the wild life on the face of the
earth: “Where I am, there ye cannot be.”

Strangely enough, the small boy seemed to have
some dim sense of this, for he had a feeling that
the passers in the sky must have his attention first,
—over the things that had a local and nearby

52

Wings, Wings, Wings 53

home. Ah! those myriad things that came out
of the southern sky in the spring and disappeared,
always flying north,—would they ever come back?
It seemed unlikely, and in his soul was the fore-
boding fear that the hour drew on apace when
his eyes would search the desolation of vast fields
of space and find no passing wing. It had been
the great flocks, spring and fall—especially spring
—that had taught him his A.B.C’s of migration.
The native, home birds that would be gone to-
day and back to-morrow—with no appearance of
ever having been away—scarcely suggested it;
but the countless millions going by in the light
of the sun, often darkening it like a cloud,—
coming from nowhere, and disappearing into no-
where—these were the obvious migrants, these
the real world voyagers. The wings, the wings,
the wings that gave a living thing the emancipa-
tion from the earth enjoyed by a cloud, the speed
of the wind, and enabled them to traverse high-
ways whose only street lamps were the stars,—
for he heard them going by in the night.

The living cloud from the sky that had struck
him dumb that first spring, had been a vast flock
of Passenger Pigeons. Clearly they had no fear
of the little tad standing on a hill alone, and
swept by, not a dozen feet above his head, with
the sound of a rushing, mighty wind; and both the
wind and the sound were real enough, for the

54. What Birds Have Done With Me

one left him bare-headed, and the other half
deafened him; and fear gripped his heart lest, in
what seemed the onward rush of all things, the
wings would carry him away. How beautiful
they were, how graceful,—many had the flush of
both the dawn and the evening sky on their breast,
and the eyes with which they looked at you were
fearless and full of confidence. No one knew it
at that time but they constituted America’s one
characteristic ‘‘Moving Picture’’—that all the
countless billions of money since produced by our
Civilization could not now replace. But more
than this; let us suppose the physician of one of
our multi-millionaires, J. Pierpont Morgan, said
to be dying at Rome, had ordered for him a Pas-
senger Pigeon, as the one thing that would save
his life, the expenditure of his entire fortune, of
fifty millions, would not have obtained it for him.
This was the bird that the early settler netted,
trapped, pounded from the roost by wagon loads
and fed to hogs and used as fertilizer, and slaugh-
tered and left where they fell to rot. Under the
old Mosaic Law, a young, domestic Pigeon might
be offered up as a sacrifice for sin, but the Civil-
ization that we are expected to teach our children
to regard as splendid, allowed all our wild
pigeons to be sacrificed for naught; and the shame
of their destruction should evermore be chronicled
- among our national sins.

EE

Wings, Wings, Wings 55

In numbers, next to the pigeons, came the ducks
in flocks so vast that the individual members
seemed as the stars of heaven. ‘The pigeons be-
longed to a single variety, but the ducks to in-
numerable varieties—no two of whom seemed
alike. When the hunting was good in the fall,
as Adolph put it,—which simply meant the birds
had come down from the north,—he often took
the small boy with him to help retrieve the game;
and that meant to help pick up a boat load. At
such times he would devote some attention to
the small boy’s education, when they unloaded
and sorted the duck, by telling him the names
of the different kinds. The small boy long cher-
ished in his memory some of the names, though
at the time he half suspected that the resourceful
little Frenchman depended for them more upon
his imagination than upon his memory; ‘Ze
Melard, ze blue and green-winged tel, ze butter
bel, ze wisle wing, ze wood, ze canvas cover, ze
pin tail, ze old squaw.”’ The last two names
were accepted with great mental reservation and
were regarded as likely imaginary,—but turned
out to be correct. Adolph thought he was doing
a land office business if he got 60 cents a dozen
for his ducks, often, half of which were Canvas-
back; and no one dreamed that the time would
ever come when duck of that variety would sell
in the New York market for $10.00 each,—a price

56 What Birds Have Done With Me

easily realized to-day. While vast numbers went
on farther north, multitudes remained and nested
in every lake, river, creek and little pond, and
could be seen swimming around later in the sea-
son in the midst of their broods—almost like do-
mesticated ducks, with whom they occasionally
mixed freely.

Culver, Hamilton, and Spaulding ponds con-
tained many such families, but in Culver’s, the
smallest of the three and the nearest to the vil-
lage, all were shot early in the season; leaving
open water there for three families of Wood-
duck that later on took possession with their
pretty broods. It was the small boy’s first sum-
mer in the wilderness and he became much inter-
ested in these families of wild things, and was on
a fair way to a friendly acquaintance, when one
Sunday while at Sunday-school, some Christian
hunter visited the pond and killed four of the old
birds and slightly wounded a fifth—a male that
later on died; this left one mother bird and seven
ducklings. The wild mother in spite of her good.
reasons to distrust man, soon overcame her fear
of the little tad who came, literally, casting his
bread upon the water. How the bright-eyed, in-
credibly swift-motioned little fellows would
scramble for it; and they knew who brought it
better than the small boy’s sister, who had so

Wings, Wings, Wings 57

much to say about his appetite for bread and
butter meals.

A perfect gentleman, whose name was Darling
and who had a business named after him in a
nearby town, came over to sell Culver a patent-
right,—and got the wild mother and four of her
babies who could not fly—and a mink mercifully
prevented the remainder from starving to death.
For a few days after this, had the teacher hap-
pened to glance at the small boy’s slate, she would
have seen the word Darling and might have con-
cluded that she had surprised a first love affair;
but she would have been miles from the truth, for
that represented to him no term of endearment,
but an active little flame of pretty-fierce hatred.
The capital ‘“D’’ was the one significant letter
and it stood for a certain lean, hungry gentleman
whose full costume comprised hoofs, horns and a
tail.

The small boy knew something that few nature
lovers of the day seem to know: namely, that in
the bird kingdom, the duck is the natural and
irresistible harlequin. Imagine a quiet sheet of
water, on a peaceful October late afternoon, cov-
ered with countless thousands of ducks—before
they had become the gun-shy creatures of to-day
—and it requires no further imagination to see
before you a Water Circus, the like of which you

58 What Birds Have Done With Me

never saw on earth: unless your memory carries
you back to the early days in the wilderness when
it still belonged to wild things. Our base-ball,
foot-ball, and College field-day become tame af-
fairs in comparison to the duck high carnival.
Of course, he couldn’t see it all quite clearly on
account of the flying spray that they scattered to
the four points of the compass, but the small boy
never doubted that they were playing “‘I spy,”
‘sheep in the pen,” “‘anty over,” and “‘pullaway”’ ;
and the wild screaming joy in the eternal joy of
life was never exceeded since the stars sang to-
gether at the dawn of Creation. Where all this
occurred, there is neither sight nor sound of liy-
ing thing to-day. [he waters are in uneasy mo-
tion, muttering incoherent complaints to the
water flags that line the shore, and whispering in
lonely places, the forgotten histories of all life’s
yesterdays.

Wings, wings, wings, there are yet wings in
the upper air and the dimming eyes of age watch
them from the same hill-top where the eyes of
youth followed them in the long ago. Canadian
geese in military precision hurl themselves across
the sky, at an altitude where no fowler can do
them harm, obedient to the mysterious call of the
North. Few and scattered are the flocks com-
pared to those that used to go by calling to each
other in that hoarse, honking cry, that falls upon

Wings, Wings, Wings 59

the ears of heaviness and sleep, in the mid-night,
as an “‘all’s well” from the watchers of the silent
places. Adolph sometimes shot them when they
stopped to rest or feed, but to the small boy it
was an evil act, a kind of a treachery to a stranger
from a far land who should have received hos-
pitality. How big they were, and what a won-
derful thing a wing was that could carry such a
great bird through the sky, as fast as a train of
cars could run on an iron track. The sky made
them small, but the earth made them large, and
until the Frenchman told him of his mistake, he
had thought them the largest birds in the world.
Adolph told him that to compare them to a Swan
was like an old rooster to a big turkey.

Adolph also told him that swans were harder
to see than geese, because they were white and
flew higher and did not keep asking you to come
and shoot at them—the way a fool goose did.
The very next day he saw them, not flying in a
great V-shaped flock as he had expected, but in
a straight line, hard to tell from the white clouds
that hovered about them and whose children they
seemed to be. If they were not really the chil-
dren of the clouds, maybe the clouds wanted to
race with them; but as he watched them sail along
they seemed too stately to race with anything,
unless it might be with their own shadows—and
they were clearly too high up to even see them,

60 What Birds Have Done With Me

Of all the things with wings, they seemed the
most wonderful and farthest removed from the
common earth to which other creatures belonged,
and he was greatly shocked when Adolph told
him that ‘Ze woman, she use ze down to pretty
ze dress.” Not long after this, at church, he saw
a very beautiful little girl wearing a blue merino
cloak, with a hood to match, trimmed with Swan’s
down, and was not shocked, for some way she,
also, seemed a child of the white clouds.

The cranes going by—’way up in the blue ether
—with their weird cry, were things of the sky
and not of the earth. They undoubtedly had
wings but they did not seem to use them, but
were blown along the great currents of air,—a
part of them,— riding on their backs, with their
long legs stuck out behind to steer with, as idle as
the proverbial painted ship upon the painted
ocean. In later years, the small boy had to very
greatly revise his notion with regard to the crane
as a super-terrestrial creature, and it became not
only a creature of the earth, but of the low places
of the earth, the swamps, and marshes and dis-
mal fens, where slimy things crept and crawled
and hid in rank grass. Like some other things,
it became rather grotesque on close inspection, but
one of Nature’s pet jokes all the same. Every
one, young and old, laughed at the ridiculous long
legs, and yet concealed in those same stilts, from

Wings, Wings, Wings 61

common observers, is a whole legal brief, going
far to prove the adaptation of means to ends in
the scheme of things. Those long legs, clearly
intended for wading, would not be of much value
if not a step could be taken without a splash;
so that has been provided for, and the wide-
spreading toes are carefully folded up by the
same contraction of the muscles that raise the
foot, and are not allowed to expand till the foot
is again beneath the surface of the water, and
consequently there is no splash. In spite of all
this, perhaps the frog is about the only thing
that does not regard the Crane as a joke.
“They shall mount up on wings, as Eagles,”’
said the Prophet of God, foretelling the strength
to be the inheritance of the Redeemed: and never
was grander figure of speech used to portray
super-human might. The power of flight reaches
its final triumph in the king of the air; other
winged things hurl themselves through it, while
the Eagle alone, floats across fields of space
claiming lazy kinship with the passing cloud.
Effortless it climbs invisible spiral stairs that lead
upward toward the very temple of the sun and
drops back to earth, held in the secure embrace
of some dreamy zephyr. It soars and seeks those
far altitudes that no eye hath reached and
through which dreams wander and lose their way.
Along the rocky slopes of old Sugar Loaf, the

62 What Birds Have Done With Me

small boy heard the young Eagles crying for food
from a nest that overlooked lake and forest and
plain, and he watched with never-flagging interest
the old birds climbing the viewless ladders of the
sky and he knew, as only those know who have
never doubted, that when the dying Christian in
the hymn, cried, ‘‘Lend me your wings, I mount,
[ fly,’—his soul was calling for the wings of an
Eagle.

CHAPTER VI
PIRATES

The immigrant of to-day, following the rail-
road, knows little or nothing of the privations
suffered by those of fifty years ago, who preceded
the railroad and in a way were swallowed up by
the wilderness. Many of the early settlers of
Wisconsin found themselves not only a hundred
miles away from a market, but what was almost
as bad, a hundred miles away from even a weekly
newspaper, and in some cases destitute of any-
thing to read. Even professional men carried
their libraries in saddle-bags and any kind of read-
ing was prized like a gift of the gods. The New
York Tribune, the New York Weekly, the New
York Ledger, came as angelic visitors. As a
rule, no family took more than one of them and
they were traded about till they were literally
read to fragments, and the fragments kept to
wad a gun. With regard to the two last-named
it would, doubtless, have been better for the ris-
ing generation had they been used as gun wads

before they were read at all, for what they offered
63

64. What Birds Have Done With Me

starving minds were veritable ‘‘apples of Sodom.”
They were read by everybody, often read aloud
so they could be quickly passed on to the next
eager lot of readers; and their lurid pirate stories
fixed themselves in the minds of the juvenile list-
eners to their very great harm. Perhaps some of
them never forgot them, and at least one small
boy had good reason to remember the worst of
them—if there are degrees of iniquity in pirate
stories—all the days of his life.

Captain Ludlow, of ‘The Sure Death,” was a
monster,—capable of such frightful atrocities that
even the devil would have done himself credit to
have disowned him as a subject. ‘There was no
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde about him, though at
times having the mien of a perfect gentleman, he
was always consistent, always the fiend incarnate.
It could never be said of him that he did not care
a hang for humanity—for his ambition seemed
to be to hang the whole human family. He had
a commendable pride in the originality of his
treatment of captives; he had forced none of
them to walk the plank—that was old-fashioned
when he came upon deck—-so all that fell into
his hands had been given their exit from a world
of trouble through the hangman’s noose.

Of course always excepting himself and his first
and second mates, Guzzling Jack and Gorging
Jimmy, English Bone, a gaunt miscreant, was a

:

Pirates 65

person of great importance, for he was hang-
man, and that post was no sinecure on “The Sure
Death.” If one of the great family newspapers,
alluded to above, is to be relied upon, Captain
Ludlow, when business was heavy and many cap-
tives were coming his way, was in the habit of
taking a day off and holding a general hanging
bee. On such occasions, the Captain of “The
Sure Death”? would be present in a semi-offcial
character, invariably white duck trousers, ruffled
shirt, and scarlet jacket and cap—so covered with
gold braid as to look like the field of the cloth
of gold in miniature. It almost goes without the
saying that on such occasions, he puffed his cigar,
in all the bustle, with the bored expression of one
forced by politeness to listen to a very old story.
On such occasions, English Bone, the hangman,
held the center of the stage—an artist in his line,
—decorating the rigging with assorted bodies,
heavy-weights below and so on up, with an infant
at the fore-top gallant mast. It was always quite
clear that in the mind of the author, English
Bone had a mighty taking way with him. On
more than one occasion when his Captain was
bearing up manfully beneath all his gold lace on
deck, “The Sure Death” hopelessly becalmed,
English Bone had strung up one of the crew, just
to add interest to a sunset at sea.

As the natural result of this kind of reading,

66 What Birds Have Done With Me

the woods adjacent to the settlement were full of
little pirates. On one summer afternoon, Shanty
Pete’s crew had come ashore from their water-
logged flat boat, and the crew to amuse their
Captain, were staging one of English Bone’s
hanging bees. Captain Shanty Pete stood about
minus the gold braid, but with the cigar and the
bored look. Stub Miner, with his bandy legs,
red hair, freckled nose and rabbit mouth that was
ever agap, in no way looked the part of English
Bone, the Sure Death’s hangman, but was
hungry for the job—and got it. Perhaps he
proved his fitness for so much honor in the way
he cursed his men for their clumsy efforts to erect
a gallows, according to his rather vague orders.
Captain Shanty Pete had finally to come to the
rescue with his profanity as it was getting to be
a question if his cigar, which had only been what
is called a snipe at the beginning, would last
through the execution. Guzzling Jack and Gorg-
ing Jimmy, i. e., the two little Eaton boys, finally
saluted and pronounced all things ready.

Two sticks, with crotches at the top, had been
driven into the ground and into the crotches was
placed a horizontal bar and to this were attached
the nooses—five in number—made of fish line and
about two feet long. ‘The trap was a slender
wand of willow placed parallel to the bar above
and about six inches below it, easily yanked out

Pirates 67

of shallow notches in the uprights. An old jacket
at the foot of a big white oak nearby held the
prisoners. Stub Miner, burlesquing English
Bone, though he knew it not, now proceeded to
place each captive in place and adjust the noose.
Merciful heavens! They were five young Golden
Woodpeckers nearly grown and as innocent and
helpless as any other babies. They were clearly
not at all afraid and clung to the fatal drop with
wonderment in their bright eyes—and one of
them actually opened its mouth to be fed. Now
or never—if this slaughter of the innocent was
not to take place—interference must come from
some quarter and it so happened that a certain
small boy, hidden behind a nearby cedar and
fascinated by the horror of what had been going
on before his eyes, was selected as the puny agent
of that mysterious something that we call Provi-
dence.

When Shakespeare wrote of mercy as a unl-
versal quality that ‘“‘droppeth as the gentle rain
from heaven upon the place beneath,” he should
have made an exception of that flinty part of a
pirate’s anatomy, generally called a heart; for
all pirates, especially little ones, know nothing
of such softening influences. Intuitively, the
small boy knew full well that any plea for mercy
would not only be denied but would add zest to
the gang’s orgy of cruelty. Stub Miner, as Eng-

68 What Birds Have Done With Me

lish Bone, was on the eve of springing the drop,
when a kind of a human catapult shot out from
behind the cedar and the head of it took him
exactly in the pit of the stomach, and for a little
time, in the beautiful and expressive language of
Bret Hart—‘the subject of proceedings inter-
ested him no more.” Captain Shanty Pete was
that spellbound that he “‘got his” before he could
speak or move and went down beside the redoubt-
able English Bone—equally limp and equally
drowsy. The little Eatons in retreat, the small
boy was in possession of the field barely long
enough to release the captives, who were too
young to either walk or fly, when the “‘little
Eatons” made a grand rally and he went down
before their charge with both on top—and
Shanty Pete, capping the climax, atop of the
struggling trio. It’s no use, at this late day, to
recount all the pirates did to their helpless pris-
oner; sufficient to say that after he was securely
bound with fish-line, Stub Miller walked over him
and kicked him in the face—fortunately with bare
feet.

The pirates now reorganized their hanging
bee, first sending to the boat for a rope for the
land-lubber who had dared to interfere with their
sport; they would dispatch the bird-captives first,
and then hang their would-be rescuer from the
white-oak, close beside them, as a horrible exam-

|
f

Pirates 69

ple of the fate of all who attempted to interfere
with their royal sport. Putting the small boy
where he would have to witness the execution,
they proceeded to once more arrange the young
Woodpeckers on the drop, this time successfully
pulled from beneath them. They swung by their
necks, but it was found that their weight was not
sufficient to even strangle them to death,—much
less break their necks. Captain Shanty Pete was
equal to the occasion; the “‘little Eatons’’ were
ordered to get five stones, each bigger than the
body of the captive to whose feet one was to be
attached, then the hanging might proceed—after
the fine model set by the great Captain Ludlow.
If the small boy was really afraid of being hung,
he could never afterward tell for certain, for
like the ‘“Tar Baby,” he was saying nothing, but
was alert and watchful as no “Tar Baby” ever
was. Possibly it was on account of being so
much closer to the earth than the rest that he was
the first to hear the approaching footsteps of his
deliverers.

Ben Burroughs and Ira Smith, two youths ap-
proaching what Lowell calls ‘‘the awful verge of
manhood,” strolling along the lake, by the merest
accident, flanked the pirates and captured their
captain and hangman, before those worthies
knew their danger. Shanty Peter fairly roared
for mercy and prayed for clear weather beneath

70 What Birds Have Done With Me

a rain of cuffs from the strong hands of Long
Ben, as he was called. He did not have to be
told a second time to cut the bands that made
the small boy a prisoner and being on his knees,
he thought without suggestion, of the apology,
of which he made the small boy the recipient;
pronouncing it with something of the unction of
a divinity student, practicing the “have mercy
upon us, most miserable sinners.” English Bone,
in the equally strong hands of his captor was also
treading the thorny path of repentance and resti-
tution. Mid a storm of “‘pitchforks and coals of
fire,” he released his captives—seemingly unhurt
—and made five ascents of the white-oak, whence
they had been taken, to restore each one to its
home in the heart of the oak,—secure from all
enemies except young pirates. The “little
Eatons”’ made good their escape so it was only
to Pete and Stub that the final riot act was read,
mild yanks and cuffs emphasizing important parts.
They readily promised never to play pirates
again, never to molest another bird’s-nest, and
to do their utmost to break up all other piratical
gangs infesting the beautiful lake and the noble
forest, already set aside as the site of an institu-
tion of learning. They were then asked sepa-
rately and collectively, if they regarded them-
selves as soundly converted and answering in the
afirmative, their captors led them out to the

Pirates 71

end of the pier—which was a tree fallen into the
water—to which their boat was hitched, and
knowing that they could swim like water-rats,
they were solemnly assured that in the case of
reformed pirates, baptism must follow without
delay, and they were dropped into the lake. Wet
and shivery and thoroughly humiliated, as they
pulled their boat for home, it is to be hoped that
Captain Ludlow, of ‘The Sure Death,” and his
noble compatriot, English Bone, seemed to them
what they were in fact, the frightful monsters of
a frightful dream.

That anything of lasting importance should
have had its birth in this scrap among five little
boys over a brood of young Woodpeckers, on
the face of it is improbable, and yet the insig-
nificant affair was not without its life-long influ-
ence upon the after-life of our small boy. He
had been the rescuer of five young birds against
great odds and these rescued birds, in a way,
sent him forth, with an unflagging determination
never to give up the struggle, against all pos-
sible odds, for the rescue of all birds from their
human enemies, boys and men.

It was a forlorn little figure, with torn shirt
and bloody nose, that went limping home amid
the long shadows of the afternoon, not knowing
that the pirates and the golden woodpeckers
together had come very near making a hero out
of him.

CHAPTER VII
AN OLD LOG THAT WAS BEWITCHED

It is said of the bumblebee that he hums but
never sings, and it may be said of the Ruffed
Grouse, with equal truth, that he drums but never
plays a tune; but his drumming, such as it is, in
connection with the booming of the Prairie
Chicken, constitutes an essential part of the great
spring orchestra. In the forest of my early years,
the wandering minstrel with a drum was every-
where and nowhere, silence quickly swallowing
sound and vacancy places that seemed alive. Not
only Wordsworth’s Cuckoo 1s to be called “a wan-
dering voice,” but the name applies equally well
to a vast number that we occasionally hear but
seldom or never see, In the north woods on my
father’s farm, by a fence in a dense thicket was
an old log,—a prostrate giant, whose bark had
crumbled into nothingness and whose heart was
a cavernous chamber of black emptiness.

Though it may seem a far cry to suggest a
comparison between this venerable log and the

72

An Old Log that Was Bewitched 73

statue of Memnon, that was said from time to
time to give out a sound like the breaking of a
harp-string, it is nevertheless a fact, much bet-
ter authenticated than the story of the statue,
that the log was full of uncanny, mysterious
sounds that saluted the dawn and at certain sea-
sons of the year, might be heard almost any time
throughout the day. They did not sound like
harp-strings, but were clearly alive with a thrill-
ing affinity for a boy’s heart-strings. Poe opened
the door of his chamber and in there stepped a
stately Raven of the saintly days of yore; but a
thousand times I opened the door of the grove
and peered in to find silence there, and nothing
more. Silence, tense and inscrutable, fairly lay-
ing the somnolent old log upon which a woodland
minstrel had stood, not two minutes before, mak-
ing the welkin ring, and speedily eloped with the
echoes. In those days, of a May morning, you
might start to run it down and it broke out behind
you; retrace your steps and you heard it to the
right or left—clearly making a fool of you in a
quest as impossible of success as an attempt to
catch your own shadow.

It really seemed as though no one in the com-
munity could explain the mystery of the bewitched
log, but no one took it seriously and laughed at
me as a rule, some resorting to Munchausen in-

74. What Birds Have Done With Me

vention—common ways of meeting the eager in-
quiry of a child anxious to learn all about things
in his new world.

My parents were city born and bred and knew
nothing of nature. Clesen Smith, our neighbor
on the East, told me—through a great cloud of
tobacco smoke, typical of a hazy state of mind—
that the sound was made by tree-toads, that doubt-
less made the old log their home. Grant Culver,
to the East, was quite positive that the Fairies
were using the log as a prison, for political of-
fenders and what I heard was an awful warning
being given out from time to time by the miserable
captive. Jerry Norton, the village liar, had three
pessible explanations. A Woodchuck had a den
under the log and what I heard was the Wood-
chuck chucking wood: a Prairie bull-snake had
its den in the log and warned its children by
pounding its tail on the ground when it was go-
ing away to spend the day: a Were-wolf lived in
the log and the explosive sounds J heard were its
gloating enumerations of the number of human
creatures it had devoured.

Truth is said to be at the bottom of a well,
but the explanation of mystery is often found
waiting you at the side of the road, at the end of
a long journey. Only after years of search did
I find out the true explanation of the bewitched
log, and witchcraft was changed into love, an even

An Old Log that Was Bewitched = 75

greater mystery—fed by a million flames and —
fanned by ten million strange processes. Back
in the primitive zons of life, love was fanned by
battle, and the female was charmed to give her-
self to the victor; but the day dawned when love
would be fanned by elements quite remote from
physical force—fancy being captured by means
too occult to be formulated, or expressed if for-
mulated; fancy giving way to interest, and inter-
est giving birth to a god, a goddess, a myth,—
the one great reality in a world of shadows.

We do not always find when we seek and we
often stumble upon the thing for which we had
long sought in vain. A half-domesticated, half-
wild heifer, recently purchased by my father,
escaped from the home pasture and was thought
to be hiding a new-born calf somewhere in the
north woods, and on a misty gray Saturday morn-
ing, I was the new member of a searching party,
now quite worn out by two unsuccessful days of
pursuit; trained intellect struggling with blind in-
stinct. A fool cow and calf’s brains making
monkeys of lords of creation. No wonder every-
one was out of humor and my proffered assist-
ance was lightly esteemed. Long before day-
light, with sundry pieces of venerable toast—for-
gotten by every one, and never-to-be-forgotten
by me,—in my pocket, I took to the woods and
probably would have taken to my heels had I run

"6 What Birds Have Done With Me

upon the black cow in a thicket and in the dark-
ness mistaken her for a bear, of which I had heard
much and seen little. It was fore-ordained from
all eternity that my way that morning should take
me in the neighborhood of the bewitched log and
the approach of bare feet over wet leaves and
grass must have been as near being shod with
silence as it is ever possible to human kind, and in
addition to this I was approaching from the north-
east, an entirely new direction, and the very first
glimpse of the log revealed the presence of some-
thing new—a big bird standing upon it in the atti-
tude of a soldier on guard. We were both wait-
ing for something, and unless something outside
of us intervened, we would have to remain motion-
less, in statu quo, for twice ten thousand years—
and all the time silence like a mighty, invisible
flood was rising higher and higher and threaten-
ing to drown us. Help! Rescue from the un-
speakable thing into which we are sinking! We
had not noticed it before, but all the time sugges-
tion had been saying in a soothing voice, “sleep,
sleep, go to sleep.” What broke the spell was
the sun in the east; the military bird broke into a
wild gyration and emitted a torrent of sound,
from now on no more mysterious than the break-
fast bell at home. I showed my approval like
Tam O’Shanter, but my witch fled, a brown streak,
—I in pursuit to get an identifying look in the

An Old Log that Was Bewitched ry

open—when not ten rods away I stumbled over
a black calf that was quickly joined by its mother;
and she and I wended our way home, each in pos-
session of our dark secret.

There is this singular thing about a mystery;
when you think it all cleared up, the sun of truth
is just beginning to break through the clouds of
error and the full noon is apt to be hours away.
I had the calf in the barn and the cow in the
pasture, and had been scolded at by my brothers
and praised by my father before it dawned upon
me that I did not begin to know all about the
crazy Ruffed Grouse yet; whereas I knew who
made the noise I did not have the ghost of an idea
as to why he did it. It required weary hours of
waiting and watching before proof, strong as
Holy Writ, established his claim to being the most
poetic of woodland minstrels beneath the window
of the female of the species—the surrounding
hills, her castle walls, and his loud lament, a
woeful ballad to his mistress’ eye-brow.

Let no man say, “Oh, vanity, thy name is
woman,’ for man who has the first right to about
everything has first claim to vanity as well. Mrs.
Peacock, Mrs. Gobler and Mrs. Ruffed Grouse
must have a certain amount of contempt for their
silly husbands, always on dress parade, always
trying to show off and attract attention. Especially
is Mr. Rufted Grouse’s attempt to drum up ad-

78 What Birds Have Done With Me

mirers little short of disgusting. With him, every
year is leap year and the drumming is to give
notice that he is at home and ready to receive
proposals of marriage from eligible spinsters and
attractive widows. Love is certainly blind, or no
self-respecting female would fall in love with this
Jumping-Jack, with a fog-horn attachment. Per-
haps they finally marry him to stop his noise, but
if such is the case the sacrifice is useless, for the
noisy lover makes a noisy husband, just as a
drunken lover makes a drunken husband. Much
has been written and said against vanity, but
seriously it is something of a question if it may
not be a virtue masquerading as a vice. Making
the most of what has been given you by Mother
Nature isn’t so bad, always trying to look your
best cannot be condemned, and trying to make all
the world love you suggests the golden rule in
a party dress. If vanity is the detestable vice
we have been taught to think it, then it follows as
the night the day that Mr. Peacock, Mr. Gobbler
and Mr. Ruffed Grouse will prove to be especially
bad husbands, but as a matter of fact quite the
reverse is the real state of the case. Mr. Gobbler,
sO prominent and respected on Thanksgiving oc-
casions, is a perfect model of conjugal devotion,
willingly taking upon himself fully one-half of all
domestic duties and such a perfect under-study
of his better half that if any calamity happens

An Old Log that Was Bewitched 79

to her, domestic matters go along without a skip
orabreak. With regard to Mr. Peacock, I could
a tale unfold, but that is another story. There
is a great deal to be heard about the private life
of Mr. Ruffed Grouse, but one cannot and should
not believe all they hear and nothing has been
proven against him that would make it impossible
to put on his tomb-stone the usual statement that
he was a good neighbor, a devoted husband, and a
kind father.

I am willing to bear testimony as to the good
character of the vain fellow who had me and the
old log bewitched. Though our acquaintance
never could have been termed intimate, I entered
into the family’s joys and sorrows to some extent.
I was not invited to the wedding, but happened
along, so to speak, at the christening. A fine
family, John Roger family, and when the little
ones most needed a mother—a two or a four-
legged wolf got her—and the bereaved husband
became the devoted father, bringing each and all
up in the way they should go, and never once try-
ing to drum up admirers,—I even found him shy
of praise.

He loves wilderness ways and his home is the
forest; his little journey in the world is to visit
the clearing and we love to see him along high-
ways that we may kill him on sight. Among
wood-folk we always think of him as an alert

80 «6 What Birds Have Done With Me

business fellow and that leads to the fancy that
he may be a commercial traveler undergoing a
Ruffed Grouse re-incarnation.

I remember very distinctly how the forest had
been adding tinsel to the fading colors of October
that somber Sunday morning when I rushed out
into the open, beyond the north edge of the North
Woods, for some explanation of the barking of
a dog and the sound of guns in a woods to the
west, a half a mile away. “To many, what was
taking place would have been as difficult of inter-
pretation as a forgotten dream, but to me it was
all horribly distinct, to its last minutie. The
Ruffed Grouse, this bird of mystery, whose drum-
ming has bewitched many a boy, is himself be-
witched by the barking of a dog under a tree, in
which he has taken refuge; and a whole flock may
be shot by gunners in full sight, if they shoot the
birds on the lower branches first, without a single
one attempting to escape by flight. Bitterly pro-
testing, but so far away that I was as helpless as
a man in a dream, I could do nothing but curse,
for to me it was a foregone conclusion that these
fine sportsmen were, as leisurely as they might
pick apples, killing my Magician and his entire
family. Dog and followers (at least one of them
a mongrel), had disappeared before I reached
the corner of the fence where the murder, most

An Old Log that Was Bewitched 81

foul, had taken place. At first I thought nothing
was to be seen but tramped and bloody grass and
leaves, but a second examination revealed a bloody
trail leading into a nearby tangle of berry bushes,
—which pursued, led to a dead bird and also to
the certainty that the gunners had left in a hurry, —
for the Commander-in-Chief of the Covey had
been overlooked. He had been so full of life
and now how dead he was, how inert—this week
a watchful father, next week a bit of carrion,
harmless and even beneficent in the scheme of
Nature, and killed, really not for food, but for
sport. Perhaps some old Brahmin rose up in
me and my very soul was filled with loathing at
the thought of taking life except as a stern neces-
sity. I remember thinking so long as he had
been killed for sport, no one should eat him, so
I carried him back and hid his body in the hollow
log where I had seen him first and rolled a heap
of stones to the door of his fitting sepulcher.

I took my little grand-daughter last May to see
the place and found only the stones remaining,—
more magic,—the old log had turned into a bank
of violets. While the little child filled her chubby
hands with Nature’s blue dearlings, I said aloud:
“Nothing walks with aimless feet, not one life
shall be destroyed or cast as rubbish on the void,
when God shall make the pile complete.” She

4 ‘ ie

82 What Birds Have Dow! Wi ith ee

say: cy don’t think I can make you iin rs an
Little One, for I don’t think I could make re ae

one understand.”

‘

CHAPTER VIII
NOTHING SO SILLY AS A GOOSE

It was all in the merry month of May, when
the south wind is virile, and life everywhere fol-
lows its fleeting kisses, that the “Cathrine” left
its pier with a merry little company on board to
make the tour around one of Wisconsin’s many
beautiful lakes. The steamer was chartered and
the sole object in view was pleasure, but he who
goes after pleasure often finds, as did this com-
pany of merry-makers, that the whole expedition
was from first to last, a ‘‘Wild Goose chase.” In
Pine Bay, on the south side, a Canadian Wild
Goose was sighted, within the deep shadows of
that rocky shore, and as they had practically
ceased to be migrants at so late a date in the year,
and as they never make their long journey to the
far north in solitary state, it went without the say-
ing that the lonely bird was there for the excellent
reason that it could not fly and such, indeed,
proved to be the case. Silly Goose that it was,
it still had power to divide that jocund company;
the vast majority thirsted for its blood and longed

83

84 What Birds Have Done With Me

for a gun; a respectable minority admired its
grace and alertness and one man among them all,
and as it happened the host, determined to cap-
ture it, mend its broken wing, and in the fall
migration, allow it, if it so willed, to go south
among its fellows.

No trick, you doubtless fancy, for two stalwart
young men in a boat with a good landing net,
with a handle six feet long, to pick it up from
the water. If you have been entertaining such a
notion of the silliness of a Goose it would have
been a surprising experience to have been one
of the company on as astonishing a Wild Goose
chase as has been pulled off in many a day. After
an hour of valiant pursuit and most ignominious
failure, a vote was taken whether to continue the
trip or the chase; if the first proposition prevailed,
each one would have to pocket the mortification
of having been bested by a Goose. So we all
stood pat and now belong to that respectable
minority, who going on a “Wild Goose chase”
return with rejoicing, bringing their bird with
them. So far the pursuit had been so fast and
furious that no one had been taxing his gray
matter to any great extent, but the little voting
intermission had put us in a judicial frame of
mind and we shouted our collective wisdom like
a well-drilled class in the A grade: ‘She doubles

Nothing so Silly as a Goose 85

like a Hare; pursue with the steamer and that
will give the men in the boat a chance.”’

Her undoing was in the discovery of her tactics.
Like Pat and the Flea, when the men picked her
up she was not there and reappeared rods away,
floating to the surface, with neck stretched along
the surface of the water, looking not unlike drift-
ing sea-weed. Why had we not noticed that she
always doubled back? We are only saved from
dying of mortification by the fact that doughty
Colonel H., direct from Washington, who took
full command in the absence of our captain, in
the rescue party, shouting wise saws and modern
instances, also failed to notice that ‘“‘she doubled
like a Hare.’ The length of her swim under
water was limited by the time she could get along
without breathing, and when she came up beside
the rowboat, she allowed herself to be gathered
in without a struggle. I took her from Jim, our
mighty hunter, and tied her legs with my pocket-
handkerchief and she lay at my feet upon the
deck, still without a struggle, biding her time.

Half the pleasure of hunting is showing off the
result of the chase to jealous enemies and admir-
ing friends alike, and on my return to the hotel
I put my Goose down upon the lawn that every-
one might have a chance to admire us. Quick as
a flash, the time she had been biding, arrived,

86 What Birds Have Done With Me

and she was using fettered feet and her one sound
wing in a burst of speed in the direction of the
lake. ‘That it took so many to capture her, dis-
abled as she was, came like a secret little revela-
tion along the line of kinship, which as no one
mentioned it, rather increased our interest and
affection for the creature that had such good
cause to distrust man’s tender mercies.

You'll not be interested in the modern surgery
upon the compound, comminuted fracture beyond
the fact that a perfect result was obtained and
the Goose paid the M.D. his fee, day by day,
as the case progressed. She received his min-
istrations without wincing, fighting, or apparent
gratitude, and in every way proved a beautiful
patient. After a more or less intimate acquaint-
ance extending over several months, her physician
felt as ignorant of much that pertained to her
as Horace Smith confesses to have felt in the
presence of the mummy. He knew her race, but
neither her age nor station, and the question of
sex proved utterly baffling. The baptismal name
given was that of Canada, from a notion that
the captive might owe allegiance to that far
off Dominion. Once a week its attendant put the
crockery crate, its prison-house, upon a wheel-
barrow and took prison and captive to the lake
for a swim. For the first few times when it
found itself in its native element it made a des-

“

Nothing so Silly as a Goose 87

perate effort to escape, diving to the bottom and
beating the water into spray, then it gave it up as
useless and never afterward repeated its struggle
for liberty until that coveted possession came
almost by itself. When it was clearly convales-
cent, and might have been sent home had it been
a real patient in a hospital, the fracture having
knit and all appliances removed, its medical at-
tendant had a little yard built for it, half of which
was in the lake and half on the shore, but no top
was put over the four-foot wire fencing that made
up the enclosure as it was a question if that was
necessary in order to keep Canada in the United
States. If Canada felt any gratitude for the
treatment it was receiving its monarchial pride
may have had something to do with the fact that
it failed to mention it.

The silence, dignity and utter loneliness of its
personality was not to be borne and its keeper,
hearing of a celebrated domestic Goose raised
by hand, like Pip, in “Great Expectations,” and
christened ‘‘Bildad” in his downy youth, lost no
time in purchasing the same to act as guide, phil-
osopher and friend of the mysterious Canada.
Bildad was gorgonized with a stony British stare
and the Dominion would have none of him. Then
a Mrs. Goose was selected from Goose masses
and put between the possible rivals, but Canada
watched their betrothal with all the dignity that

88 What Birds Have Done With Me

stamps the caste of Vere de Vere. They were
three in a pen but not three of a kind, and though
Canada did not seem conscious of their existence,
there is some limit to what can be expected of
good breeding and it may allowably escape what
has become unendurable. Canada escaped from
Bildad and his silly Goose of a wife. Knowing
the difficulty of holding such opposite elements
together, I was not greatly surprised and told

the man to release the other two Geese, but to -

make no attempt to recapture Canada.

Now came a great surprise, we being thor-
oughly convinced that Minerva should have had a
Wild Goose—wild, mind you—instead of an owl
as emblematical of Wisdom, and having been
taught to believe that the distance between Cap-
tivity and Freedom is a million times the length
of the road between here and Tipperary, I
found myself nonplused, dumbfounded when con-
fronted by Canada strolling about the lawn quite
to the manor born and just as though nothing
had happened. She finally took up a position
on the public road, three feet from the wagon
track and not only rested her plump breast upon
good old Mother Earth but put her confiding head
under her wing and pretended to be asleep. Lobo,
a curious Collie puppy, saw nothing feigned in
her attitude and attempting a close acquaintance
found her cruelly wide awake and endowed with

ee

Nothing so Silly as a Goose 89

the power of driving all thoughts of slumber from
his universe. Lobo got his early, I mine later
when it was borne in upon me that in the mind of
at least one Goose there was only one man in
the Universe and I was it. Every day she came
to the hotel office door for the one man to feed
her corn, other humans showered her with it but
they might as well have thrown gravel stones.
She did not run, she simply walked away, leaving
every kernel. On moon-light nights, I often en-
tertained a little audience by calling her in from
a few rods out in the lake—she never went ten
rods from home—and throwing corn into the
water where she would dive for each individual
kernel. Queer, isn’t it, that whereas she could
scarcely have tasted corn before her capture, she
should have become so much more fond of it
than Bildad and his Goose of a wife. It is some-
times arrogantly asserted that domesticated crea-
tures have acquired at least a part of their wis-
dom from contact with man, while quite the
reverse is true. Bildad was the heir of all the
ages of domesticated Goosedom; Canada, direct
from the wild, had forgotten a thousand times
more than he ever knew. Comparing the two,
Canada was a gentleman and a scholar; Bildad,
a loafer and a grown-up gosling. One was an
astronomer, a World Voyager; the other, a rich
collection of untried-out Goose oil. How Canada

90 What Birds Have Done With Me

had fought for her life, and on the other hand
you can imagine Bildad going to sleep with his
head resting across a chopping block. If that
old story has any foundation in fact, it is my
belief that it was a Wild Goose that saved Rome.

It is impossible to go into all her little ways
through which she captivated my imagination, but
take her for all in all, she was one of my most
interesting patients from the wild. Here was
the omnipresent speculation with regard to her:
when fall came with countless numbers of her
migrating kind, would her instinct be too strong
for her local attachment? Vain speculation; the
question never was settled. At dawn on the first
day of “the open season,” when our vanishing
wild life may be slaughtered according to law, a
drunken young hoodlum, from a_ neighboring
town, shot Canada on the beach in front of the
hotel. It was one of those little occurrences to
be met with in life, when expression is apt to be
of a character that would make its publication
more or less of an indiscretion.

During all the days of her brief sojourn with
us, Canada had never uttered a sound and for a
long time this very fact associated her with all
silent places. In the spring when we watched
the flocks going north, when they finally melted
into space and their last sound became inaudible,

ERE ee

Nothing so Silly as a Goose gI

then occasionally the wrath of Canada would float
along the passing shadow of something that was,
and is not.

The Glenn County Club, in California, enter-
tained two sportsmen?—God save the mark—
for a day’s shooting. ‘They went out where a
wire fence held captive Canadian Geese, used as
living decoys. On each side were “‘rifle-pits” for
the killers—not hunters—and back of them an-
other for the ‘“‘guide,’’ who could imitate the
“honk” of a Wild Goose. In one hour, with their
automatic shotguns, they had used up all their
ammunition and, the account says, had to their
credit—let us say discredit—two hundred and
eighteen dead birds. They went back in the
afternoon and killed enough more to bring the
number of the slaughtered up to four hundred
and fifty. This in America, in the name of Sport;
we the people who are “the heirs of all the ages
in the foremost ranks of Time’’—still capable of
a thing like that, and what is even more hideous,
bragging over it and calling it glorious. No pair
of crawling reptiles, or fierce, four-footed beasts,
in the darkest jungle that ever existed in the re-
motest parts of this earth, have equaled this de-
struction of harmless creatures, from a mere lust
to kill. Establish their right to be called ‘‘Pot-
hunters” and you honor them, for comparatively,

92 What Birds Have Done With Me

in an ethical point of view, the “Pot-hunter”’ is a
Prince and a King, when lined up with the mere
KILLER, who does it for fun.

Let us suppose that yonder, beneath some
mighty dome, is hung a splendid canvas—Art
holding Beauty captive—and they together, tell-
ing the story of heroic deeds. Across the face of
even such a painting, I do not hesitate to hang a
picture of Autumn—a word painting from a fa-
miliar poem—asking you to look at mine, instead
of the triumph of Art that it but half conceals.

“A haze on the far horizon,

The infinite, tender sky,

The ripe, rich tint of the corn-fields,
And the wild Geese sailing high,—
And all over upland and lowland
The charm of the goldenrod,—
Some of us call it Autumn,

And others call it God.”

This is as sweet and tender as the Dawn; here
we find Hope and Fruition hand in hand—a
golden fancy mixing the pigments and an infinite
hand wielding the brush. Autumn is its own
artist; October, as a painter, shaming the old
masters by producing only perfection. The pic-
ture would be incomplete, imperfect were it not
for the indispensable element of life supplied by
the flock of birds sailing across the sky. Their
mystic V is emblematical of splendid victory

SS oe Fe ae oe

Nothing so Silly as a Goose 93

over terrestrial conditions, and its lesson to us,
the Earth-born, is to hope on, hope ever. ‘They
are the weird musicians of the temple of the sky,
across the day, beyond the night; we, strangers
and pilgrims, hear their voices calling, as they fly,
of the better country far away.

Oh! ye poor sportsmen of the automatic gun
and the living decoy,—know ye not that ye are
robbing God’s great picture of life,—Hs finished
picture of the finished year?

On a wild March morning, before dawn, the
writer of this little sketch seemed to be sinking
into his last sleep,—the doctors had announced
that they could do no more, members of the fam-
ily despairing, and the nurses at their wit’s end,—
when suddenly just over the house came the clamor
of a passing flock of Wild Geese. The familiar
sounds roused the one who was so near crossing
the bar, and turning on his pillow, he cried faintly:
“Bless you, oh! God bless you!’ and at once
started in to fight his way back to life again.

CHAPTER IX
A DISH OF ROBINS

It has always been rather a matter of regret
to me that we have to journey along to the middle
of the alphabet to get the first letter in the name
Robin. The bird thus designated should have
been given a name commencing with the first
letter of the alphabet for the excellent reason that,
in the order of time, he comes first in our acquaint-
ance with our bird neighbors. I have never known,
in the North, a single individual who will not put
him first in his identification of birds, and even
in the South, in this respect, I rather think he
scores over the ubiquitous Mocking Bird. He
practically is the outer guard to the bird king-

dom and later on a royal conductor into the ~

inner shrine, for a person who does not know a
Robin, does not know a thing of any bird, and
the person who knows a Robin well, as a rule
knows a whole lot about a lot of other birds.
This will not seem strange when we call to mind
the fact that Cock Robin is not only a splendid
teacher of chart classes, but gets himself talked
94

a Se ed

A Dish of Robins 95

about to nearly all the little people before they
are out of their long dresses and they know about
his need of stockings and shoes before they have
any of their own, and romance is born when some
inspired person, with his woeful history of Cock
Robin and Jenny Wren at his command, leads
uncertain little footsteps through the thrilling
days of courtship, merciless disaster and death
and sad obsequies through which the Dove can
actually be heard mourning for some one else’s
love.

“John O’ Mountains” found a dandelion and a
Robin very much at home on a glacier in Alaska,
and Cock Robin is a dandelion among birds, will-
ing to make himself at home just about every-
where, if you will please keep him out of your
pot-pies. From the savannahs and jungles of the
tropics to beyond the tree-line in the far North,
he adopts all countries and climes and what he
whistles at sunset is what he whistled at dawn:
“My country, tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,
of thee I sing.” ‘Then again he is a very common
unit of measure, to people generally, most birds
being either larger or smaller than a Robin.

From her knowledge of his splendid appetite
it almost looks as though Mother Goose might
have entertained him at a church supper or had
him spend a summer vacation with her. Let me
see, what was it she said of his ability as a trencher

96 What Birds Have Done With Me

man? ‘He could eat more victuals than three
score men, a church and a steeple and all the good
people and yet his belly wasn’t half full.”

Once when I was calling professionally on a
sick lad, his mother stopped in a half-apologetic
manner to consult me about a sick bird they had
in the house—a wild bird picked up on the lawn
two days before. After the manner of doctors,
I declined to give a diagnosis till I had an oppor-
tunity to examine my prospective patient; but
when I saw her coming with a Robin in her hand,
I knew at once that what ailed this patient was
just the opposite to what ailed her gorged little
boy, the bird was starving. Evidently, the good
lady’s education had not included Mother Goose
or she would not have entertained the notion that
on a diet of two horse-flies and one angle-worm,
in two days, the case was likely one of indigestion.
Again after the manner of my calling, I said:
‘This is a fatal case, you should have called me
earlier, very sad, very sad, for in a land of plenty,
it is simple starvation. A hundred horse-flies one
day and a hundred angle-worms the next, might
have carried him along until he was old enough
to go to church alone and look after himself.” As
a matter of fact, a growing young Robin requires
more than its own weight of food daily. You
who live across the street or in the next house
to a girl who practices on the piano five hours

A Dish of Robins 97

a day, may thank your lucky stars that kind
Mother Nature did not crucify you with a sense
of hearing exaggerated into an acuteness that en-
ables him to locate the movement of a worm under
ground two yards away. It seems unconditional
surrender upon the part of the worm when Mr.
Robin comes calling, but he gives up the ghost
to the fisherman only after a struggle, and what
is worse, often in a niggardly half-a-loaf fashion.

W. H. Hudson, the famous English naturalist,
has a book whose title is “Birds and Man,” as
though they were inseparable, but as a matter of
fact there is only one bird inseparably associated
with man, and that is the Robin. He can’t get
too close, and if given the slightest chance does
courting, builds his nest, and rears his family by
preference under the veranda where human crea-
tures pass at all hours of the day, and cats prowl
at all hours of the night. In Mr. Hudson’s book,
to which I have just referred, he tells the story
of an Owl, reared in captivity and without fear of
man. So confiding was it, that coming, like all
Owls on noiseless wing, it would light on the
shoulder of any human creature who might hap-
pen along in the night. Some one, supposing
himself attacked, struck it to the ground and
broke its wing with a club. It survived its injury,
but its confidence in man was at an end and it
grew wilder and wilder until it finally returned to

98 What Birds Have Done With Me

its native forest, as wild or wilder than any of
its kind.

The Apostle Paul’s narration of having been
scourged, beaten with rods, and made to fight
with beasts at Ephesus, tragic history though it
be, still does not give him a place among martyrs
to be compared to the high perch that the demure
and cheerful Robin-Redbreast, that you see on
your lawn, of a summer morning, has earned for
himself. In very fact, he dies daily as the re-
sult of ignorant persecution—Hunnish, ruthless
slaughter.

With the single exception of the remediless
slaughter of the Passenger Pigeon, no other fam-
ily of birds has suffered what the Robin has and
still survives. He is, always excepting the Chick-
adee, the optimist of the bird kingdom, jolly under
the buffeting of March winds and rollicking
through adverse conditions that would justify the
grouch of grouches. For unknown ages half the
Robin’s life has been spent in that part of this
country, known since its settlement as the South-
ern States and, since the coming of the white man,
the birds’ Inferno—a St. Bartholomew of birds
generally speaking, but a veritable slaughter-house
for this winter resident in particular.

It is with shame and humiliation that I append
the following indictment against my brother man,
and the president of the Grand Jury is no less a

A Dish of Robins 99

person than T. Gilbert Pearson, Secretary of the
National Association of Audubon Societies:

“Robins in winter sometimes congregate by
thousands to roost at a favorite spot, and here
the hunters often come to take them, in the man-
ner, Audubon tells us, people took the Wild Pig-
eons during the last century. Stories of their
killing creep into the public press, and over their
coffee men marvel at the slaughter of birds that
goes on, sometimes in their immediate neighbor-
hood. Here is an authentic account of the raid-
ing of one such roost, given the writer by Dr.
P. P. Claxton, of the University of Tennessee.
He was familiar with many of the details, and
will vouch for the truthfulness of the facts here
set forth. He says: “The roost to which I refer
was situated in what is locally known as a ‘‘cedar
glade,” near Fosterville, Bedford County, Ten-
nessee. ‘This is a great cedar country, and Rob-
ins used to come in immense numbers during the
winter months, to feed on the berries. By the
middle of a winter’s afternoon, the birds would
begin coming by our house in enormous flocks
which would follow one another like great waves
moving on in the direction of the roost. They
would continue to pass until night. We lived fif-
teen miles from the roost, and it was a matter
of common observation that the birds came in
this manner from all quarters.

100 What Birds Have Done With Me

‘“‘*The spot which the roost occupied was not
unlike numerous others that might have been
selected. The trees grew to a height of from
five to thirty feet, and for a mile square were
literally loaded at night with Robins. Hunting
them while they roosted was a favorite sport. A
man would climb a cedar tree with a torch, while
his companions with poles and clubs would dis-
turb the sleeping hundreds on the adjacent trees.
Blinded by the light, the suddenly awakened birds
flew to the torch bearer, who, as he seized each
bird, would quickly pull off its head, and drop it
into a sack suspended from his shoulder.

‘““*The capture of three or four hundred birds
was an ordinary night’s work. Men and boys
would come in wagons from all the adjoining
counties and camp near the roost for the purpose
of killing Robins. Many times, one hundred or
more hunters with torches and clubs would be at
work in a single night. For three years this tre-
mendous slaughter continued in winter, and then
the survivors deserted the roost.’ ”

These are almost the identical methods em-
ployed in killing untold numbers of Wild Pigeons,
which is today probably an extinct bird in Amer-
ica. This is followed by the testimony of William
Dutcher, the very Commander-in-Chief of all
constructive methods and conservative bird work
in America.

A Dish of Robins IOI

“Wherever the Robin breeds within the con-
fines of civilization, man is its friend, and a mu-
tual attachment has grown up that borders on
sentiment. ‘The man extends his protection and
the bird rewards by making his home almost
under the same roof tree, displaying a confidence
in his human brother that is begotten by lack of
fear.

“In the Robin’s winter home in the southland,
all is different, for there no sentiment but that of
gastronomics is displayed; the bird is simply a
tender morsel to be made an integral part of a
stew or a pie. In Central Tennessee are large
tracts of cedars, the berries of which serve to
attract myriads of Robins in the winter. One
small hamlet in this district sends to market an-
nually enough Robins to return $500, at five cents
per dozen, equal to 120,000 birds. My inform-
ant naively says: “hey are easily caught at night
in the roost in young cedars; we go to the roost
with a torch and kill them with sticks, others climb
the trees and catch the Robins as they fly in.’
One of the officers of the Louisiana Audubon So-
ciety furnishes the following information regard-
ing Robin slaughter in his own state: “They are
commonly killed for home consumption and for
marketing, a conservative estimate of the number
killed annually being from a quarter of a million
in ordinary years to a million when they are un-

102 What Birds Have Done With Me

usually plenty. During the past winter one gun-
ner killed over 300 Robins in one day, and in one
village in the state the boys and young men are
vying with each other for a record in Robin-
killing, the present high score being 200 birds in
one day.’ Better, by far, sentiment than slaugh-
ter, as the one preserves and the other destroys
what is of great value, as will be proven later.”
From these gloomy pictures of greed, and
blood-lust and depravity, I turn to the annual
visits of a pair of Robins—possibly escapes from
the bird shambles in Tennessee—who for five
years nested in a vegetable dish on a two-by-four,
in an open passageway, just outside my office door.
The first little dish was left there by accident
and found and appropriated by the birds, and
afterward was put there for their convenience.
What beautiful confidence and seeming affection
for man in spite of his vile treatment of them in
certain localities; building their home, without
hands, open to human inspection by the door
where he passed many times a day. Later on, the
bright-eyed babies adopted each visitor as a foster
parent and never failed to stretch wide their big,
wide mouths for supplementary feedings. Ours
was the only dish of Robins to be spoken of with-
out loathing and disgust. It was surely the same
pair that came year after year to an accustomed
nesting place, for after the fifth year no nest has

a OR, ee ne

A Dish of Robins 103

ever been built there, though an empty dish, cov-
ered by dust, like the little toy soldier, is still
“waiting the long years through.” Till death over-
took them, they came unto their own, and their
own received them with hearts full of affection.

I never see a Robin, cheerful and active as he
always is, without a feeling that I am confronting
an object that stands for much that is best in life.
To me, he is eternal hope, dressed in working
clothes. The poet Campbell dressed up hope so
gorgeously that he makes you feel like Moses in
the presence of the burning bush:

Eternal HOPE! when yonder spheres sublime

Peal’d their first notes to sound the march of
Time,

Thy joyous youth began—but not to fade—

When all the sister planets have decay’d;

When, wrapt in fire, the realms of ether glow,

And Heaven’s last thunder shakes the world
below,

Thou, undismay’d shalt o’er the ruins smile

And light thy torch at Nature’s funeral pile.

Against these lurid surroundings of eternal hope
in the last rays of a burning sunset, I have a
memory picture of a living incarnate eternal hope
in the cool dawn, after a night of tempest,—and
this living hope is only a Robin redbreast. A
tornado, in the blackness of darkness, wrecked a

104 What Birds Have Done With Me

house in which was a woman and her little daugh-
ter, the husband and father, a fresh air tubercular
case, in a shack outside; all three found them-
selves together, they knew not how, stunned,
bruised, despairing. Though not mortally in-
jured, they and all their friends united in the
feeling that unmerciful disaster had done its
worst. It was a case of who has woes like unto
my woes and individually and collectively, they
looked the part.

There came into my mind some words that I
had learned from a song of doubt that seemed
a pretty good expression of my own pessimism:

“There is no good! There is no God
And faith and hope is a heartless cheat
Baring the back for the devil’s rod
And scattering thorns for the feet.”

Then I saw the Robin! His nest had been hurled
from a tree and the eggs all crushed, but he
wasn’t crushed,—far from it. The very embodi-
ment of eternal hope, cheerfulness and energy, he
and his busy wife were getting ready to build a
new nest in a wood-shed that had outstood the
storm. ;

Your pardon, but I hear a Robin and am going
out in the sweet sunshine to get the uplift of a
moment’s association before the night cometh,
with man’s closest bird friend.

CHAPTER X
MR. CHICKADEE

It has been said that America comprises Rhode
Island and the other States of the Union. I
understand it to mean that little Rhody is not to
be bunched, but demands especial mention. Now
be this as it may, something of the kind certainly
applies to the Chickadee,—to any one who really
knows him, it is the Chickadee always having espe-
cial mention, and the rest of the feathered crea-
tures that make up the bird kingdom. It was
said many years ago, that to know Madam
Récamier was equivalent to a polite education,
and it may be said with even greater truth that
to know one Chickadee is equivalent to a scien-
tific knowledge of all the stuffed birds in kingdom
come.

As the only interest the majority of people
have in a bird is its value for food, I want to say
right here and now, that for that purpose, as a
neighbor woman, here in the South, said of her
husband: “He haint worth shooten.”” Down in

Dixie Land, where nearly every bird that flies
105

106 What Birds Have Done With Me

finds its way to the table, I never succeeded in
running down any sufficient proof to convince me
that any human hyena had ever devoured Chick-
adees, though such may be the fact. Without the
excuse of starvation, staring him in the face, the
libel on God’s creatures, who would do a thing
like that ought to be Anathema Maranatha.

As Mr. Chickadee never had an enemy, and
isn’t of value for food, it would look as though
in their relation he never had any valid reason
to distrust man; but that is far from the truth,
for he, in common with all other birds, has had
good reason to fear ‘‘the relentless, remorseless
bird-skin collector.”” To kill a Chickadee for any
purpose seems almost next to the murder of an
infant for the coral on its neck, in fact the Chick-
adee is the real Peter Pan of the bird kingdom.
He has never grown up, but from first to last is
a dear goo-gooing baby; guileless, confiding, care-
free, with close relations to all our happy yester-
days and vitally connected with all our longed-for
to-morrows; the Alpha and Omega of bird life.

Adolph Buzze had about the right notion with
regard to the blessed Chickadee. When he was
building his cabin in the woods, in zero weather,
they came in great numbers, and I was astonished
beyond measure to find wild birds so intimate with
a human creature. He picked out yellow worms
from between the bark and the log he was hew-

_—

Mr. Chickadee 107

ing for the log house, and scattered them at his
feet and they came in flocks, Adolph calling them
“Frenchman’s wood chicks.” Maybe Adolph
was a poet for this sounds something like it. I
asked him where they came from. He did not
answer at first but after awhile, with a far-away
look on his face, he pointed to the sky and said:
“When Frenchman build little house in woods,
Mighty God send blessings by Chicks. See, easy
nuff.”

In early life, in common with so many foolish
people, I took it for granted that something of
value may be learned about birds in the study of
stuffed specimens. In nearly the first case was a
stuffed Chickadee, possibly one of the very
messengers that had brought a blessing from
“Mighty God” to the Frenchman’s cabin so many
years ago. It was rather an unfortunate experi-
ence for me, from that moment to the present
time I feel about the whole wretched business as
I imagine a devotee of religion would feel if he
entered a cathedral, of his own faith, and found
Cherubs pinned to the walls like butterflies in
cases.

Czsar dead and Cesar alive are a million miles
apart. The Chickadee in his natural environ-
ment, very much alive, with his little song so full
and running over with cheer, and the pitiful
stuffed specimen, named and numbered and sur-

108 What Birds Have Done With Me

rounded with crude decorative attempts is a trav-
esty of the real thing, who as Robert Browning
said of the thrush:

“He sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture.”

The movie man calls his undeveloped films
“stills,” but these dead and dusty things in cases,
that once were birds, can never be developed into
something with a vital relation to life, they are
“stills’ forever. To study them is to study death,
not life; as well study the withered flower, the
dead and leafless tree, or a moss-grown tomb.

I am yet to meet any bird-lover who was ready
to admit that he ever learned anything of birds
of real value by the study of the stuffed specimens
in the museum and, of course, pictures of these
stuffed specimens are equally worthless. I once
asked a class in high school to name for me a
photograph of ‘‘Bob White” after he had disap-
peared from Wisconsin, that had been made from
a stuffed specimen—and someone called it a Tur-
key Buzzard, without a dissenting voice being
raised in the class. Indeed, that fine naturalist,
W. H. Hudson, in his book, “Birds and Man,”
repudiates the notion that anything can be learned
of birds by the study of the finest collection in
existence. He says: ‘“‘These collections help no

|
.
.
;
1

Mr. Chickadee 109

one, and their effect is confusing and in many
ways injurious to the mind, especially to the young.
A multitude of specimens are brought before the
sight, each and every one a falsification and degra-
dation of nature, and the impression left is of an
assemblage, or mob, of incongruous forms, and
of a confusion of colors.”

“These dreary remnants of dead things set be-
fore them as restorations and as semblances of
life, produce a profoundly depressing eftect.”’
“The best work of the taxidermist, who has given
a lifetime to his bastard art, produces in the mind
only sensations of irritation and disgust.”” From
the above extracts from his writings, it is easy
to get his point of view with regard to the stuffed
specimen as unnecessary and useless in the study
of the birds he knew from a close and extended
personal relation in their natural environment. It
is scarcely putting it too strongly to say that
according to his system of theology the collector
stood for the devil himself.

The difference between a “Bird Lover” and an
“Ornithologist’”’ is much the same as between a
“Demonstrator of Anatomy” and a ‘Family
Physician,’ one gains his facts from death, the
dissection of a dead body, the other from life,
the study of a living creature. Follow in the foot-
steps of the Ornithologist, pure and simple, and
they will lead you to a shamble, a Valley of

110 What Birds Have Done With Me

Shadows, where death reigns, making one think
of what King Herod did to this world when he
ordered the slaughter of the innocent. Systematic
Ornithology is scarcely necessary at present, it
has been done and well done, and back of much
of the so-called scientific examination of birds’
stomachs is the commercial demand for a stuffed
specimen. On the first page of our this week’s
village paper is an article on birds, a scientific
article, beyond question; an account of the exam-
ination of the stomachs of some of our rare and
beautiful birds is given and the statement is made
that 271 stomachs were available.

This certainly suggests a successful drive upon
the part of the Allies—Scientists, Plume Hunters
and Curators. We can but adopt the justly cele-
brated words of Madame Roland and cry out:
“O! Blind and deaf and bloody Ornithology,—
‘what crimes have been committed in thy name.’ ”

You can learn something about birds in a mu-
seum that happens to have a collection of stuffed
specimens, and most museums have, and you can
learn something of the piano, under a good
teacher, if you never have anything but a dumb
instrument to practice upon, but in both cases the
element of life is wanting and discord will be the
inevitable result of misdirected study.

In all his long years of study in the Philippines,
I notice that Dean Worcester failed to secure the

Mr. Chickadee BEL

skin or stuffed specimen of a single native and
no one scoffed at his failure to do so; but had he
been an Ornithologist studying birds, such actions
would have discredited his work for all time.
Now as a matter of fact we “Bird Lovers” care
mighty little about the inside of a bird, and what
we want to learn most of all is how to protect
them from their enemies and their so-called
friends, who simply regard them as being worth
skinning.

Scorning to make the slightest concession to the
man ‘“‘whose god is his belly,” in passing, perhaps
it will be as well to make a little concession to
the man whose god is a little row of figures show-
ing the net earnings, for three hundred and sixty-
five days, of the farm in which every other inter-
est is merged, and assure him that his Chickadees
brought him in more than his chickens. I do not
care whether you believe it or not, but all growing
things are menaced by a mighty and ever-increas-
ing army of insects, and this tiny Chickadee
is a dough-boy attacking the enemy in his trenches
and destroying as many as five or ten thousand on —
a single drive. This country has National For-
ests and the Chickadee is our best National For-
ester. Nevertheless I am loath to discuss his
economic value, for to me it seems a bit like ask-
ing the economic value of the benediction that
follows after the prayer. We cannot put an esti-

112. What Birds Have Done With Me

mate on spirituality and the Chickadee is a spirit
and must be worshiped in spirit and in truth.

If men realized their condition of pur-blind-
ness, they would have to say, with the one of old
whose sight was being restored, “I see men as
trees walking,” for it’s only the exceptional per-
son who really sees things just as they are; for
only a few things carry any impression to the
brain, and where that actually takes place, it is
soon effaced. A certain man went from New
York to Boston and when his friends asked him
what he saw, he replied in a perplexed manner:
“Oh! nothing much; all I remember is two hay-
stacks I saw out the car window, but they were
going in an opposite direction.” A brilliant man
who graduated from Harvard at nineteen went
for a familiar walk along a much-travelled road
one Sunday morning, taking with him his two
boys, aged six and eight, and a seven-year-old
daughter of his host. On his return he said to
the little girl’s father: “Your daughter made me
feel like a fool this morning. As you know, I
have taken this walk two or three times a day for
the last two weeks and during all that time I can
recall seeing only two birds, a Robin and some
kind of a wader, so when your little daughter
pointed out a half a dozen and knew all about
them, too, it made me feel like no end of a fool.”
An unusually fine, big-hearted, intelligent man,

Mr. Chickadee HES

but alas, the “trees he saw walking” had no leaves
on them.

A few years ago, with the help of this same
little girl, now grown to womanhood, we devoted
some winter days,—we each had our separate
window,—to watching the Chickadees that came
to the free lunch counter that we maintained out-
side on the veranda. By no stretch of the imagi-
nation could we have called our work either Salva-
tion Army or Red Cross, for our visiting dough-
boys always brought their cheer with them. They
all wore the same uniform but no two looked alike,
and by the third day all had gone through with
their baptismal service and in the name of the
Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, had been
given Christian names. Please do not think that
I am going to give the whole list of names, for
such is not my intention, except in the case of
certain individuals to whom you are given a spe-
cial introduction. It went a long way in the
direction of confidential relations when we could
call each by his first name and with them as with
people, nicknames stood for chumminess. ‘‘Othel-
lo”” was certainly blacker than the average, but
to be perfectly honest, failed a little in jealousy
toward his wife, “White Girl,” and tragedy was
unknown in a conventional marriage in which
they lived happily ever afterward. Neither could
we keep it up, and later on they became ‘‘Blackie”

114. What Birds Have Done With Me

and “Whitey,” the rather common members of a
rather uncommon community. Of course she
knew that her husband had done his country some
service and that was all there was about it.
“Romeo” and “Juliet” were very much in evi-
dence, and while they had cut out the balcony
scene altogether, they gave us many a veranda
scene, which is the next thing, and even at this
late day I feel it perfectly right to tell the truth
(and I have a witness who will also swear to it)
throughout the entire veranda scene, they were
always eating peanuts. He was some lover but
with a trifle too much assurance, and while we
never did, we were always fearful of hearing the
word universal used in connection with his ability
to do a single balcony scene. Anyway, it’s the
good husband that counts in the journey of the
years rather than the great lover. Ina quiet and
harmless way there were reasons for suspecting
“Juliet” of being a bit flirtatious, which may have
given ‘‘Romeo” cause for being too ready to
crowd his attentions upon strangers on short no-
tice. However this may be, before the first sea-
son was over, matrons were calling him Mr. Im-
pudence and the name stuck, without any baptis-
mal service.

It is a fact, though I question if well known,
that a raw peanut shelled and sliced across, is to
a winter bird what candy is to a child. In a

=

Ss. =~ = se

——

a

Mr. Chickadee 115

shallow cigar box, tacked on the window sill, was
kept a supply of fine-cut suet, hemp seed, and
sliced peanut; a well-balanced ration, but not bal-
anced for long as the peanut would disappear like
snow in summer, leaving only the hemp seed and
the suet. All accepted the inevitable with a fair
amount of Christian patience and resignation,
with the exception of Mr. Impudence, who never
failed to be outraged and ready to voice his
wrongs to the world at large, and to the head
waiter, grinning at him out of the window, in
particular. I am not going to admit that he
actually swore at me, but the way he would droop
his wings and hurl expletives at me that were
neither necessary nor ornamental, made me feel
just as if I had been sworn at. When I supplied
his needs, he blessed me with the unction of a
bishop offering forgiveness to a penitent sinner.
Indeed, he knew who it was that put the food in
the box and when having made an exhibition of
himself, if I had not compared him to a bishop,
I would tell you that he would actually do penance
himself by taking a hemp seed and flying to a
nearby tree, hold the seed against a limb with his
middle toe, pick out the heart, and devour the
kernel as though it had become to him a means of
grace. My daughter had a Chick that she called
“Mother Mary,” of so devout a look and gracious
a mien that she insisted that the old masters had

116 What Birds Have Done With Me

painted the expression a thousand times. Well!

perhaps. Cheerful and fearless, what can be.

more exalted? What a joyous company, a little
lower than the angels, but super-human just the
same! All agree that there is a great gulf be-
tween man and the ‘‘animal kingdom,” but the
Chickadee bridges it in a single, uninterrupted
journey, when he comes flying from nowhere to
light upon your hand. Victor Hugo once said:
“No man who has ever really laughed can ever
afterward be bad.” Be this as it may, I am
thoroughly convinced that after a wild bird has
crossed the gulf and voluntarily submitted itself
to your loving kindness, it thereby swings open
the door to its own kingdom and makes of you a
loyal ally, for from that time on you are a man
who has dreamed dreams and seen visions.

In mid-afternoon of a gray winter day, return-
ing from a cold and difficult drive over, or
through, mighty drifts, my wife met me at the
door and asked if I would not feed the birds at
once for a party from a nearby town who had
brought two little girls to see the birds eat out
of my hand and had been waiting for some time
in spite of drifting roads. I immediately at-
tempted to comply and for a bad ten minutes cer-
tainly felt like a large-sized ‘‘Nature Faker,” for
the little flock of Chickadees that came at my
call would not come near the tempting sliced pea-

=e. Pees ee

EEO ee =

Mr. Chickadee Why

nut that I held in my open hand. They came into
the railing of the veranda just over my head, and
Mr. Impudence bombed me with expletives and
they all ‘“‘dee de de deed” me at a great rate, but
eat out of my hand they would not. I finally
“sot it through my hair” that they had a not un-
natural instinct against a fur-bearing animal, and
I had kept on my Coonskin coat. I dropped it
off, and presto, I was no Nature Faker at all, but
a lunch counter where no meal ticket was required.

The next winter my daughter, after an illness,
spent some hours a day in a wheel-chair on this
same veranda and the Chickadees overcame their
fear of her fur coat and simply walked all over
her; often taking peanuts from her hand and fly-
ing up to her hat, which they used as a table. I
would have you know that the Chickadee has
very pretty table manners,—in violent contrast,
for instance, to the Nut-hatch, whose table man-
ners are atrocious.

We long since ceased to cultivate too great an
intimacy with our bird friends, being convinced
that it is a doubtful kindness to rob them of their
instinct of self-preservation, and above all else
teach them not to be shy of man. Over on an-
other street, fully a mile away, a Chick attempted
to investigate the bowl of a pipe that an old
German had in his mouth but was not smoking,—
possibly looking for a place to hole up in the cold

118 What Birds Have Done With Me

weather,—and the man thinking himself attacked,
struck the friendly little creature to the ground
and killed him. It was certainly a warning to us,
for we had failed to teach our birds not to at-
tempt even the average pipe without a gas-mask.

In this little study of the Chickadee it has been
hard to stick to prose, which is my only reason for
lapsing into rhyme.

When the blizzard from the Northland
Holds the world in fierce embrace
And ten million swirling crystals
Sting you, blind you, smite your face;
And your world is not your world,
Grotesque distortions, bush and tree;
Above the raging, howling tempest
Comes a joyous chick-a-dee.

In the soul there’s something hidden,
‘That such a message comes to greet;
Above the rage of human passion
Comes a whisper strangely sweet;

A little song from out the tempest,
Born of hope for you and me,
There’s love eternal in the storm cloud
When this bird sings chick-a-dee.

CHAPTER XI
THE SONG AND THE SINGER

Gene Stratton-Porter’s ‘Song of the Cardinal”
is a kind of a winged epic and at the same time a
passionate protest against the man with a gun.
The man with a gun is consciously attempting to
kill a singer, but is quite unconscious of the fact
that if he succeeds he will also have eliminated a
song from the waning chorus of the summer time.

This sad old world is in crying need of more
songs, but each year the number of singers grows
less and the volume of song fainter and fainter
and in places it has been swallowed up by all per-
vading silence. Song is something vast and great,
at large in nature, waiting for the voice that can
give it utterance and none can say that it was not
born close to that realm where angels have their
birth. Whether the utterance comes to us through
the medium of a bird or a human singer, the
uplift is identical and always in the direction of
the better things in life.

On Howard Avenue, Biloxi, Miss., a few years
ago there was a fruit-stand, managed by an old

II9Q

120 What Birds Have Done With Me

Italian woman and she had in captivity a wonder-
fully beautiful Cardinal, the one bird that carries
the colors of the University of Wisconsin through
all the Southland, and this splendid fellow had not
only been robbed of his birth-right of freedom,
but his eyes had been put out with a red-hot iron
that he might not be able to tell night from day
and would thus forever keep on calling for a dawn
whose approach he would never again behold.
Fight down your indignation and honest rage
against the perpetrator of the hideous outrage,
as I did mine, and get down on your knees and
thank Heaven that neither captivity nor blindness,
nor both together, can silence a singer that is a
member of God’s orchestra.

When life is in its fresh, glowing, splendid
morning, youth with its ardors and unvoiced long-
ings demands the new songs, but when experience
has steadied, possibly saddened, the heart de-
mands the heavenly manna of the old songs.
It’s not so long ago that the realization came that
there are no new songs; that a song, like a prov-
erb, to be truly great must have the approval of
unnumbered people through a long period of time.
Every time a national song is sung it becomes
greater, there adheres to it something of the sen-
timent, the emotions of the singer, so the solo
becomes equivalent to the mighty chorus. Call
this fancy if you please, but I never alone listen

The Song and the Singer 121

to a solitary bird song,—I am one of a vast audi-
ence, and the singer is one of a vast choir invisible.
Be this as it may, surely the quality of bird song
is so fine it appeals to the finer sentiments of
our dual natures like a voice from the vanished
years. We are all human, and when we hear
Joseph Addison approving of the music of some
of our bird friends, the approval is some way
divided between the bird and ourselves; the bird
as a good singer and we as good listeners. I here-
with give an Addison letter that you may see
what he thought of the song and the singer. This
letter, written in the year 1708, by Joseph Addi-
son, to the young Earl of Warwick, whose mother
he afterward married, is full of a charm that
time has not dimmed. It reads as follows:

“My dearest Lord:

“IT can’t forbear being troublesome to your
Lordship while I am in your neighborhood. The
business of this is to invite you to a concert of
music which I have found in a neighboring wood.
It begins precisely at six in the evening and con-
sists of a Blackbird, a Thrush, a Robin, and a
Bullfinch. There is a Lark that, by way of over-
ture, sings and mounts till she is almost out of
hearing, and afterward falls down leisurely and
drops to the ground as soon as she has ended
her song. The whole is concluded by a Night-
ingale that has a much better voice than Mrs.

122 What Birds Have Done With Me

Tufts and something of Italian manner in its
diversions. If your Lordship will honor me with
your company, I will promise to entertain you
with much better music and more agreeable scenes
than you have met with at the Opera.”

Addison’s appreciation of old friends of ours
carries back into the past, a point of view that
divorces a real singer from an anatomical speci-
men. It’s a rill near the head-waters of that
great river, that disregarding mere drift wood, is
now rather generally recognized as one of the
living forces of the world-creation’s poetry, crea-
tion’s choral singers.

Joseph Addison, recognized as a thinker of un-
usual power, of necessity, could not neglect the
wonderful house of life in which he lived and had
his being, and consequently investigated bird
life and had his soul thrilled with bird music;
music way beyond man’s imitation of something
to be heard where dawn winds laugh and the trees
of the field clap their hands. It was an old song
that the Blackbird was singing in those days, but
what Addison heard was inferior to what Frances
Ledwidge heard and makes us hear. Listen:

“And then three syllables of melody
Dropped from a Blackbird’s lute and died apart
Far in the dewy dark. No more but three, |
Yet sweeter music never touched a heart

*Neath the blue domes of London.”

ee

aR aE aS

a ae

ee
fal ne Beli Somer!

“<, paki
wh

The Song and the Singer 123

This humble Irish poet, this inspired Nature
lover, this sweetest singer among sweet singers,
shortly before making the supreme sacrifice for
his country, put this echo of himself and the song
of a bird into the heart of humanity.

Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, “when in
the thick of it,’’ saw Flanders’ fields with the eyes
of a seer and sweeps the heart-strings of humanity
with a ‘‘Swan-song,” the like of which was never
written, calling upon the world’s heroes for help,
not for himself, but for his cause,—that he might
sleep where Poppies blow in Flanders’ fields. In
the little poem of fifteen lines, two and a half
are devoted to a great song that is being sung
to terrific accompaniments:

“And in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.”

What he hears is no madrigal, a mere expression
of sylvan bowers and love and gaily flitting hours,
it of necessity must have been a heroic battle-
song, like the great ones “whose footsteps echo
through the corridors of Time.”

In the sky of the soldier’s mind, in his better
moments, there often came the shadow of pass-
ing wings and his soul at such a time was often
enthralled by some dominant bird song—the phan-
tom of a silent song for which he listened though

124. What Birds Have Done With Me

he knew he could not hear it. He put it into
his marching songs and it shortened weary miles
—a spiritual urge, a voiceless benediction from
vividly remembered yesterdays:

“There’s a long, long trail a-winding,
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the Nightingales are singing,
And a white moon beams.”

Not only to marching men, but to the world
weary, the lonesome, the man away from home,
has the singing of wild birds come with an inspira-
tion and an ever-present help in time of need.
This story seems to confirm a general belief. A
man whom unmerciful disaster followed fast,
found himself so beset with difficulties that he
made up his mind to go throw himself in a river
from a bridge; when he got there, he found a
bunch of boys in swimming at the very place where
he was going to end it all. Without the least
modification of his resolve, he hid himself in some
bushes and settled down to wait their departure.
Suddenly a brown bird, a Brown Thrasher, in a
tree almost over his head began to sing, and the
song gripped the soul of him, snatched him out of
hell, as he lay there grovelling with his mouth
in the dust. City bred, he had never listened to
a bird song—had the utmost contempt for those
who did—and now when he could not help him-

The Song and the Singer 1205

self, wonderful waves of melody had taken him
captive, had lifted him up in an indescribably
tender embrace and made a new creature of him.
It was no common bird song, it was a pean of
victory over the redemption of the most miserable
wretch beneath the blue sky. Almost before he
knew it, he was crying over the vanquished cur
who had come down to the river to end all and
the next instant, he was laughing and rejoicing
with the man who was going back to town to win
his own place in a world that was not all discord.
Both beauty and melody are divinely ordained to
bring about the salvation of the lost and they
frequently unite in the wild bird and the super-
human song.

In the general narration of what birds have
done for me, I recall a case when a wandering
voice came to me with inexpressible cheer and
comfort,—shepherding, so to speak, a lost sheep
—at what age does a human creature cease to be a
lamb and become a sheep,—is it seven? Lured
by a cow-bell on the neck of a frisky creature that
possibly was in training to jump over the moon,
I had wandered from six to nine o'clock, and
finally lost my way, in a forest where fences were
unknown and cattle ranged for miles. I was soon
to recall snatches of conversation that neighbors
had carried on with my father. We children
were not allowed to hear much of the talk, always

126 What Birds Have Done With Me

being sent out of the room. Old Clesen Smith had
figured it out, if “it” kept coming at its present
rate of speed, “‘it’’ would hit the earth in just
three days. Grant Culver was sure that if “it”
did not change its course it wouldn’t touch his
house but might tick his barn, ten rods to the east,
and that was fully covered by insurance. Old
George Walker said that if the Bible was true,
there would be signs to give up our leases—he
said this with a sly chuckle—that the world was
so given over to wickedness that nobody had kept
any look-out for the signs of the second coming
and he had a notion that things would go on
about as they were for a little time longer.
George was a friend of mine, and I don’t care if I
did listen at the key-hole. Ezra Wilson had heard
that over at the Seventh Day Settlement, they were
airing out their ascension robes, and getting ready
for the second coming. We children heard what
Daddy said, for he had a big, carrying voice that
would leak out of a little room and besides, he
kept talking when the neighbors were going down
the path. He just told them not to be fools, and
said that if old George Walker was right and the
world was much more than six thousand years
old, that would simply strengthen what he had
been telling them, that no such catastrophe had
ever happened in the past and that was a very
strong assurance that it was not going to take

The Song and the Singer 127

place now. ‘These simple people were afraid of
something, but it was kept from us and we did
not have the slightest notion of what all the talk
was about. Jerry Norton had called to us from
way out in the lake, where he was fishing, that
we had best sharpen up our tomahawks as there
was going to be an Indian war. Nobody believed
him, as a rule, but I think we concluded that he
was telling the truth and began to think Indians.

Now I was in no way prepared for what I saw,
when coming out of a thick growth of poplars
on the edge of a little marsh, I saw a great fiery
body with a long tail of flame in the midnight
sky, rushing straight toward me. Clesen Smith
was no fool and he had said “it” would come in
three days—and that was three days ago. All
the world was more or less afraid of that big
comet of sixty years ago; is it any wonder that a
lost child in the woods—lonely and afraid—
should have been simply terror-stricken? A mad
panic seized him and he ran like a frightened
hare through under-brush and vines and bram-
bles that scratched his face and tore his scanty
clothes, insensible to every feeling except the de-
sire to put all the space possible between himself
and the awful thing that was going to hit the earth
right near the poplar swamp where he first saw
it. He kept it up till, panting and sobbing, he
fell to the earth unable to proceed a single step

128 What Birds Have Done With Me

further; his race was run. How long he lay
there, he never knew. He was roused out of the
sleep of exhaustion by a voice, a calm, steady,
deliberate voice, clearly unafraid of what was go-
ing to happen to the world, saying over and over
again: ‘‘Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will, Whip-
poor-will’’; and it was a disembodied voice, bird,
animal, or human, he could not tell, but comfort-
ing as the hand of his mother stroking his per-
spiring head. He wanted to get closer and as
he approached, it retreated; he forgot everything
else, it was all swallowed up in the desire to get
closer to the wonderful comforter. Ahead, he sud-
denly saw a hole in the woods; they were coming
to a clearing and in a moment more he was in a
path that seemed familiar, and the next he knew
there was Adolph Buzze swinging down the path
toward him, singing a French song. When he
got hold of his hard, strong hands, he held on,
not saying very much, but just holding on. “Oh!
bird come every night. Some joke about whip-
ping-Will; was no Will to lick. Oh! yes, about
comet—that big joke, too. Mighty God, scare
foolish children with Mr. Longtail, then he say
Mr. Fire-eater, go chase yourself and he go, easy
’nuf.”’

Good men, through my adolescence, on revival
occasions were in the habit of trying to uncover
hell, an anti-climax after the big comet, and

The Song and the Singer 129

though they tried to make us hear as well
Heaven’s last trumpet shaking the world below,
what I really heard was ‘‘Whip-poor-will, Whip-
poor-will, Whip-poor-will.”” Dear kindly voice
that in my distressed childhood led me to Adolph
and the home pathway where the cows had come
of themselves, been milked, and were chewing
their cuds as unmindful of the fiery comet as
Adolph himself. How often in after years did the
memory of all this come to me on silent wings with
_ healing for spiritual ills and guidance to the green
pastures and still waters where souls are restored.

Woodrow Wilson has performed a stupendous
service for humanity, the greatest conceivable
service, when he liberated among selfish mankind
a devotion to principle for which men were glad
to give their substance and their lives. Among
the clangor of sordid aims, the snarls of defeated
profiteers, the vituperation of political enemies,
one clear voice has risen, saying over and over
again the same thing: the weak must be protected,
the world made safe for the individual. What
is to be the power to bring this to pass? The
greatest in the world—spiritual force,—the only
power that is adequate, on earth, to remove moun-
tains of ignorance and selfishness. If you will, a
dreamer is making a dream come true, preparing
the world to see beauty that it has never seen;
to hear music that it has never heard. Natural

130 What Birds Have Done With Me

beauty and natural music are so inherently spirit-
ual that they can only be spiritually discerned. I
am using this word spiritual in no narrow ecclesi-
astical sense, but in the wide sense of oneness,
with the only forces that, concealed by the tem-
poral, are eternal. Brother, mine, the poor tem-
poralities of life have prevented you from seeing
the singer and hearing the song.

Returning in the night, after an absence of
more than four months, it seemed most fitting
that the insistent reveille of the Loon should usher
in the dewy freshness of the late April dawn, and
be the fore-runner of a host of familiar voices
that, also, woke the echoes of many a dim and
far-away spring morning. I found myself not
only listening to the cry of this particular Loon,
but to every cry of the kind I had heard since
childhood. It almost seemed as though these
half-forgotten voices lived again, or else I was
hearing the echoes of those long since smothered
in the silence of death. When I first heard it, it
seemed nothing less than the terrible voice of
some unknown wild beast, or the lament of a lost
soul in torment, and long after I knew the sound
came from a bird and was possibly a love call,
certain sub-conscious echoes, in my childish mind,
would cause fear to show a leering face.

The next voice was that of the Mourning Dove.
Sweet and tender as the dawn, yet seemingly

The Song and the Singer 131

charged with an inexpressible plaint, an eternal
lament, fitting it beyond any other wild thing, to
tell its woeful story o’er and o’er amid the wreck-
age of old battle-fields. Indeed, there seems no
personal element in it—if it be grief at all, and
from having been accustomed to think of it as
expressed in exclusive lament for that fine lover,
Cock Robin, dead before his time, a little stretch
of the imagination, and lo! a universal lament
over the wretchedness of humanity.

Optimism is born again at the sound of the
cheery voice of Cock Robin himself, very much
alive and seemingly well satisfied with the world
and life as he finds it, or at least putting up a
splendid bluff. Mr. Woodpecker, I hear those
sounds you are making, two blocks away, using a
telephone for a drum and as an Irishman might
say, while you are waking the echoes, you are not
saying a word.

The Song Sparrow, everybody’s darling, is
next; swinging back the cob-webbed doors into
the music room of one’s heart of hearts.

Ah! I hear you, Mr. Red-Winged Blackbird,
in the willows down by the lake, and your song
is liquid sweetness, long drawn out, a joy forever;
a thread of gold running through the years, a
tinkling melody, not of the earth earthy.

How good it seems to be at home; how inex-
pressibly good to be at home with all these voices
of Nature.

CHAPTER XII
THE LOVE ELEMENT IN BIRD PROTECTION

The poet Bryant wisely calls attention to the
fact that it is to those who held loving com-
munion with Nature, to whom she speaks and
for whom she has a message in all the changing
conditions of human life. It is equally true that
to those who do not love her, she is as silent as
the Sphinx. Love is the key to the great realm
of nature—the wonderful house of life.

In a profound reverence for life, some of the
vanished civilizations have mighty lessons to teach
the man of to-day, who is dominated by his lust
to kill. Egypt had its “sacred Ibis” and anyone
killing it was guilty of murder and the punish-
ment was death. Why was it thus highly es-
teemed? Because in the old days ‘‘Ra came down
from heaven and said unto one of the gods of
Egypt: “Chou art in my place and thou shalt be
called Theth, the representative of Ra.’ Then
the majesty of the god of Ra spake unto Theth,
saying: ‘I will make something shining and re-
splendent in the under-world and in the land of

132

The Love Element in Bird Protection 133

the deep. And I, also, give unto thee power to
send forth thy messengers.’ ‘Thereupon, the Ibis,
the messenger of Thoth, came into being. The
miraculous bird was beneficent in all his ways,
destroying locusts, scorpions, serpents, and the
noxious creatures which infested the country and
its searching out and destruction of these enemies
to the growing crops and to man himself led to
the profound respect which this messenger of a
god enjoyed.”

Theth, inventor of astrology and mathematics,
the god of wisdom and magic, the one among
them with divine power to restore the dead to
life, and the Ibis became one and inseparable. He
was often pictured as having the head of an Ibis,
even when restoring the dead, and the picture of
the bird is, indeed, the hieroglyphic of his name
as well as the hieroglyphic for ‘‘the soul.’’ Is it
not possible that the weakness in the love element
in our regard for bird-life will help explain why
this all seems such nonsense to us. Nevertheless,
much might be said in support of the belief that
the bird is the gift of God, and in very fact in-
separably associated with man’s well-being on the
earth—beneficent messengers meriting loving rev-
erence. Having written thus, much of what will
doubtless sound like ancient fable, may I be per-
mitted to add a parable of the 1919 model?

Professor Blake, returning from a morning

134. What Birds Have Done With Me

walk brought in his hand the dead body of a
small bird, looking strangely like a Canary. His
three children gathered around him and he ex-
plained to them that it was an American Gold-
finch and not a Canary, though sometimes called
one. Instantly the children lost interest when
they found out that it was not a Canary and they
were hunting up their playthings; and it is doubt-
ful if they heard him as he went on to tell them
that the dead bird belonged to the family of Frin-
gillide and its correct name was Spinus tristis.
Certain it is, that Spinus tristis had had no place
in their affectionate little hearts. Finding that
the children had no further interest in his find of
the morning, the Professor tossed the dead bird
out of the window, as a breakfast for the family
cat. Just at that instant his wife came flying into
the room with a bird-cage in her hand,—“Oh,
John, Dicky is dead,” she cried. ‘Toys are dis-
carded and every child takes up the wail, “Dicky
is dead” —and it is a tender husband and father
whose own eyes are misty as he attempts to com-
fort his weeping family. Later on, he makes the
little cofin and he and his wife stand at an upper
window while the children conduct funeral serv-
ices in the garden below.

There is a stern pressure of the clasping hands
of the parents when Baby comes to make the
prayer. He is actually kneeling by the open grave

The Love Element in Bird Protection 135

and his troubled little face is lifted up to the blue
dome of the sky as he says: ‘‘‘Our Father in
heaven, hallowed by thy name,’ Dicky is dead, we
are planting him in the garden, so please, ‘Our
Father in heaven, hallowed by thy name,’ to keep
him from taking cold so he can sing to us like he
used to, when we come to heaven looking for him.
Amen.”

Why the difference in the effect of the death
of these two birds, looking so much alike, on this
family? The answer is not far to seek. In one
case, they had little knowledge and no affection.
In the other they had intimate knowledge and
great affection. After all, it is the love element.
that we must depend upon to save the remnant
of vanishing wild birds.

There is a profoundly philosophical statement
to the effect that ‘“‘things seen were not made by
things that do appear.” In other words, back
of the tangible thing before us, are unseen and
often remotely operating causes. In every life
are what are called red-letter days—something
sharply defined, a new point of view, the instan-
taneous dominion of a strong emotion. Detach-
ments of gray mist are deploying across a hillside
in the early dawn of a May morning, after a
night of rain. The big guns of the storm clouds
had put on their barrage and their receding roar
could be heard across the lake to the southwest.

136 MVhat Birds Have Done With Me

The wind had fallen to a zephyr, the zephyr to a
sigh and the sigh had faltered and died and the
tremulous leaves of the poplars waited orders.
Suddenly, out of the strangeness, out of the gray-
ness, a part of the waiting silence, taking posses-
sion of the universe, a red bird, a flame of fire,
adding the visible presence of God to the mist-
enclosed tabernacle in the wilderness. For this
cause, the bare-footed boy had come into the for-
est—he had mistakenly thought he had come in
search of cattle—for he was a worshiper before
it would have been possible to put the shoes from
off his feet, had he had any on. Worship is a
mysterious cradle in which love sleeps and dreams
and grows strong and is made perfect. It was
only a Scarlet Tanager, but it swiftly led him
through all the stages and gradations of emotion,
and a radiant vision of childhood was transformed
into a tangible possession enriching all of life.
James Lane Allen and Gene Stratton-Porter have
each put their Cardinals into a volume, but my
Tanager and the dreams and fancies connected
with him are so much a part of the heart of me
and the great heart of Mother Nature that prose
seems inadequate and poetry itself could do little
more than call attention to something beyond it,—
like allusions to dawns and sunsets. ‘Though the
Scarlet Tanager did not make a great poet of me,
it put great poetry into the woods and some of

The Love Element in Bird Protection 137

the very finest kind of blank verse into every-day
life. There is no other bird like the Scarlet
Tanager in the North woods and if you think it
pagan to make a deity out of him, at least en-
throne him as a High Priest in the temple of
Beauty.

Quite a good many years ago, we had snow on
the thirtieth of May, and being out driving with
my family we came around the base of a hill, and
there before us not a hundred feet away, in a dead
tree, were two birds not ten feet apart,—one an
Indigo-Bunting and the other a Scarlet Tanager.
A little daughter who had been studying the flags
of all nations, said they were the colors of the
English flag and then we saw them together
against the snow-covered hill—Red, White and
Blue. Looking back across a war-devastated
world where a Peace Conference is now in session,
the remote Memorial Day becomes exceptional—
made so by two birds that quickly separated and
snow that melted like a dream that all taken to-
gether, for a brief moment gave us the colors in
the flags of the three greatest nations on the face
of the earth—England, France, America.

Next to the Tanager, the Indigo-Bunting is our
most beautiful bird. In the estimation of very
many, he stands for the cloudless sky, the halcyon,
the perfect day. Sky-blue, like truth in which
there is no mixture of error, the whole apparel is

138 What Birds Have Done With Me

from a patch of the perfect blue above. As the
Eagle is a national emblem so should our weather
service adopt this calm serene Blue-bird as the
fitting emblem of the kind of weather most de-
sired. As a general favorite, the real Blue-bird
scores over the rarer and more reserved Bunting.
Five hundred people know and love the Blue-bird
where one never saw the other. In the north, the
Blue-bird with the Robin is a harbinger of spring
and is loved for his engaging ways; winning ways,
they surely are, as is proven by the large number
of his friends. With the house Wren and Robin,
his relations are close and almost confidential with
man. ‘The first thing on his return he comes
around your home looking to see if in his absence
you have provided him with a house, which is his
first choice. If you have not done so, he finds a
suitable place as close to you as possible, and goes
to house-keeping. If your soul is not dead within
you, the presence of such a neighbor is looked
upon as a general improvement of the whole
neighborhood. John Burroughs says that “the
Blue-bird has the sky on his back and the earth
on his breast.”’ It seems as though he must have
the red clay of Georgia in mind rather than the
dark loam of Wisconsin. However this may be,
the thought is fine, a dear familiar bird standing
for both earth and sky. No weather is too cold
for the Chickadee, or too warm for the Blue-bird;

The Love Element in Bird Protection 139

I never saw the first seek protection from the cold
nor the second from the fiery rays of the sun.
The Blue-bird, beyond any other bird I know, is
a bird of the sun-light and will not live in the
shade. On the lawn of my home, is a venerable
apple tree, the last of a large pioneer orchard.
It is partially hollow and principally decayed, but
every year it buds and blossoms and puts forth
a wealth of leaves that keeps the sun from pene-
trating to the bole of the tree. Seeing Blue-birds
casually investigating the tree, year after year,
and never building in any of its numerous cavities,
I concluded that it must be on account of the bad
state of decay in which they found the trunk of the
tree. So I put my latest thing in a bird-house in
the deep shade in the center of the tree and the
Blue-birds came and looked it over and did a lot
of talking among themselves and then took up
quarters else-where. Different models of houses
were tried but with no success, and then I got a
hunch; it’s the shade. The neglected house in the
tree was quickly moved to the top of a fence post
up by the garden, all in the merry month of May,
and in no time it was taken on a long-time lease
and has not been vacant since.

One year a pair of Blue-birds set up house-keep-
ing about six feet from the ground, in an aban-
doned Wood-pecker’s hole, in the dismantled stub
of an old apple tree. Nothing could have been

140 What Birds Have Done With Me

more public than the selection of a nesting place.
It was on Hotel grounds and not two hundred feet
from a tennis court and from the beginning of the
nest building to the flight of the brood, people
passed constantly and visitors frequently came in
crowds. All this disturbed the birds not at all,
and it did not require a whole lot of imagination
to fancy the proud parents posing the babies for
their pictures after they came out of the hole in the
tree. It was a beautiful Summer-school where
little children, world-weary people born and reared
in cities, entered together a kindergarten where
the teachers were birds that stood for the earth
and the sky.

Time spent in bird study that does not trans-
form the student into the lover is time thrown
away. Only spiritual forces can conquer material
brute lust and selfishness. London-Bridge can be
fiddled down and love can conquer Jungle-land.
Just as soon as a large number of people place
upon our bird neighbors proper esthetic value—
a value not to be computed in dollars and in
cents—but in heart throbs and pure joy—we
will be assured that love will bring about the ful-
filling of the law.

Nobody does anything in this world worth
while except where action is the expression of an
emotion, a sentiment not all of the earth earthy.
Horse breeders, dairy-men, shepherds, chicken

The Love Element in Bird Protection 141

and dog fanciers and swine growers have a certain
interest in the creature that occupies their thought
and monopolizes their activities; but I fancy that
none of them would care to be reckoned the ac-
tual lover of the creature they care for, while on
the other hand those who care for birds are proud
to be known as bird-lovers. A very learned and
somewhat famous educator once wrote me offer-
ing the chair of nature study in a school of which
he was president and the letter went on to state
that people who ought to know, had recommended
me as an accomplished ornithologist. I wrote
right back and said that there must be some mis-
take, I was no ornithologist at all, never had
claimed to be anything of the kind, and I was glad
to be able to state that there was nothing in my
past suggestive of King Herod—being only a bird-
lover.

Just as people are constantly asking you—if you
happen to know ten lines of poetry—what is your
favorite poem, so people are always asking me
what is my favorite bird. The question puts me
in the position of a person with a big family being
asked which is the favorite child. It being more
or less embarrassing, I have invariably tried to
side-step it and even now I think I’ll have to do
the “Lady or the Tiger.’ There are Mourning
Doves and Bronze Grackles; each has had a large
place in my heart—which is the dearest dear, you

142 What Birds Have Done With Me

must decide. Before I tell their story, I wish to
call attention to a general law. Intimate knowl-
edge and close association are necessary conditions
of real affection. Why the Dove and the Grackle?
I have only the one answer; I have known them
intimately since child-hood—they are old play-
mates.

‘““A burnt child dreads the fire” is the proverb,
and an analysis of the why would show that the
flame had burned itself deeply into the memory.
I not only burned my fingers but my whole hand,
and got a live coal into my apology for a shoe in
rescuing a Mourning Dove’s nest from a burning
brush-pile. Never. mind about my eye-brows and
my eye-winkers, I got the nest out that was just
beginning to smoke and one bird lived, my very
very first pet coming from the wild. With it
perched upon my shoulder, I climbed several steps
up toward a kingdom where things fly; it made
me want to fly and later when it would make cer-
tain little journeys in the world, I would pursue,
running like the wind. Panting, breathless, de-
spairing, certain it never would come back, it al-
ways came straight as an arrow for its perch on
my shoulder. Was ever a seven-year-old so en-
vied by other boys, especially after Mourny
learned to take a grain of corn from between my
teeth, fluttering before my face as it did so? An-
other trick was to pry open my clinched fingers

a ee

The Love Element in Bird Protection 143

with its bill for kernels of wheat held in my
clasped hand. J, alas, had not heard in those days
about Mahomet having something to eat in his
ear when the multitude saw pigeons lighting on
his shoulder to whisper to him, or I might also
have gone into the prophet business. It’s rank
exaggeration to say of any thing that it’s worth
its weight in gold, but that was my estimate of
my pet. It was never caged, but was left free to
go and come, and it did both. It found its own
kind and might spend a half day in the fields with
other doves but always came home to roost. Many
a time when bringing water from the well a hun-
dred yards from the house, in the evening, it
would come sweeping back and flutter along before
my face pretending to be after corn from between
my teeth. My older sisters said that I was a sissy
and had taught it to kiss me. Perhaps I had not
explained all of Mourny’s tricks to them. I had
been holding bags for a neighbor who had just
finished thrashing and a lot of grain had been left
around where the thrashing machine had stood
and I had salvaged a big pocketful for Mourny
and it was under my very eye having a feast in
the open passage-way between the kitchen and
wood-house, when coming from nowhere, a
strange black and white tom cat launched itself
on the unsuspicious Dove and killed it in one sec-
ond. Sir Thomas clearly thought he was getting

144 What Birds Have Done With Me

some easy meat and clearly was in no way pre-
pared for an avalanche of boy that was on him be-
fore he could make way with his kill, knocked his
prey out of his mouth and was seemingly bent on
squeezing the breath of life out of him as well.
The strong legs and powerful feet with their mur-
derous claws made short work of the little hands
that grasped the throat of the small tiger, that
escaped after lacerating the hands of a child be-
longing to the foolish human creatures who, for
ages, have harbored it. That such things could
be in the light of day had such a numbing effect
upon him that he made no out-cry, the cat had
done that and he had duly contrasted his red
hands with the pitiful red feet of his pet, as he
took the body out to the garden and buried it be-
fore he allowed them to take him to old Dr. Shaw
to stop the bleeding. Every Mourning Dove since
has been a lineal descendant of Mourny and the
wife and daughter, of the man writing this, have
heard for the first time since this reminiscence
was started, the name Mourny which all these
years he had kept hidden in his heart.

A certain Doctor of Divinity here in the South
is known as a mighty hunter, and a notice in a
city paper said that on a recent hunting expedi-
tion, he had to his credit (?) thirty-three Mourn-
ing Doves; let those who will call him Reverend
Doctor,—to me he is nothing but an old Tom-

The Love Element in Bird Protection 145

cat, thirty-three times meaner than “Old Black
and White Scratches.”

Cyclonic conditions had seemed imminent all
the morning, but the storm did not break till near
eleven o’clock and when it did come it was not a
twister as had been feared, but a deluge of rain,
a hail-storm and wind of a velocity that cuffed
and broke great branches off trees as though in
wild sport. A carriage load of people had sought
refuge in our house, and when the storm was at
its worst and we sat around the living room in
almost perfect darkness; some sang and others
prayed and we boys thought it a fine lark. Such
- convulsions of nature are not apt to last long and
when all was over and we looked, amid indescrib-

able wreckage of fences and tree-tops and heaps
of hail-stones, there was a woebegone young
Grackle that could neither fly nor walk but was
still very much alive. One of our callers when he
saw him said: ‘“‘Holy Moses, did he rain down?”
It seemed a good guess for as no Grackles had
nested on the sand-hill a mile from any water, if
the storm cloud did not bring him, his presence re-
mained a mystery. First he was called Holy
Moses, but later on just Moses,—never Mose.
It is not altogether his black attire that suggests
the ministerial character, but for a fact, with the
possible exception of the Raven, he is the most
sepulchral, stately and dignified of birds. Every-

146 What Birds Have Done With Me

body agreed that Moses was funny, took life and
himself that seriously that it was positively funny
just to look at him. When he walked it was the
Lord Mayor of London leading a procession to be
reviewed by the king, and then Moses was always
lame which made it all the funnier. He could lose
himself about the grounds, but his dignity, he
could not lose. He was supposed to be a young
bird just out of the nest when he first came, but
soon that was questioned, he had such wise old
ways. Those who took the side of youth pointed to
the knock down fact that he had not yet learned to
fly. In two weeks he was a very important mem-
ber of the family, in four weeks he owned the
place and instead of his living with us, we lived
with him. Wescott’s Brindle Bull dog attempted
to cross our lawn and our dog Carlo, a mongrel
but some fighter, went over the top to meet this
Hun. It occurred by the back kitchen door and
soon all was in wild tumult and Moses forgot
himself to that degree that he flew up into a near-
by tree—remaining there through the engage-
ment, a kind of a war balloon giving Carlo point-
ers. When the dog fight was over, he took up
his old life and never again was known to attempt
flight. To narrate all the queer things he did
before a cat got him would make a book, and
what I aim to do is quite the reverse. I simply
wish to show that to the general acquaintance

a ee ee

The Love Element in Bird Protection 147

with the Grackles that I got when driving the ox
teams on the breaking plough, is a close and inti-
mate relation with the mysterious King of the
Grackles who came out of the storm cloud and
made his home with us. We did not capture him,
he captured us. I, for one, did not know how
much I loved him till the morning when he was
not in any of his usual places and Cash Haskins,
who was helping plant corn, accidentally stumbled
on the remains of a cat’s supper on the lawn where
we saw him first. Yes, I’m frank to admit that
I’ve always been fond of Grackles and what is
more, at least, some Grackles have been fond
of me. I presume that when one creature trusts
another completely, if you could get at the facts
you would find that trust bound up with a certain
amount of fondness.

Not so long ago on a misty morning, I was
using a scythe among some shrubbery that I did
not care to turn over to the tender mercy of a
| hired man. I found there a Mr. and Mrs. Bronze
Grackle and five very callow babies in possession
of the grass I wished to mow. I started in gin-
gerly, thinking I would soon be ordered to go
about my business, but strangely enough, the birds
made no objection to my presence and there was
neither distrust nor the faintest anxiety in their
usual utterances. Still, I did not realize that these
_birds were paying me the highest compliment that

148 What Birds Have Done With Me

a wild bird can pay a human creature,—perfect
confidence. A stranger came out there to see me
on business and instantly there was blood on the
moon. I took him by the arm and led him away
but turned around and took off my hat to the
birds, as genuinely touched as I ever was in my
life. Five weeks in a darkened room, when your
relation with the outer world was by means of a
bulletin, giving pulse and temperature of which
you know nothing. The head surgeon starting in
at zero, no chance—then, one in ten, in five thou-
sand. Then even; then, on the road to recovery
and then, sit up day after to-morrow. But the
night before the appointed time, I bribed the nurse
to put two pillows under my head, raise the win-
dow shade and let me have a look out. It was
winter when they carried me into that room, it’s
spring now and in the park just across from the
hospital a pair of Grackles are making a nest.
My stately friends had brought the spring and all
out-doors, so I could see it from my window—
nests, new life, called back by two handfuls of
straw and mud.

A psychologist of some note has recently put
forth the theory that black is not a color and if
the mind is concentrated on this supposed some-
thing,—that is really nothing,—sleep may be in-
duced. It certainly is of some benefit in some
kinds of insomnia. I started to concentrate on

a
‘
}
;
‘
‘

The Love Element in Bird Protection 149

Poe’s Raven whose color seems black, but black is
not a color, so it’s nothing; but I never felt quite
at home with some-body’s Raven so I naturally
traded him for one of my own Grackles. I fol-
low him across the lawn as I have seen him walk-
ing a thousand times, he out-walks me; I grow
weary, lose my way and later waking take up the
chase again with the same result. Who knows,
perhaps it will be the King of the Grackles who
will gently lead me down to my last sleep.

CHAPTER XIII
MR. ESAU

In introducing my friend Mr. Esau, I concede
your right to an immediate explanation as to how
a Rose-breasted Grosbeak became the possessor
of such an extraordinary name. It’s simple enough,
which is probably true of all nick names, but we
are not to lose sight of the fact that a nick name
will not stick unless it has the approval of the
majority of one’s acquaintances. A Rose-breasted
Grosbeak, a hospital case,—the hospital being a
big wire cage, on a veranda,—was seen by a young
lady and her mother, demurely kissing a feminine
caller through the wires and what more natural
than for the young lady to exclaim: “I saw Esau
kissing Kate and the truth is we both saw”; and as
the act and the comment were both repeated, what
more natural than for Mr. Grosbeak to become
Mr. Esau. Then again, a brother had robbed a
brother of his birth-right and in so doing had de-
prived him of a blessing that included the dews of
heaven and the fatness of the earth and love and

song, of which corn and wine are the all too fee-
150

Mr. Esau 151

ble symbols. An air-gun that, perhaps, a fond
mother thought would make her future President
manly in his tender years, had been the weapon
used in the fracture of a wing, and this fracture
meant the robbing of the organ-loft of a cathedral
tree of a sweet and mysterious musician, intimate
friend of Aeolian Harpists and rival of Apollo.

Victory and defeat are often not more than a
minute apart and one has a most unaccountable
trick of usurping the place of the other. A small
boy thrilled with victory as he beheld his ani-
mated target falling fluttering through the limbs
of the tree earthward, but when within reach of
his hand the splash of red on the breast was mis-
taken for blood, and overwhelmed with remorse
and shame, he took to his heels; and it was quite
another boy, who knew nothing of the catastrophe,
that picked up the wounded bird by the roadside
and carried it to his teacher at school and she, figu-
ratively speaking, put a red cross upon him, and
had the patient rushed to my hospital for neces-
sary surgery.

Like his great prototype, my Mr. Esau was a
cunning hunter and a creature of the field and in
addition, I found him to be one of my most im-
possible patients fighting each and every measure
attempted for his betterment, with the obstinacy
of a martyr and the long-suffering of a saint. The
difficulty was not in applying the starched bandage

152 What Birds Have Done With Me |

to the nicely adjusted fragments of the greatest
wing bone; the difficulty came in when we at-
tempted to hold the broken wing in its proper
place. So to speak, Mr. Esau refused to carry
his arm in a sling and if there can be any such
thing as silent eloquence, he eloquently announced
his unalterable determination to die first. With
some feeling akin to what Darius Green enter-
tained for the Wren, my gray matter, plus that
of a host of helpful friends, was combined in an
effort to out-wit a single broken-winged, improp-
erly nourished mite of a bird, who scored over us
as the afore-mentioned Wren did over Darius, in
his attempts at flight. A four-tailed bandage, the
size of six postage stamps, laid out two and two,
with a tape sewed to each corner and holes cut
for the legs, when afore-mentioned tapes were
criss-crossed and tied over the back, was impul-
sively called Eureka, but should have been Ap-
pomattox, for in less than six hours I found my-
self kneeling upon the worthless contrivance and
humbly proffering my ‘‘Catlin” to Mr. Esau and
expressing the hope that he would condescend to
use my Rush Diploma as his door-mat. Though
bull-dog tugging at the bandage would not re-
lieve him of it, it never failed to pull it around
enough so that he could not use his legs, and en-
able him to turn turtle; the sight of his red keel

Mr. Esau 153

uppermost wrecked faith, hope and charity every
fifteen minutes. -

I had rather be chief cook for a hundred lumber
jacks than personal chef for a single caged Gros-
beak. Mrs. Rorer herself would have had to
work over time to devise dishes that would tempt
sO Capricious an appetite. Potato bugs were out
of season and Crickets and Grass-hoppers in Kin-
dergarten classes; Dragon-flies cruising as subma-
rines and June-bugs undrilled for street concerts;
the White Grub was my refuge and help in trou-
ble. How he loved them! He would eat a half
a pint in a day. It was a banquet twelve hours
long and he Fletcherized each individual grub.
He would hop about the cage with a fine fat
beauty sticking out of the side of his mouth, sug-
gesting a devotee getting the very last whiffs from
a quarter inch long cigarette. He would not eat
an angle worm on compulsion, or in any other
way, and rejecting cherries and lush strawberries,
always made believe that he had a well-bred lik-
ing for grape-fruit. Hemp-seed he cracked for the
sake of the recreation it afforded, having clearly
no great liking for the kernel except as it helped
to balance his White Grub ration. He never at-
tempted to sing the songs of the tree-tops in his
narrow prison-house and how his kind learned of
his predicament, I have no more way of knowing

154 What Birds Have Done With Me

than I have of what they thought of it after pay-
ing him repeated visits. Almost every day he
would have visitors, both male and female, com-
ing singly, as a rule, and perching upon his cage
for about the length of time that is given to the
formal call, and my wife and daughter are posi-
tive that they kissed at parting. I take it that
the calls were more or less formal, for they never
brought him any thing to eat, neither did he ever
offer to share his grub with them. I confess to
having failed to get any key to the mystery of
their communication and yet there is every reason
to believe that the misfortune of one of their num-
bers made quite a lasting impression upon the
minds of his Grosbeak neighbors and friends.
Proof of this statement will be offered later on.
When the last bandage was removed, it was
found that the bones had knit properly and he
had pretty fair use of his wing, but it drooped
and could not be held in place and extended
flight was still a question. For two weeks more
this question kept him in Hospital; the last night
came, his splendid progress would demand the
opening of the door at dawn, returning him to
the blessed earth, the mysterious fellowship of all
aerial voyagers,—free, free, free! The ways of
life and death are past finding out. The «dawn
came, but the door was not opened, the good
wing and the mended one were equally helpless,

Mr. Esau 155

and on the bottom of the cage was a rigid little
body, the worthless remains of what we had
known as Mr. Esau. Perhaps the eyes blurred a
little and the hand was not usually steady when
certain rites and ceremonies were being performed
that were destined to change Mr. Esau into, not
only a stuffed Grosbeak, but a whole sermon on
the text, “Who being dead yet speaketh.”
Making my annual bird-talk to the village
school, shortly after the death of the Grosbeak,
I took his skin with me and told his story and let
the children of the lower grades not only see
but handle the patched-up wing, the only witness
called for a time; but in the fifth grade I re-
ceived a hunch and shading my eyes with my hand
I began to look for the guilty boy; after a pre-
tended unsuccessful search, I said in substance:
“‘No, he is not here and if he was I would not
point him out, for you all hate him, hate him be-
cause he is a robber and has robbed you and me
of something of the sweetness and melody of the
spring-time and to this there is to be added the
hideous blood-lust that is supposed to lurk in jun-
gles.” “Children,” I continued, “I want you to
be very sorry for this boy’s mother—poor, poor
soul, how I pity her, in ignorance of his real char-
acter,—sneaking, cowardly, pitiless;—she is
doubtless hoping, believing, praying that her son
will turn out a splendid man, a leader of men.” I

156 What Birds Have Done With Me

doubtless said too much, but Mr. Esau’s shade—
I’ll not say skin, for ordinarily they are denied
the power of speech—said even more and the
children were as eager to get hold of the killer
as they had been to handle the skin of the thing
killed, and I am quite sure it would not have been
anything like as gently.

Bright and early Saturday morning following,
the girl said there was a boy in the outer office
to see me and when she sent him in I half caught
my breath, for my hunch was true and I had se-
lected the right urchin in No. five School-room.
Though scarcely ten years of age, he was quite
an old friend of mine, and I patted him on the
shoulder and for the fortieth time, I reminded him
of the bitter fight he put up at the age of five
when I vaccinated him. However much he had
been in the habit of rewarding my reminiscence
with a pleased little grin, no ghost of anything of
the kind was on duty nor could be called from
afar.

Clearly Billy was in trouble, and the world
over, the deeper the trouble, the more difficult it
is to get rid of the perilous stuff that weighs upon
the heart. He was over-whelmed by a mountain
that stood squarely across his pathway and could
only say when I asked him what the matter was:
“Oh! nothen Doc,—that is, nothen much.” He
evidently found the room warm and I told him

Mr. Esau 167

to take a seat by the window till he was ready to
talk. A surreptitious glance revealed the fact that
Billy’s chin was trembling and he had frequent
furtive uses for his dirty little handkerchief, so
swinging around I delivered a ‘‘mercy shot”—
“Don’t feel bad, son, I ’ll never tell any one that
it was you who shot the Gros-beak.”’

I do not intend to be thought flippant in the
presence of real grief when I say that before you
could say “Jack Robinson,” Billy had hold of my
hand, sobbingly demanding that I ‘“‘Cross my heart
and hope to die.”” As there were still some duties
and pleasures not worn entirely thread-bare, I de-
murred at the latter half of his demand and we
compromised on the first clause to his entire sat-
isfaction. No possible question of the soundness
of Billy’s conversion or the honesty of his desire
tu become a Billy Sunday among Junior Audubon
Evangelists. Before many audiences in many
parts of the country, thus did Mr. Esau win his
victories so that if ever canonized and given a
new name it will be entirely proper to call him
after some great evangelist. I walked part way.
home with Billy and at the turn in the road this
was his parting confidence: ‘‘If you had told, I
don’t ’spect it would have made so much differ-
ence with the fellows, but I know the girls would
all ’spized me.”

A year after the long struggle with Mr. Esau,

is8 What Birds Have Done With Me

the one who had carried it on was himself a
prisoner on the same veranda, not in a cage but a
wheel chair, contrary beyond question but not so
much so as he might have been had it not been
for the flittering ghost of Mr. Esau acting as a
horrible example. Grosbeaks are shy birds of
the tree-tops, who reverse the conduct of good
little boys by being more often heard than seen,
so it becomes difficult to imagine my surprise to
have one come into the ornamental wood-work
at the top of the veranda; and here follows the
proof that they had not forgotten the poor cap-
tive of the preceding year; a maid brought out a
canary and hung the cage under the veranda and
coming from nowhere almost instantly, there was
a Grosbeak on it clearly looking for Mr. Esau.
Singly it seemed as though each Grosbeak visited
the cage once only and there were no kisses at
parting. Dickey was to them no yellow peril and
there was neither race war nor affection between
them,—only the Alps of an impassable indiffer-
ence. Coming back to my own “‘vine and fig tree”’
from a hospital that for me had been down close
by the gates of death, it is impossible for me to
make any one understand how much the Gros-
beaks did for me when it became evident that
among humans I was the one to be trusted. All
that Spring, always excepting Chickadees, no other
birds had ever been so intimate, almost confiden-

Mr. Esau 159

tial,—if such a word can be used in connection
with a bird. They Fletcherized their food, made
love, fought their little battles, told their stories
and sang their songs, as though I was quite one of
them. To some it will seem like extravagant
sentiment, even when considered in the light of the
thick coming fancies of a sick man, but to this day
I feel that I shall stumble and lose my way if I
attempt to tell all that is in my heart of the minis-
try of these wild bird friends who visited me
when I could not go to the forest where Spring
and Summer meet.

“Ah! who shall lift the wand of magic power,
And the lost clew regain?
The unfinished window in Aladdin’s tower
Unfinished must remain.”

CHAPTER XIV
STUPIDITY STREET

In an editorial having the caption; ‘“The Strong
Things in Life,” the “Times-Picayune” of New
Orleans, quoted the following lines from the poems
of Ralph Hodgson and I know of nothing to be
found elsewhere that is a more remarkable epi-
tome of the whole question of ‘‘Bird Protection.”

“T saw with open eyes
Singing birds sweet
Sold in the shops
For people to eat,
Sold in the shops of
Stupidity Street.

“T saw in a vision
‘The worm in the wheat,
And in the shops nothing
For people to eat;
Nothing for sale in
Stupidity Street.”

Here, in a nut shell, is the whole matter; it is
stupid to kill song birds for food, they are the

160

Stupidity Street 161

real wardens of all growing things, they stand be-
tween the worm and the wheat field; kill them all
and there will be nothing for sale in ‘Stupidity
Street.” There is no escaping the inference of
the poem. The man who uses a song bird as an
animated target, destroying an insectivorous bird
for a tidbit to tickle the palate of a would-be epi-
cure, may not be a criminal, but alas, is one of a
multitude—all of whom live on over-crowded
“Stupidity Street.” Follow the people home who
are guilty of wantonly destroying our vanishing
wild life, and you will find, with scarcely an ex-
ception, that they all live on Stupidity Street. If
I were a devout churchman, I would suggest this
addition to the Prayer Book: from the besotted
ignorance of “Stupidity Street,’’ Good Lord, de-
liver us.

Here is a very sad case; a beautiful, very beau-
tiful church, to which the waves sing their finest
battle and love songs and the leaves of the Live-
Oaks tell their secrets, and wild-bird singers on
the outside outrival the best efforts of the hu-
man choirs within, and the church is called ‘“The
Church of the Redeemer.” ‘There is a Rectory
and a Rector, everything quite proper, and all
located on Stupidity Street—for the Holy man is
a killer of insectivorous birds and no voice has
been raised against him in “The Church of the Re-
deemer.”’ If the man of God does not know that

162 What Birds Have Done With Me

a Dove is worth more to agriculture to-day than
for sacrifice in the old days, and more for esthetic
reasons than for pie, he should go to school again
and be re-ordained.

It would seem that the church whose altars,
through dim, dark and dreadful ages had dripped
with the blood of young Pigeons and Doves could
do no less, by way of expiation for that bloody
past, than turn all the power of its efficient organ-
ization to conserve what is left of wild-life.

The sacred part of a temple has, of late years,
become associated with bird protection—sacred-
ness like a thread of gold clinging to our tardy
efforts to save our vanishing wild life. Those
enlisted in the Grand Army of Bird Protection
are not Crusaders, struggling to rescue from the
unbeliever a Holy Sepulcher; they are the Master
Builders for the coming years and their sanctu-
aries will be filled with life and song:

“Till the sun grows cold, and the stars grow old
And the leaves of the judgment-book unfold.”

He who builds for the future, struggling to
improve conditions affecting all the people for all
time, is engaged in the only holy war that has
ever been waged in the history of mankind. A
stainless soldier is the one who fights for principle
and is a victor glorified compared to the one

Stupidity Street 163

whose motives are sordid or corrupt. The “City
of Refuge” and the “Horns of the Altar” are
some way, more or less closely associated with
the “Bird Sanctuary,” as we know it to-day. It is
perfectly wonderful how soon the wild things
come to know where they are safe. When a mis-
guided politician in my own county had an open
season on the remnant of our prairie chickens—
protected for years—the amazed and terrified
birds collected on the Maplewood Audubon Res-
ervation—our farm—and walked about the lawn
like domestic chickens, a wounded bird com-
ing with the rest, and actually died under my
ofice window. Only the other day a beautiful
golden woodpecker, having been shot by some
miscreant, came back to our Sanctuary and died
upon my doorstep and the blood that dripped
from step to step cried out in mute protest against
the evil doer who kills for sport, fixing upon him
blood-guiltiness; and I saw the stain upon my
-doorstep magnified into a stain upon the land
that fails to prevent the shedding of innocent
blood. We ask nothing less than America as a
vast Sanctuary for song and insectivorous birds.
_ That there is no difference between North and
South except in the matter of roasting coffee and
whether we shall have cold bread or hot bis-
cuit for supper, I am sorry to say isn’t quite true,
for there is a custom in the whole South of shoot-

164. What Birds Have Done With Me

ing song and insectivorous birds that goes back
to the first settlement of the country and the pro-
fessional man, the business man and the negro,
with his three dollar gun, are all defying the fed-
eral law and are active as ever in bird destruction.
Bird protection has utterly failed to get the moral
support of the best people in even fairly pro-
gressive cities and where this is so, what can
you expect of lewd fellows of the baser sort in
little villages and back country places?

Biloxi, Mississippi, long a winter resort for
Northern people, ought to be more progressive
than the average city, and yet after five winters of
persistent work for bird protection, talking in all
their schools and writing articles for the city pa-
pers, I am frank to say I can see small results.
The same paper that published my protest against
killing Mocking-birds, published a vitriolic re-
joinder from a woman who attempted to justify
the killing on the ground that she preferred straw-
berries to Mocking birds. Nothing that I have
ever written about birds has been refused pub-
lication in city papers and the schools clamor
for more talks—they could not be worth less than
they cost—and I am called the “Bird-man”’ and
“Bird’s Attorney” and my acquaintance with the
children of the public school is extensive, but I am
assured by good lawyers that no jury would con-
vict were I to have a person arrested for viola-

Stupidity Street 165

tion of the Federal law, whatever the evidence
against the prisoner.

I am going to take the public into my confidence
and say that the lady of whom we have rented
apartments for the last five years is a good friend
and I felt pretty sure that I had made one con-
vert when she had her ten-year-old son, last win-
ter, throw away his air-gun, but on our return in
December this year, I found she had given him
an ante-Christmas present of the largest and best
air-gun on the market and he and his little chums
were killing birds, as their fathers had before
them.

There are exceptions to all general rules but
generally speaking so far as economic and esthetic
appreciation of birds go, I am forced to locate
even my friends on that street whose name is the
name of this chapter. On this point I want to
quote from an account of a brief visit to an in-
terior town twenty miles from New Orleans where
for four days my friend, Creswell J. Hunt, be-
ginning on February 20th, 1918, took a bird cen-
sus. The deep, dark and awful ignorance that he
encountered—every solitary soul living on Stu-
pidity Street—is almost beyond belief. Here is
an extract from his report that speaks for itself.
“While the residents of southern Louisiana seem,
one and all, to have a great affection for the Mock-
ing bird, this species seems to be about the only

166 What Birds Have Done With Me

one for which there is any esthetic feeling. Other
birds appeal to them entirely according to the
quality of the bird’s flesh and this makes the work
of the Department of Conservation very difficult
in enforcing its laws for the protection of the in-
sectivorous birds. These people have shot Robins
and Wood Thrushes and Vireos and King-birds
all their lives and it is difficult to explain to them
why they should stop it now, and still harder to
keep them from killing these birds. Mr. A. E.
Manint, the Department of Conservation’s agent
in St. Tammany Parish, has done remarkably
good work in protecting the birds in his terri-
tory and, at the same time, has kept the good
will of the people. He has been diplomatic, and
from what I saw, it appears that most of the
people like him and respect his authority.

“People with whom I talked knew the birds
by local names—to me entirely new names—and
in many cases it was difficult to tell what species
they were talking about as their efforts to describe
the bird’s appearance were often very misleading.
For instance they told me that I should be there a
little later when the ‘Pops’ came. ‘Their hand-
somest bird, they said, was the ‘‘Red Pop,” while
the “Blue Pop,” and the “Green Pop” were also
beauties. I later found that their ‘“Red Pop”’ is
the male Painted Bunting or Nonpareil, while
their ‘‘Green Pop” is the female of this species.

Stupidity Street | 167

And the “Blue Pop”’ is the male Indigo Bunting.

Then they told me about the “Big Caille’—
(pronounced Big Ki)—the game bird par ex-
cellence—a bird that feeds upon the magnolia
seeds; a bird whose flesh some of the most famous
French chefs had pronounced the finest eating in
the world. And then there was the “‘Little Caille”
and the “Black Caille,” both shot along with the
“Big Caille,’ but the flesh of the “Big Caille”
surpassed them all. From the descriptions given
me I decided that this ‘Big Caille’”’ must surely be
one of our Thrushes, and I later found this to be
correct. The “Big Caille’—the most famed of
all the game birds—is none other than the Wood
Thrush. I have always heard the Wood Thrush
praised but never from this standpoint. I have
heard the Wood Thrush proclaimed the finest
singer in North America. No doubt, with us, the
species ranks foremost in esthetic value. To
many of us Northerners, it is indeed the bird of
birds. It is, perhaps, the last bird we would
care to slaughter. But down around Mandeville,
they love the “Big Caille’—-when browned just
right and served upon the table. And there is
perhaps more hard feeling against the Depart-
ment of Agriculture for prohibiting the killing of
the Wood Thrush than there is about the protec-
tion of any other bird.

The Olive-backed Thrushes are killed under the

168 What Birds Have Done With Me

name of ‘Little Caille’’ and the Cat-bird, under
the name of “Black Caille.”’

Louisiana has one of the best State Conserva-
tion Commissions, but I am a great believer in the
long arm of Uncle Sam, whose officials are inde-
pendent of votes and in spite of some very excel-
lent work done, a raid the other day gathered in
a negro with a barrel of pickled Robins, and fif-
teen whites, among them deputy sheriffs and busi-
ness men. Though the state officers do their best,
no one in that bunch, possibly excepting the col-
ored man, will get a fine calculated to make any
one sit up and take notice. The migratory bird
not being the property of any state is very prop-
erly the ward of the Federal government and with
all possible assistance from state organizations,
its protection must be brought about through Na-
tional intervention. As an Irishman might say:
‘The Western Front is in the South”’ for the great
battle to make the whole country safe for song
and insectivorous birds will be fought there and
efforts to conserve and protect cannot long con-
tinue when one-half the territory is being swept
and combed by hunters who kill everything that
flies. The Street must be taught the sweetness
of bird-song, the utter shamefulness of robbing
nature of her most beautiful and attractive forms
of life, for in exquisite coloring many flowers are
wingless birds and many birds only winged flowers,

| Stupidity Street 169

plus their song. To take birds out of poetry
would be like taking tune out of music,—noth-
ing left but idiotic jargon.

Birds are poetry per se and cannot be replaced
by other living creatures in poems where they
figure, without turning fine poetry into caricature.
Here is the proof of the above statement; I will
first give Tennyson’s Poet Song, then caricature
it by simply putting an animal in the place of the
bird.

The rain had fallen, the Poet arose,

He pass’d through the town and out of the street;
A light wind blew from the gates of the sun

And waves of shadow went over the wheat,
And he sat him down in a lonely place

And chanted a melody loud and sweet,

That made the wild swan pause in her cloud,
And the lark drop down at his feet.

The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,

The snake slipt under a spray,

The wild Hawk stood with the down on his beak,

And stared, with his foot on the prey.

And the nightingale thought, “I have sung many
songs,

But never a one so gay

‘For he sings of what the world will be

When the years have died away.”

Beginning with the last two lines of the first
verse:

170 What Birds Have Done With Me

That made the wild Ass pause in her race
And the frog drop down at his feet.

The old bear paused as he hunted the bee,

A snake slipped under a spray

And a rooster stood with the down on his beak
And stared with his foot on the prey.

The Moo-cow said, “I’ve lowed many a song
But never a one so gay

For he sings of what the world will be
When the years have died away.”

There is still worse caricature than this, the
worst imaginable; instead of the music of the wild ©
—the choir made invisible by the boughs of a ven-
erable brotherhood of trees, you send skulking
through these dream haunted shades, the man
with a gun, the mean brother of a wolf who being
able to comprehend beauty, destroys it; able to
comprehend music, seeks to silence it forever—
let us pillory forever that libel on God’s crea-
tures.

Let me whisper it; the people on the Street are
ignorant,—deeply, darkly, densely ignorant.
They don’t know the first thing of the laws that
govern the world in which they live and move
and have their being. To them the house of life
has not only had the shades down and the blinds
closed, but it has been barred and double pad-

Siupidity Street 171

locked. Nobody on the Street has sought to find
a key where it is to be found, in the origin of life
itself. All life has a common origin, an invisible
cell—protoplasm. Countless billions of different
creatures live on the earth, in the water, and in
_ the air, they are all struggling for existence, and
each uses the more or less feeble spark of intelli-
gence implanted within it. Now there is not a
creature on the face of the earth, the huge ele-
phant and the tiny aphis that destroys a rose leaf,
that left to breed unchecked would not crowd
everything else off the planet. The people on the
Street know nothing of Nature’s marvelous fer-
tility and power of reproduction. The human
mind staggers in attempting to grasp this appal-
ling thing. Linneus, the great naturalist, study-
ing the so-called ‘‘plant lice’ found that in one
year a single aphis would produce a quintillion of
descendants. How do you write a quintillion
using the English method of enumeration? Write
the figure one and after it thirty zeroes. The sec-
ond year, from one single aphis you would have a
number of descendants that to represent, you
would have to write the figure one and sixty
zeroes. Thus from a creature so small that you
can scarcely see it, if all its young were allowed to
live and breed, in a very short time, there would
pile up a loathsome mass of aphids greater in
bulk than the world itself. Malthus was right;

172 What Birds Have Done With Me

all forms of life, unchecked, breed to destructive
numbers. That life may be, all forms of life
must be held in check by their natural enemies.
If the people on the Street knew this and the ad-
ditional fact that the bird is the check upon the
noxious weed and noxious insect, they would con-
serve rather than destroy. It is worse than stupid
to kill our bird friends to-day—it is criminal.
Whole species have been exterminated, many
others are on the verge of extermination, and all
species are frightfully depleted, and when all are
gone, life itself will quickly pass with the flutter
of the last wing.

Gone—This little word of four letters may be
compared to a gray wall shutting out the sunlight;
a vast desert, where life has been and is not,—a
desolation, a haunting memory—the sadness of an
irreparable loss. There is the sadness of fare-
wells in the recollection of trackless forests, swept
by the destroyer, from the face of the earth, and
with them so many of the wood-folk have gone
forever. The cultivated field, the populous city,
are not places where mother nature may be seen
and studied at her best. Sylvan dells, sweet songs,
gliding dryads, and dancing fairies are not to be
found along the desolation of paved streets.
Scores of the dear familiar neighbors of my child-
hood are gone forever. Across the dawn, I look
in vain for the strong, swift sweep of countless

Stupidity Street 173

wings. The great flocks have gone never to re-
turn. This, of itself, is a reason for conserving
what is left, gathering up the fragments and pro-
tecting them, that species may not be utterly ex-
terminated.

Yesterday we were all for slaughter, but we
grow frightened to-day, in desolate places from
which teeming life has gone, and the hopeful signs
of the times are to be found in waves of bird pro-
tection and bird legislation sweeping the land.
Yesterday, the ‘Wild life refuge’’— the sanctuary,
lived only in the imagination of a few dreamers;
to-day the dream has come true and the people
of these Sovereign States are demanding pre-
paredness for the efficient protection of the piti-
ful remnant of the ‘“Wild Life’’ before all is for-
ever gone.

The famous French publicist, Emile Boutroux,
in an article on the idealism and statesmanship
of President Wilson, gives a view of its compre-
hensiveness that is wonderful and I know of noth-
ing else that has ever been written that could be
adapted to explain my notion of an all-reaching
bird protection that will protect. Here is the
quotation above referred to: ‘‘He is, above all,
desirous of thinking, not in East-American terms,
nor in those of the South, the West, or the North,
but in all-American terms. His idealism combines
whattthe diverse populations making up the United

174. What Birds Have Done With Me

States have together contributed to the national
spirit; the Puritan notion of duty and respon-
sibility; the generous and humane democracy of
the Mississippi Valley; the independent, equality-
loving, though conservative, spirit of the South;
and the practical activity of them all.” In another
place he says: “It was not the will of an indi-
vidual, but that of a whole people which, conscious
of its ability to accomplish any end submitted
humbly this omnipotence to the authority of the
moral law and of the ideal.” |

In bird protection, I see what, in effect, will
be a League of States—the whole preventing any
one state from laying violent hands upon and de-
stroying what is the property of all the states ;—
bird-protection; “Of the people, by the people,
for the people.”” And when that glad day dawns,
“To Rent” will be in every window on “‘Stupidity
Street.”

——— |

CHAPTER XV

JAYS AND CROWS

By common consent the birds whose names
stand at the head of this chapter are members of
a most disreputable family and are sure enough
undesirables and should be deported to that ex-
cessively hot and waterless region from whence
they came. It’s as clear as mud that black and
blue are the colors of assault and battery and as-
sault and battery is a flourish, common way down
in the dregs of society, where laborers fight and
drunken brutes whip their wives and eyes are deco-
rated with the colors of the Jay and the Crow.
Not everything can be allowed in the best so-
ciety and, it will scarcely permit the bare mention
of anything so coarse and common and Bolshevist
as blue marauders and black robbers. Believing
every one innocent until proved guilty is reversed
in the case of the prisoners at the bar, who are re-
quired to prove their innocence after being ar-
rested on suspicion and tried before prejudiced
juries. As their attorney, though without a re-
tainer, I shall stand upon the rights of my clients

175

176 What Birds Have Done With Me

to a separate trial and to summon essential wit-
nesses at any cost with usual adjournments taken
in their absence.

If the court please, I demand the dismissal of
the case on two points, the first of which is that
there is no evidence of guilt, or even serious mis-
demeanor against the defendants, and the second,
that the plaintiffs have not been made to put up
security for costs.

I object, Your Honor, to excusing the plaintiffs
from the usual security for costs as it establishes
the dangerous principle of allowing the quarrel-
some and ignorant a free hand in jeopardizing the
liberty of any one so unfortunate as to incur their
displeasure, and they themselves escape all re-
sponsibility in the matter at issue.

If the court please, we will proceed to examine
the allegations in the complaint against the Blue
Jay. Again, Your Honor, I ask the dismissal of
this case against the Jay on the ground that every-
thing in the complaint, from first to last is clearly
dictated by prejudice, based upon hearsay; ob-
servations of the blind and the silly drivel of the
uninformed, who babble to hear themselves bab-
ble.

Gentlemen of the Jury, getting a single kernel
of wheat out of an overflowing bushel of chaff,
constituting an alleged complaint against my client,
let us proceed to examine the so far unproven

Jays and Crows Gay

charge that the Jay is a notorious nest robber and
devourer of the helpless young of other birds.
As this is a case based upon general suspicion
rather than a specific act it will turn upon prov-
ing the previous good character of the defendant,
if that is possible. Now, if His Honor will order
me sworn | will take the witness stand on be-
half of my client, who has been a close friend of
mine for the last fifty years. Fifty years, Gen-
tlemen of the Jury, is a long time and a man and
a bird ought to get to know something of each
other in such a period, and had I not flattered my-
self that I know him better than most people I
would not have volunteered to act as his attorney
in this case. Certainly I will not stand by and
see him wronged, for I can say of him, what I
cannot say of all my friends, that up to date I
never knew him to do anything unworthy of a
gentleman and a scholar.

Our acquaintance started on a cold day and it
has been getting warmer and warmer ever since.
I saw him as the only bit of blue on a gray winter
day and he scolded and laughed at me by turns,
from a limb of the “tip-top” wood that consti-
tuted our first wood-pile and made me ashamed
to cry with the cold, after a thirty mile ride, as I
carried in my first armful to start the first fire
in my father’s log-cabin that stood for a home
in the wilderness. Always regarding him as a

178 What Birds Have Done With Me

gentleman I of course, never asked him to eat out
of my hand, but I have given him something with
a stick and possibly my health was better just
afterward. To be a little more definite, I have
handed him a meal-worm at the end of a split
stick as he sat on the edge of his nest after a
hard day’s work in the support of his family and
I’ll swear he bowed when he received it, and
every man has a right to his opinion so why may
I not be allowed to believe that if I could have
translated his remark, it would have been: “Your
health, old duffer, and may you live long and pros-
per.”

Gentlemen of the Jury, I am not trying to put
anything over you when I assure you that this
bird, so commonly maligned and slandered, is in
very fact, ‘‘my friend Yorick, a fellow of infinite
jest and most excellent fancy” and it’s no exag-
geration to say that I had much rather see him
on any single day in the three hundred and sixty-
five than a book agent or a tax collector and he
would be twice as welcome, if he saw fit to make
me a pastoral call, as the professional Soul Saver.
Perhaps he may be shockingly worldly, but a fair-
minded man knowing him in his domestic, social
and civic relations to life could scarcely withhold
at least a small measure of admiration. ‘The
world is full of snivelers who are not willing to

Jays and Crows 179

weep alone but want every one to go into the lawn
sprinkler business with them and along comes Mr.
Jay and flaunts his sky blue in their faces and
says, as clearly as a bird can: ‘Oh! Patience
don’t mention it; people have enough of that with-
out making a community service of it so just pack
your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile,
smile.”’

My friend Yorick should be especially dear
to the heart of Ella Wheeler Wilcox for he laughs
whether the world laughs with him or not and
however much you persecute him with your guns,
traps, poison, he is now and always: ‘‘O’er all
the ills of life victorious.” I do not claim that
he is to be compared to a “Yellow prim-rose on
the river’s brink” so far as a poetic uplift goes,
but I do aver that in my heart he has stirred:
“Thoughts that do lie too deep for words.” Oh!
you don’t like his shrill unmusical ear-splitting
squawk. I do not blame you very much, but I
question if I ever heard it just as you have. It’s
the noise of the children of that neighbor whom
you do not like that is especially offensive; the
noise of your own children may sound like music.
There is a difference. Then we must reckon with
individual taste. Don’t misunderstand me; I’m
not putting my friend Yorick up as a musical
prodigy, far fromit. Asa singer he is in the class

180 What Birds Have Done With Me

with the Pea-cock and they may have attended the
same singing school. Nevertheless, I’d rather
listen to forty Jays than one Hawaiian Band.

Years and years ago, when I was an officer in
the Penitentiary of Wisconsin, there was a Jay
there, the prisoner of a prisoner and in spite of
his gloomy surroundings he was a gay rollicking
fellow, with more pranks and whimsies than a
Parrot or a Monkey. It was a matter of frequent
comment that he was such a favorite with the in-
mates of the cell-house where he was kept and it
was generally understood that when prisoners
hurled curses at him, they were compliments in
disguise, for they all recognized that his shrill
squawk had power to bring to them, even through
barred windows, the great out of doors.

I never listen to a passionate denunciation of
the Jay, generally expressed by a string of oppro-
brious epithets, a few laps longer than the moral
law, without being reminded of the quarrel be-
tween a couple of negro boys; when one had
hurled at the other every obnoxious term he could
think of, the one assailed quietly remarked, ‘All
you say I am, you is.” You think the Jay a
thief and a robber, well he returns your sentiment
plus a distrust of you, in all your ways, unequalled
by anything in the bird kingdom. Don’t be de-
ceived by the fact that he is not wild, that is ex-
plained by the further fact that he is not afraid

SO ER a OS

a i

ee

a ae ee eee

a og te

Jays and Crows 181

of you and though he builds his nest near your
home, he never relaxes his belief that you will do
him a mischief if you get a chance. Try to feed
him and you will see just how much he believes
in your benevolence. He will swoop down and
snatch some of the offered food, but it is frankly
the act of one robber robbing another robber and
not the act of a friend receiving a gift from an-
other friend.

It was a proud day in my life when after a thou-
sand failures a Jay allowed me to give him some-
thing. I well remember how I smiled all over
and asked him to come around and drink tea with
me that evening. He excused himself, but we got
to be real chums and our relations were cordial
if not exactly intimate. What an interesting vaga-
bond he was. My old Collie dog, Lobo, was old
-and stricken in years and the dinner given him
was often beyond his capacity and he would lie
down in the sun outside the kitchen door and
straightway go to sleep on guard, for which of
course, according to military law, he should have
been shot at sunrise, but he was not stood up
against a wall and so Yorick, not wanting him to
go scot free for such a lapse from the obvious
line of duty, took the occasion to rob him of the
remainder of the badly guarded dinner. After
which he would perch himself on a nearby stair-
way, just out of the sleeper’s reach and proceed

182 What Birds Have Done With Me

to whistle till the foolish old dog waking out of
sleep would charge the robber whose spirit of mis-
chief was beyond question.

None of his bird neighbors either fear or dis-
like the Jay and his veracity is never questioned.
He most fittingly is dressed in blue for he is the
real police-man of the bird kingdom and is always
on his job. Just let an owl, making a night of it,
resolve that he won’t go home till the day after
and he can’t hide himself on the lawn so the Jay
will not spy him out and call all the race of birds
to mobilize against a common Hun, and Chateau
Thierry, in a small way is reénacted under the
leadership of a sure enough American general.
Take your gun and dog and start to the woods
for a day’s hunt and a certain blue-coated guard-
ian of the forests gets there ahead of you and
goes slipping through the tree-tops, warning all
wood folk of the coming of man, the most de-
structive of all animals.

Gentlemen of the Jury, I put this up to you to
pass upon the probability of a real criminal en-
joying the confidence and respect of his neighbors,
having a reputation for veracity never questioned
and a reputation, among those who know him best,
as something of a philanthropist in rendering help
to the needy. On the question of nest robbing, I
might assure you that I have known a Jay and a
Robin to bring up their broods at the same time, in

— —— ~ me
Oe ee ee

a ae

Jays and Crows 183

the same tree and the tree not a large one at
that; but according to the old saying that one
blue-bird does not make Spring, so a single in-
stance is far from being conclusive in the establish-
ment of any allegation.

Now if the court please, I will introduce here,
marked Exhibit A, a scientific examination of
the stomachs of two hundred and ninety-two Jays,
killed in the breeding season, in almost every state
in the Union, the work being under the direction
of the Biological Survey in Washington. The
results are certainly astonishing and probably to
no one more than the amateurish investigators
and hear-say mongers bringing this action. Out
of the whole number of investigations made it
was found that only five could have been guilty
of anything like nest robbing. ‘Three contained
fragments of shell; one undoubtedly, that of a
smaller bird; another stomach had a fragment of
shell that might or might not have been that of
a domestic fowl, and the third seemed to be a
fragment of the shell of a grouse. Two stomachs
contained remains of birds. One the undoubted
fragment of the body of a small bird recently
hatched; the other stomach had in it the feet and
claws of a fully-mature bird, variety unknown.

Now Gentlemen of the Jury, let us go back and
weigh and estimate this evidence of guilt, and I
think we will find that it will furnish precious little

184. What Birds Have Done With Me

comfort to the plaintiffs bringing this case. With
regard to the shells found in the stomachs, in all
fairness the one that resembled the shell of a
hen’s egg should be excluded as it is a well-known
fact that such a fragment is often thrown out

from back doors, where Jays come to look for -

scraps, especially before people are up in the
morning. In one of the two remaining cases the
shell was thought to be that of a grouse, found
late in August, long after their nesting season.
No evidence of nest robbing in that find. The
third was the shell of a song bird, but in the
breeding season all birds drop eggs on the ground
every where and it is to be questioned if it had
ever been in a nest. With regard to the frag-
ments of birds found in the stomach, one was a
part of a nestling, but there is no proof that it was
either killed or taken from a nest by my client,
for even people who have next to no knowledge of
birds or bird life, know that young birds some-
times die in the nest from various causes and the
first thing that the mother would be likely to do
would be to throw it out of the nest, where any-
thing might pick it up, although no nest robber.
With regard to the last and final examination,
it furnishes no proof of wrong-doing upon the
part of a Jay, for it is clearly evidence of the
wrong-doing of a cat, the fragments clearly be-
ing the remains of a cat’s supper. Gentlemen of

- — st aa.
ee TT ese

ee
aS ee

|
4

Jays and Crows 185

the jury, the analysis of this evidence spells ac-
quittal for my client. Only two out of two hun-
dred and ninety-two who could by any stretch of
circumstantial evidence have been guilty of nest
robbing, as charged. Here we rest our case; sim-
ply warning you that anything brought forward
by the plaintiffs will surely turn out to be incom-
petent, irrelevant and immaterial, and not evi-
dence.

_ Having now established the fact, as I think,
that my friend Yorick is true blue, I take up the
case of his cousin, the Crow, with confidence and
high hopes of securing justice for a worthy citizen.

If the court please, this second defendant in
the general indictment found against Jays and
Crows, will have to be defended along lines al-
ready brought forward in the defence of the Jay,
and I herewith demand the discharge of my client
on the ground that no State can have jurisdiction
in the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of a
bird that is not, so to speak, the citizen of a
State but the ward of the Nation. As my motion
is refused, Your Honor, we may as well proceed
to trial. Again I wish to be sworn and put upon
the stand as the first witness.

Gentlemen of the Jury, is it not an astonishing
fact that good citizens who have conscientious
scruples against painting the devil blacker than he
really is have no scruples, conscientious or other-

186 What Birds Have Done With Me

wise, against painting my client blacker than he
is, and even blacker than the devil.

I honestly cannot tell just when and where it
was that I met my first Crow; I am, however
quite certain that it was not at a conservatory
of music and it might have been at the obsequies
of man’s noble friend, the horse. Perhaps the
way he sticks around after what has been done to
exterminate him may be traced to this same habit
of getting, so to speak, the first chance at the
glue pot. Being an undertaker’s apprentice, it
is fitting that he should wear black and eschew
frivolity of all kinds; a sad bird, indeed, if sad-
ness is to be accentuated by a customary suit of
solemn black. Strongly social by nature, some
think he has a language, and if that is so, per
adventure he gossips or talks shop.

Leaving the domain of conjecture and coming
into that of fact, it may be averred that no other
bird has been the victim of so much prejudice,
perjury and piffle. Pre-judgment is the forming
of an opinion before you are in possession of the
facts in the case and such an opinion once adopted
is frequently held with the utmost tenacity when
facts are presented calculated to overthrow your
pre-judgment. Sentiment, dislike, love, hatred,
rarely have a foundation of fact and you can do
no more to change them by pelting them with facts
than you could drive away a fog by throwing

Jays and Crows 187

stones at it. The Jay and the Crow are hated
because they are believed to be bad birds; show
them to be good members of the bird kingdom
and many people will not change their dislike of
them an iota.

“T do not like you Dr. Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell,
This single fact I know full well,
I do not like you Dr. Fell.”

Just as the mind crowds the unknown with fool-
ish superstitions, so we endow what we dislike
with every detestable quality that the imagination
can conjure up and this is the human quality that
has conceived of total depravity as a condition
not uncommon. We use the Crow as a unit of
measure in estimating conditions of blackness, and
as black as a Crow is superlative. He is a bird
belonging to the realm of uncreated night, mys-
terious, probably devilish. This belief was clearly
in the mind of Edgar Allan Poe, when he wrote of
the Raven, the Crow’s first cousin: ‘‘And his eyes
have all the seeming of a demon that is dream-
ing.”” Now in spite of all this the Crow is not
as black as painted, and there are even white
Crows. |

What lies have been told about him, by people
who never meant to lie, and the lie in combina-
tion with printer’s ink has made a fine mechanical
mixture for the dissemination of falsehood. A

188 What Birds Have Done With Me

dear, old grandmother, with three grandsons over
in France helping make the world safe for Democ-
racy, and a woman who would not intentionally
misrepresent, told and it got mixed with printer’s
ink, too, that she saw a wicked, black Crow steal
and carry away a clutch of fifteen hen’s eggs. It
was not stated just how he carried the eggs, so
you are at liberty to make a guess whether it was
with claws or in his bill.

Again, a very honorable citizen, an official
member in a rural church, stated that he saw, and
this got mixed with printer’s ink, too, a wicked
black Crow—as black as ever Crows can be—
carry away a whole brood of baby chicks, one by
one, in his talons. And taking the public into
his confidence, he lapses into a reminiscence of a
barn-building that he carried on for a brother-
in-law, way back in the early settlement of Wis-
consin, and having to walk through a woods to
get to his work, carried his gun and without loss
of time kept his family table supplied with Grouse.
These birds, according to the statement, were so
plentiful and tame that he sometimes got a mess
on a rainy day shooting from the windows of the
barn. At the close of his valuable contribution
to natural history, he solemnly avers that since
that time the Grouse have been practically exter-
minated by the nest-robbing Crow, possibly a
Crow with talons.

q
|
3
q
1
i

Jays and Crows 189

To my certain knowledge a Grouse had her
nest on the ground, in part of an old tree-top
blown from a giant white-oak and in that oak a
Crow had her nest and the bad nest-robbing Crow
never molests the eggs or callow young of her
nearby neighbor. And I have a hen-house on the
edge of a big woods where Crows have nested for
the last quarter of a century, but to the best of
my knowledge and belief, no egg or young chicken
has ever been disturbed. As a matter of fact,
no Crow could possibly carry away a hen’s egg,
and they have no talons. So far as I know they
prefer their game and meat a little high. ‘The
Crow being a bird of uncanny intelligence, super-
natural cunning, seeing and hearing everything
going on in his neighborhood; no nest could be hid-
den and none would escape if he made a business
of robbing them. According to the Scotch verdict,
the charge against him is: ‘‘Not proven.”

Now the farmers’ charge against him is not as
a nest robber, so much as a corn puller; pulling
the young corn when it first comes up. It would
be folly to allow my client to plead not guilty to
this charge, for it happens to be true. In certain
localities and under certain conditions, the Crow
develops an appetite for the well-soaked, soft and
mushy germinating kernel, and damages the com-
ing crop. Some years he pulls no corn, and in
some States he is a pest and not in others, and the

190 What Birds Have Done With Me

damage he does is insignificant compared to his
destruction of the June Beetle, the parent of the
frightfully destructive White Grub. The Crow
may take a few hills, but the Grub will take the
entire field. There is something almost ridicu-
lous in the devices advocated to trap the June
Beetle; flickering lights and tubs filled with water
and kerosene, the light to attract, the mixture to
drown, and the great Agricultural Schools advo-
cating the “Light Water Trap,” does not seem
to have thought of giving the Crow, the Beetle’s
natural enemy, a chance. Later on we may be
told to go after the June Bug with machine guns,
bombing air-planes and gas shells, and at the same
time continue the bounty on Crows. Pifile,
wretched piffle.

Serious consequences follow tampering with
Nature’s balance. Men, to preserve the teem-
ing finny tribes that abounded in the four great
rivers that empty their waters into Mississippi
Sound at Biloxi, went ahead and killed the Alli-
gators that also abounded, and the result was
the vast multiplication of the Alligator Gar-fish,
upon which the Alligator fed in such numbers that
it speedily destroyed most of the game fish.

Hawks, Owls, Jays and Crows have been
slaughtered, things useful and beneficial in the
scheme of Nature to the great detriment of grow-
ing crops for the removal of their natural enemies

Jays and Crows I9I

allowed pests and vermin to multiply and the bal-
ance of Nature has been disturbed. A lady said
to me the other day, half petulantly, “If you
seriously defend Jays and Crows I would not be
surprised to hear you demand protection for
Snakes and Skunks.” I made answer, “I am sur-
prised that you have not heard that I have been
demanding protection for both, for more than
twenty years.”

Gentlemen of the Jury, that farmer is only once
removed from a fool who demands physical
beauty and the ability to either sing or whistle
from everyone in his employ. If he does his
work and does it well, he should be protected and
reasonably remunerated, quite independent of
how he strikes our fancy. ‘The public press, the
rostrum, the pulpit, and a great commission, and
even blank walls, have been shouting to us for
months that FOOD WILL WIN THE WAR. The les-
son is obvious; everyone was to unite in conserv-
ing it, why not allow the bird to keep it from the
destruction of swarming myriads of Hun insects
and rodents. Hunger is a monster, disregarding
every law, it can make a cannibal out of the flower
of our highest civilization, and neither Jay nor
Crow nor human creature is to be punished for
what they are driven to by starvation.

Gentlemen of the Jury, I demand acquittal for
the Crow as I did for the Jay; on the ground that

192 What Birds Have Done With Me

there was no cause for action. And with this
anecdote I rest my case. Many years ago, in a
country church, a tame Crow flew into the build-
ing and, lighting on the sounding board of a
half century ago, interrupted the evening revival
by croaking out from the gloom that concealed
him from all eyes, when the good man was mak-
ing the opening prayer: ‘“‘Damn you,” and again,
“Damn you,” and so he kept it up till human
nature could not stand it and, seized with super-
stitious fear, the Reverend man and the entire con-
gregation fled, with the exception of one old
woman, who recognized that it was a tame crow
talking. And when he kept on with his maledic-
tions after the two were alone, she with some
natural ire, shook her finger in the direction of
the voice and said, ‘‘See'here, Billy, you hain’t
got no occasion to damn me, for I don’t belong
to this church no how.”

Whether I win or lose, I some way feel that
I have at least earned the right of exemption
from the malediction of a tame Crow, for I do
not belong “‘no how” to that vast company of
superstitious, uninformed, avaricious tillers of the
soil who seek his life, to take it away.

CHAPTER XVI
BIRDS’ COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE

Some cynic has said that matrimony among up-
to-date people is a necessary preliminary to ali-
mony. ‘This cannot be true of our bird neigh-
bors, but they have their preliminaries also, and
some of them more or less exciting and even
weird.

Generally speaking, we know so little of birds
that it may seem a good deal like presumption to
write of their personal and most intimate rela-
tions. Still we know more of the courtship of
some birds than that of the soldier and his girl
clinging together on the street, and more of their
marital woes than we know of the unhappy tri-
angles of the divorce courts. Man—‘“the roof
and crown of things’’—a little lower than the
angels, stuff and nonsense, is not to be compared,
in devotion and constancy, with his bird neighbors.
The stones that have been thrown at birds, since
time began, had better have been thrown at man
if he, in his smug superiority, were capable of tak-
ing a rebuke.

193

194 What Birds Have Done With Me

The human race today is something turned out
of a melting pot, cannibal and patrician, with all
grades between producing mongrel tribes cover-
ing the earth. The bird, free to follow its own
nature, produces neither hybrids nor mongrels.
Think of it, a thousand ducks migrating together,
nesting together, and never a cross-bred bird;
birds are always and everywhere, true to species.
Do you begin to feel the rebuke of it? Is their
conduct or man’s the most astonishing?

A few years ago I closed the bathing season
at Green Lake by accidentally going into the water
in a successful effort to get a wild duck out alive
that was being frozen into the ice, being unable
to fly owing to a broken wing. He was taken
home and put in a pen of Pekin ducks, eleven
females and one drake, and this drake was acci-
dentally killed by a playful colt, when the flock
crawled under the fence into the horse yard. This
left Mr. Green-headed Mallard in sole possession
of a snug little harem of his own. ‘Talk of peas
in a pod, those white ducks looked exactly alike
and yet only one appealed to the little stranger
from the wild. The courtship is a sealed book,
or was it not made into a book as is so common;
about the only thing I am certain of is that it
was carried on late at night, which may be the
only thing certainly human about it.

We first became sure of their marriage, seeing

Birds’ Courtship and Marriage 195

them together in the opaline light of an April
dawn. To quote from Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s
“Birth of the Opal” perhaps: ‘“The dying day
was their priest.” ‘‘For this cause,” says the old
marriage service, “a man shall leave his father
and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and
they shall be one flesh.”” Now this is as true of
ducks as of humans, and as true of Mrs. Hen as
of Mr. Drake. In the case in hand, she did the
cleaving; leaving her family and following her
uncivilized husband to a nearby island, where she
performed the duties of wife and missionary to
the heathen, at one and the same time.

During the long-drawn-out period of incuba-
tion her family were more or less devoted, mak-
ing frequent calls when they were swimming by,
and who knows, aunts and cousins and even sis-
ters may have asked the family’s new member to
take a little swim with them, but he never did. He
surely looked lonesome as he swam back and forth
in the lagoon near the nest and I am certain he
was; and my six-year-old granddaughter dubbed
him Dr. Mally because he did so much quacking.
How ‘“‘Mally” caught the spirit of our civiliza-
tion, heaven only knows. I am dealing in facts,
not psychology, and it is a fact that the very next
year he had five white wives and two gray ones,
and his name should have been changed to Lot.

_ The aimless Puckyan is a stream so crooked

196 What Birds Have Done With Me

that it has been told that an explorer seeking its
outlet, it never had an inlet, followed its winding
course through more S’s than are in the name of
the State of Mississippi; and tied up his boat and
stayed all night at a farmhouse on a bend, and
after paddling all the next day, tied up his boat
and stayed the next night at the same house,
never having gotten out of sight of it. The lan-
guid little river, a river that never grew up, mean-
ders somewhere in the “Big Marsh.” The owner
of the house at the bend, Mr. Wiselander, came
back from the Big Marsh one late September
afternoon with a high load of hay and a baby
Sand-Hill Crane, the longest-legged bird that ever
wet its ankles in the deep places of the Puckyan.
When he first saw it he got a notion that it wanted
to catch a ride and there was no waiting for a
second invitation to come along and take pot luck
at the farmhouse, not, however, the usual pot
luck given birds. This strangely tame creature
from the wild was soon at home at the farm and
spent its time taking bird’s-eye views of terrestrial
things. How it spent the winter looking down
on the woolly creatures that some way got their
noses into a big barn that had been assigned to
a star boarder, are matters to be passed over in
well-bred silence. Neither have I time to tell of
his. possession of a prudent mind, like Mrs. John
Gilpin, a mind that would not allow the daughter

Birds’ Courtship and Marriage 197

of the house to bury perfectly good tulip bulbs,
and forced him to resurrect the same and store
them away for future use.

Jumping many attractive little hurdles, so to
speak, just turn your opera glasses upon Mr. S.
Hill Crane and myself as in the soft Spring
weather we turn our unequal steps in the direc-
tion of the Big Marsh, he, in pursuit of experience
and I, in the pursuit of knowledge. We both got
what we went for; he got a wife and I, knowledge
of what it means to be best man at a high-up
wedding. It was both an old and a new cam-
paign, but no listening post was needed; you could
not even escape the soft nothings he whispered
to the South wind before she paused in her cloud,
as though saying to herself, “‘Why not a little
home of my own close to the gushing heart of the
Big Marsh?”

Not all lunatics are lovers, but all lovers are
lunatics, and the crazy things that fool bird did
I am afraid to tell for I am not sure whether I
saw things or dreamed them. It’s easier to think
that I really got what I am about to tell from
‘Alice in Wonderland” than from the Big Marsh,
where my father used to buy standing grass for
fifty cents an acre, when I was a boy. A good
wife always comes at your call and as she came
at his from the first, I knew what kind of a wife
she was going tobe. He had no claim check upon

198 What Birds Have Done With Me

her when she first put in an appearance, while she
had a stop-over and was just looking around a
little. On close inspection the Big Marsh was a
trifle flatter than she had supposed, and she
preened her left wing and waved her right one as
though for immediate flight. It was now or never.
Doubtless you are saying he will show her what
a swift flyer he is, how fast he can run, how many
frogs he can catch in an eight-hour day; perish
the thought.

The crazy jumping-jack knows the way to the
feminine heart, the battle is not to the strong, nor
the race to the swift, any more certainly than is
the dance, the last argument of lovers. Ghost of
a cotillion of wooden-horses, minuet of a Hippo-
potamus, five-step waltz of a Giraffe and Kanga-
roo; S. Hill Crane has you all beaten to a frazzle.
However, nothing succeeds like success, and those
graceful gyrations of his do the business, and
according to the long-established usage of the con-
ventional novel, I should merely add: and they
married and lived happily ever afterward, but I
want to say that he who went forth in the Spring
alone, returned in the Fall with joy, bringing a
wife and heir with him.

Life is such a tangled skein, the bitter and sweet
co-mingled, before spring the silly sheep had tram-
pled the life out of his wife, and the winter wind
slammed a door, breaking the neck of his son.

Birds’ Courtship and Marriage 199

Lonely is the Big Marsh today; the few passing
Cranes have discarded it as an ero-station, and
the call of their old enemy is fading from the
subconsciousness of the younger generation of
frogs; if heard close at hand I do not believe one
would dive tocover. All this occurred more than
a quarter of a century ago and Mr. S. Hill Crane
has moved to town with the family with which
he has lived so long, and spends his last days
looking down on chickens and in the Spring, utter-
ing soft nothings to the South wind, that has, also,
seemingly abandoned her wireless station on the
Big Marsh.

When we went into the wilderness to live in a
log house; that house was only a mile from the
village of Dartford, but between our house and
the little village was Mills’ Swamp, and through
it the road. was made by placing little logs side by
side, and then putting brush over the logs and
dirt over both. The track was not more than a
dozen feet wide and neither side was fenced, but
old Mills was going to fence his side and had piles
of rails along, once in such a distance, and for
years neglected to build a fence. Why should
he, when other people only fenced their cultivated
land? ‘There was not another house between our
house and the east side of the village, and Jerry
Norton had no difficulty in making a certain seven-
year-old boy believe that Mills’ Swamp had been

200 What Birds Have Done With Me -

set aside for Hell’s Kitchen, as soon as they got
it drained. I suppose the point he was making
was that they never could drain it and they never
have up to date.

Those stranger days when Indians were seen
daily gliding along the trail that we called a
road, and coming out of the marsh with strings
of dead pigeons; its visible terrors were enough
to raise goose-pimples on a young frontier tender-
foot, but it really was the unseen, lurking hide-
ousness of the swamp under the curtain of night,
all manner of unearthly noises in the sky that
settled down to taste the bubbling hell broth that
was being cooked by a million flickering lights,
that froze a fellow’s blood.

Dr. Barnes coming along this road to see my
brother Ted, who was sick, had left his tired horse
at home and was just opposite the fifth rail pile
when from the next rail pile, a mighty Mountain
Lion sprang into the road with a raucous screech
that for an instant silenced every other noise in
the wilderness, except the beating of the doctor’s
heart. The stars were out, but there was no
moon and the most obvious things about the at-
tacking beast were its eyes and tail; the tail in
constant motion as the big cat lashed its sides
and the green eyes emitting sparks of fire. The
doctor thought at first that there were about fifty
feet between them, but as the night prowler ad-

Birds’ Courtship and Marriage 201

vanced, the man with the saddle-bags on his arm,
backed away in the direction of the village, having
on hand a progressive case whose course could
not be checked by the kind of pills he carried.
The agitated gentleman was trying to over-awe it
by the gleam of his brown eyes into its two points
of flame, and perhaps he succeeded to some slight
extent, but the close proximity of the village,
swarming with dogs, was most likely the reason
why a good hunter went to bed without a late
supper. The doctor made his professional call
later, having exchanged his saddle-bags for a
double-barrelled shotgun loaded with buckshot,
and brought with him, as further body-guard, Bill
Marshall and Charley Cody, each armed with a
long rifle, muzzle-loaders.

The township hunt organized and carried on
with vigor, saw many traces of this undesired
visitor from regions to the north, but the beast
eluded all pursuit. But this is another story.
They sent me to the doctor’s boarding place that
he also used as an office, for some medicine for
Ted, now nearly well, that would be found wait-
ing my coming. As hero of the Mountain Lion
story, the doctor’s time had been a good bit
broken in on and he had forgotten to put it up.
His landlady was sure he would be right back
and advised me to wait. I waited and waited,
and waited, and it was dark when he got back.

202 What Birds Have Done With Me

It was really outrageous to have allowed a
little fellow to go through that marsh so soon
after that unsuccessful Mountain Lion hunt, but
there is this to be said, that the big scare made
many others, afterward encountered, seem com-
paratively trifling. It was doubtless a Mountain
Lion, but they called it a Panther, and it took
up my trail the moment I got out in the night
alone. I thought I was giving him a good run
for his money, as the saying goes, but he some
way outran me and when I got to the fifth pile
of rails, he rushed from the sixth pile, his old
lurking place, and sprang upon me. Undoubt-
edly a person may be paralyzed with fear, and I
must have been, for I made no attempt to escape.
The impact of the creature’s body knocked me
over, and the creature began licking my face,
naturally enough as it was our big dog that had
come to meet me. That I did not choke him to
death through pure joy, is little short of a miracle,
but strangely enough I was more afraid of the
sure-enough Panther than I had ever been.

This digression is simply to establish the fact
that bird courtship may be of so fascinating a
character as to actually overcome the most deadly
fear.

A booming noise, unlike anything else on earth,
starting at the earth and seemingly going around
in a circle, up, up in the sky, and when it had

Birds’ Courtship and Marriage 203

vanished, the same thing coming nearer and nearer
and dropping in the grass at your feet in the late
twilight, or early dawn, when sight and fancy
are one and the same thing. Before I was ten
years of age I had followed this gripping mystery
all over that swamp with a Panther hidden behind
every tree, and a convention of them assembling
in every thicket. I just could not give it up if I
died for it. A ditch through Mills’ Swamp emp-
tied into the Puckyan, right opposite “the deep
hole,” which everyone knew was the very best
place to catch chubs for pickerel bait. Freshets
from the melting of deep snows in the spring,
and occasional heavy rains in summer brought
floods of muddy water into the sluggish river and
along the south side, under the shadow of ven-
erable elms; a considerable mud bank was formed
and this mud bank was, from time to time, per-
forated by holes as big as a lead pencil, a kind
of a Brobdingnagian piece of honey-comb with no
suggestion of honey. It was a crazy trestle-board
upon which the outline of no theory could be
erected.

It was likely early in May or late April, on
the eve of a fishing Saturday that I fished the
deep hole for chubs with which to catch the king
of great Northern Pike out of Green Lake, and
if not actually the king, I at least, hoped for the
heir-apparent. I think it rained and I did not

204 What Birds Have Done With Me

go fishing the next day, but that chub fishing IL
have gone back to oftener in memory than any
other fishing I ever did, and still rank it as a
great event in my life. The mystery that I had
pursued so long and so far, suddenly staged itself
along the inner edge of the mud-flat, under the
outer shadow of great trees and just at the point
where twilight and night blended and became
one. I thought them snipe and had seen them
across the river pursuing each other while I fought
mosquitoes and caught bait. I was sole audience,
sole press reporter, at a Woodcocks’ Gretna
Green without knowing how privileged a charac-
ter Iwas. It was as novel a kind of ‘‘Seven Up”
as any that could have been played out for Alice
when seeing things in Fairyland. Why seven up?
For the very excellent reason that going and com-
ing, there were just that number at one time in
the air. What an astounding mode of courtship
—an erial dance. The male bird doing all the
dancing; making unearthly booming sounds and
spinning around in the air as he climbs invisible
stairways till he hears the angels sing, then the
return trip, falling at her feet, but quite done up
till the next time.

It’s not only mysterious, it’s inexplicable, but
it does the trick and is presumably the surest way
to ensnare the affection of Miss Henrietta Wood-
cock. This is billing and cooing with a long dash

et

—=
—,

Birds’ Courtship and Marriage 205

between each bill and coo. If the little god of
love who presides over human courtship and mar-
riage, also, follows the courtship of a Woodcock
that may explain why we see him pictured with so
few clothes—stripped for a race.. An old sailor
here in Biloxi when asked if he knew what caused
the tide, admitted that he did, and proceeded to
explain it: ‘‘You know,” said he, “when a feller
turns over in bed he gets there quite a bit ahead
of the covers that come a-rolling and a-swashing
along after him, and when the world turns over
in the ocean, the waves come a-rolling and a-swash-
ing along some ways behind. You can explain
everything if you are careful to study out the
reasons.’’ He is not here now and it has always
been a matter of regret that I never asked him to
elucidate the seeming mystery of the Woodcock’s
courtship.

Male birds are the greatest lovers in the world,
always excepting Wilson’s Phalarope. ‘Though
he belongs to Mr. Wilson, I greatly suspect him
of being secretly opposed to the League of Na-
tions, for he is publicly opposed to the holy bonds
of matrimony, and is on the wrong side of most
things—amiserable little no-account snipe. He is
no Lord of creation. Good Lord! his wife has
to do all the courting and threaten him with a
‘breach of promise case before she can force him
to marry her and he just hates her because she is

206 What Birds Have Done With Me

bigger and stronger and better looking than he is.
Could any wife respect such a husband? You
know she could not, and I, for one, think she
serves him just right when she leaves him to in-
cubate the eggs and rear the family, without help
from her. Cutting all domestic matters she
devotes herself to civic affairs and is a really
respected suffragette. This Miss Nancy, old hen,
Bridget, Child’s Nurse, he, Phalarope, is the
mean little exception to a sex that has made woo-
ing a profession and song and love, synonymous.

CHAPTER XVII
A LAST YEAR’S BIRD'S NEST

This is a proverbial type of emptiness, but
Nature abhors a vacuum and emptiness is speed-
ily filled with things visible or invisible. At a
first glance, this dilapidated, weather-worn old
nest seems as bare as old Mother Hubbard’s cup-
board, but before you can look twice, a ray from
Aladdin’s Lamp has gilded and beautified and
crowds its emptiness with teeming life.

Lo! we are in the presence of a work of art,
not made with hands, and of a model to be seen
“through the latticed windows of the grove,”’
when Time was young. Yes, bird-craft is greater
than hand-craft, for no human creature, using his
hands and mouth alone could equal the wonder
of this old nest. This Master-Builder could have
never been taught Geometry, but he, nevertheless,
never fails to produce a perfect circle in the archi-
tecture of a nest whose model is unchanging from
age to age and whose craftsmen produce nothing
that falls short of perfection.

There is magic here. Aladdin’s Lamp is so
207

208 What Birds Have Done With Me

flooding the old nest with light, unapproachable,
that one instinctively begins to fumble for his
shoe-laces. We have before us a microcosm,
in this shallow cavity, life and melody had their
birth, pray God, the life may be unending and the
melody as eternal as Time. An empty nest ?—
far from it. Here the miracle of Mother-Love
has reflected the visible presence of the Divine
Creator of something so holy that in its presence,
Art and Song fall down powerless and all speech
becomes incoherent mutterings.

I hold the crumbling nest in my hand and try
to visualize a form or forms that the depths of
space have swallowed up, try to follow the waves
of melody that may flow on for twice ten thou-
sand years and my vanished singers, indeed, be-
come ‘“Troubadours and Ballad singers on the
streets of Heaven.’ Much has gone from the
nest and much remains. A nest is a type of home
and the perfect home, also, has its relation to
Past and Future, Life and Gladness, and there is
nothing else of greater significance, or more uni-
versal attractiveness in this present evil world.

How well I remember my first nest which, so
to speak, I held in co-partnership with the parent
birds—a pair of Robins. It was located on a
corner of a Virginia rail fence, along a lane where
I drove cows every day on my father’s farm in
Wisconsin. I had never seen a nest—it was my

A Last Year’s Bird’s Nest 209

first year in the country and I am not even sure
that I had ever heard of one. When I first saw
the Robins flying about with grass and straw in
their mouths, I pondered upon it but certainly
did not arrive at the right explanation, for, on
recovering from having been thrown from the
back of an unbroken colt, I resumed my usual duty
as a cow-herd, I suddenly saw the nest,—not as
high as my head and containing four wonderfully
blue eggs—Robin’s egg blue—there is no other
color just like it. I afterward saw some of the
wonders of architecture that man has erected on
this earth, I saw diamonds and other precious
stones, confronted many of the wonders of Crea-
tion, but nothing ever astounded, awed, enthralled
me like that first nest with its sky-blue eggs. It
has been said that every circus is but a duplica-
tion of our first circus and so every other nest
among the thousands I have seen has but in a
greater or less degree, reflected the wonder of
that first nest—a house not made with hands.
Wood-peckers building their nests in the very
heart of oaks, turning bill and head into chisel
and hammer and beating carpenters at their own
kind of work, impressed me greatly, but some
way it did not seem quite so wonderful as the
perfectly round nest made of grass and mud,
with its blue eggs under the blue sky. I did not
believe the man who first told me of the Bal-

210 What Birds Have Done With Me

timore Oriole’s nest; a woven bottle, hitched to
the tip-top branch of a tall tree, where it was
swung by the winds as no boat was ever rocked
by the waves. But it was all true, plus the
witchery of always finding it complete and never
in process of construction. I think I was most
shocked and sorry for a little warbler, who, so
to speak, always has to carry its nest with it
and that nest a Dutch oven. No wonder he
walks in the most dignified manner, instead of
hopping,—what else can you expect of an “Oven-
Bird’? The name was given on account of the
size and shape of the nest that is built on the
ground.

From the Fish-hawk’s nest, built year after
year, in the same tree, one nest upon another, till
you see what looks like a cartload of sticks, down
to no nest at all; the eggs deposited on the ground
or a flat rock, there are all gradations. So there
are all sizes of eggs; from the Ostrich, as big as
your head, down to that of the Humming-bird
not bigger than a pea. When Jerry Norton, the
village liar, told me of birds’ eggs bigger than
my head, I thought he was lying; when he told
me that some bald-headed men had a sun-stroke
on a desert and as they lay unconscious, some
Ostriches came along and thinking the bald heads
their own eggs, sat on them and hatched out bal-
let-girls, I knew he was. He must have told the

A Last Year's Bird’s Nesi 211

same story to Francis Wilson and it looks as
though he believed it, for he has been telling it off
and on ever since.

That birds have unchanging types of nests,
built in about the same general locations from
year to year, has long been established beyond
question. In fact, so generally accepted is the
type and the location that at a first glance we
might jump to the mistaken conclusion that both
are beyond change. There are few rules having
an invariable sequence and the general rule of
the nesting habits of birds is not an exception.
Their rule is changed, some in only a slight degree,
others radically. The Swallows have departed
most widely in this respect. The Barn-Swallows,
with their long row of nests beneath the eaves,
have made certainly great departure from the
habits of their ancestors, but not greater than
the Purple-Martin, from a hole in a tree to his
present man-made apartment house.

Perhaps strangest of all is the Swift in the
chimney,—the Chimney Swift, braving smoke and
fire and gloom profound, not to mention an odor
of creosote next to a Hun’s gas shell. Great
numbers of young must be smothered and burned,
but still they persist, doubtless for reasons as
mysterious as their place of winter sojourn, which
is not known. The Night-Hawk, also, made a
stupendous change when it changed from the

212 What Birds Have Done With Me

bosom of Mother Nature to the flat roof of a
city block, where it is not infrequently found
nesting.

The Mourning Dove is one of the most in-
artistic and slovenly of nest builders, often mak-
ing so shallow and poorly-constructed a nest that
a sudden movement from fright will cause her to
knock out of the nest one or both of her eggs.
What is true of the Mourning Dove was equally.
true of the Passenger Pigeon and I recall the
same kind of accident to a Pigeon nest that I was
watching, many years ago; first, one egg and, a
few days afterward, the second were knocked out
and broken by the mother bird. That various
birds have ideas of adornment and ornamentation
is beyond question. I saw a Robin’s nest, this last
season built in a passage-way beside lattice work
and on the side opposite of the lattice work,
streamers of heavy cord had been attached to
the nest and hung down three and four feet. How
else are we to explain the sluffed snake-skin that
the Great Fly-Catcher twists around its nest?
Bright pieces of yarn and ribbon will take the eye
of many a bird as “the weave of a kiltie will
take the eye of a lassie,’ according to Harry
Lauder, and whatever else the tartan is, it must
be bright to be most pleasing.

I recall a Wren’s nest built in a gaudily-painted
watering pot, the wrecked plaything of a child,

A Last Year's Bird’s Nest 213

both the handle and the spout were missing, but it
was clearly the thing the Wren long had sought
and it was a possession she was ready to defend
with her life if need be.

If we took up the list of odd places in which
we have known birds to build nests, like Tenny-
son’s Brook, the number would go on forever.
Two we must mention. A Robin, possibly from
Boston, built its nest in a hub; one, from Maine, in
a boot-leg.

In China, there is an edible bird’s nest, that is,
edible to the Chinese, and they are welcome to
my share; and in the far North many people get
both food and drink, figuratively speaking, out of
the Eider-ducks’ nest, all the expensive Eider-
down of commerce being from the nests of the
birds who divest their own bodies to protect their
ducklings. Surely nothing else in this world is
born into quite so downy a nest. The value of
the down has alone kept the duck from the exter-
mination that overtook the Labrador Duck.

The story of birds’ nests is a rich lode of nat-
ural history which if properly smelted, is easily
beaten into leaves as numerous as the leaves of
autumn. In other words, the man has not yet
been born with the Seer’s insight and the Magi-
cian’s touch to weave again the rare tapestry that
Mother Nature’s birds have been weaving since
the world was fresh and young. The miracle of

214. What Birds Have Done With Me

it all, the nest and the egg, the egg and the bird,
the bird and the flight, the flight and the song, in
advance of the fact, if told for truth, it would
have taxed the credulity of children and fools.
A mass of protoplasm inside a shell, the shell
for a few weeks kept warm by the heat of the
mother’s body, then something alive from within
calling for the freedom that life demands, no an-
swer from without, no offer of help, then the
cramped, puny creature nerved to stupendous ef-
fort by the very urge of existence, batters down its
dungeon walls and for days may remain blind and
helpless, or in twenty-four hours may be a full
partaker of the life of its kind, running or swim-
ming with the speed of adults. ‘That the Ostrich
chick should perform this prodigy is difficult of
belief: that the unhatched Humming-bird should
do likewise is unthinkable; imagination lays down
and will not come to our help. In this way, and
in this way only, is bird life continued on this
planet, where nest robbing is a business, a pastime
and a science.

In almost every country on the face of the
earth, frequently open and above board and again
secret and furtively, birds’ eggs are articles of
merchandise, the trade under the usual laws of
trade, scarcity inflating prices. The rarer the
species, the higher the price the eggs of some
extinct species selling for hundreds of dollars each

Ss

A Last Year's Bird’s Nest 215

to collectors. The eggs of our game birds since
the settlement of the country, have, to some ex-
tent, been used for food, following the customs
of savage predecessors. Here is a modern in-
stance of how eggs are eaten in the far North,
by the natives. When not quite of age Benjamin
Rogers, son of Dr. B. T. Rogers, President of
Racine College, Racine, Wisconsin, went to
Alaska to install an electric lighting plant for the
Episcopal Mission at Point Hope. With five
natives he paddled sixty miles to an island to col-
lect Murre’s eggs—the Murre incubates a single
egg—and they filled their skin boat with such an
enormous load that it took thirty-six hours’ con-
stant paddling to make the return trip. This inci-
dent is only three years old and my intrepid young
friend modestly confided the adventure to me on
his return. The vast number of eggs collected as a
pastime, could they be brought to light, would
surprise the average Ornithologist, and astound
the public. As a special Game Warden and Con-
servation Warden, I have examined collections
so extensive that no one would expect to find their
equal outside of a museum. I recall one in par-
ticular, the work of a retired farmer, living in a
town of eighteen hundred population, carried on
for years, the collection hidden in his barn and
kept secret from all his neighbors. Though a
close-fisted old fellow, he has bought most of his

216 What Birds Have Done With Me

eggs, many secretly from children, and had
spent money to indulge this passion as he would
not spend money for anything else. A devout
church member, when I asked to see his collection
he looked me in the face and most emphatically
denied having one. The light of a star helped
his memory and he took me to his barn, with
profuse apologies. ‘The necessity of catching a
train prevented me from going through it all,
but I had rarely seen the like in any private col-
lection and this the strangest thing of all: he was
afraid to own it, would neither sell nor give it
away and had no one to leave it to. I imagine
that I will not be believed when I assert that
fortunes, both in this and other countries, are be-
ing spent for birds’ eggs and these collections will
be inherited by people who in our better civiliza-
tion, already knocking at the door, will be
ashamed to have it known that among their an-
cestors were nest robbers and they will secretly
destroy a gruesome and worthless inheritance.
‘The Oologist” is the name of a little magazine
having Science pilloried on its title page, the little
mother of yellow journalism, for it is published
in the interest of the birds’ egg collector, the
scientific birds’ egg collector, if you please. Be-
hold the noble ambition of “The Odlogist’’ to
promote the distribution of birds’ eggs so that
every museum and school shall have a collection,

ae SS =

A Last Year’s Bird’s Nest 217

the larger the better, that the sum of human
knowledge may thus be increased. Granted that
the object is primarily scientific, I challenge the
right of the egg collector to make persistent in-
roads upon our vanishing wild life, for we are
not to lose sight of the fact that the egg of the
rare bird is sought above all others. For a fact,
collections. of eggs and stuffed birds are of small
value to the student of Ornithology and worthless
to everyone else. The wise teacher of such
studies says with the poet Bryant: ‘“‘Go forth under
the open sky and list to Nature’s teaching,” and
the soul of the teacher who would send a student
to a city to study a musty, moth-eaten collection
of either birds or eggs, must be already dead
within him.

To me, an empty nest, a last year’s bird’s nest,
if you please, is still wonderful—as wonderful as
the life for which it stands. I have seen some
of the great collections of eggs in this country
with only weariness and disgust and I have found
a half shell on my lawn and found in it a message
so wonderful that when I append it here and at-
tempt once more to tell its story, I have the same
feeling that I had then, that the story of the
half shell is not half told.

To call one half of a blue shell an ‘‘Azurite”’
would be a stilted and fanciful way of speaking
of a fragment of a Robin’s egg found in the green

218 What Birds Have Done With Me

grass on the lawn, where the never-ending miracle
of incubation had taken place in the tree above.
Nevertheless, the one who found it felt that all
words were inadequate to express something of
wonder and awe in his inner consciousness aroused
by the not at all uncommon find.

Beautiful and fragile as the fragment was, it
had played its part and was now a worthless thing
to be cast aside, but the blue still suggested the
sky and the creature that had come out of it, as
belonging to another world—out of the blue, into
the blue, a relationship between the near and
remote.

Surely there is no other day, but a June day,
that comes in emerald robes and golden sandals
across the far horizon with kisses, and more kisses,
for all that are glad and rejoice in the great gift
of life. On such a morning a world-weary man
came hurrying across the lawn where his “Super
Six” awaited him on the drive. As he drew near,
instinctively, the owner of the fragment of blue
shell closed his hand, as though it would not be
kind to show a glimpse of Heaven to a poor
wretch who was carrying about with him his own
Hell.

The unhappy man’s story is scarcely more un-
common than the fragment of shell. Here it is
in brief. From his childhood, the poor worldling
had been shut out from joy and gladness of the

A Last Year’s Bird’s Nest 219

wonder world about us. From a tenement, where
foreigners were herded like cattle, he had climbed
to the ownership of a big factory, an ill-smelling
factory, from which dollars came in a stream and
this stream had been augmented by war profits
till it was a torrent submerging all the landmarks
and carrying him out on a lonesome ocean, where
there were nothing but dollars and where dollars
would no longer buy a thing—all quite valueless.
He was in the last stages of a new disease, that
doctors could do worse than call Millionitis.

When the wretched, sleepless, wandering
Cresus had eliminated himself from the land-
scape, the owner of the half shell shyly opened
his hand and the first glance convinced him that
the fairies had been doing things, while he had
been only talking, for the blue had collected all
the other rich coloring of a world of beauty. His
eyes were suddenly ravished with the light of
dawns, sunsets, waterfalls, rainbows, and look-
ing to see that he was not observed, he held the
fragment of shell to his ear, and as the sea shell
sings of the ocean, his being was suddenly flooded
with the bird song of the universe, a feathered
“choir invisible.”

Time, like everything else in these days, is to
be Hooverized and as a matter of fact, the
man with the half shell had only stopped his lawn
mower long enough to dip up a little of the dewy

iain
ee
Se Rey

lips of the inner man of the heart.

CHAPTER XVIII
A SAINT BARTHOLOMEW OF BIRDS

A massacre is indiscriminate slaughter with
unnecessary cruelty, but as it is practically never
necessary, it is always cruel and outrageous.
Hands red with innocent blood make indelible
stains, and that people or nation indulging in
blood lust is still in the swaddling clothes of a
development just commencing. Massacre is a
parent stem upon which mob violence is born in
the shape of a gnarled and unripe fruit. Mob
violence is an emotion often widely divorced from
all sober, serious thought, in fact, it is incapable
of thought, as thought would destroy the unrea-
soning act. The world is just learning the pos-
sibilities of unleashed passion with ignorance as a
dynamo running wild.

In Longfellow’s ‘Tales of a Wayside Inn’’ is
a poem entitled, “Ihe Birds of Killingworth,”
and in that poem occur the words that serve as
the caption of this chapter. ‘The whole thing de-
scribed with prophetic vision a Saint Bartholomew

of Birds, restricted to a circumscribed area, which
221

222 What Birds Have Done With Me

later on became general, universal. Longfellow
is really the pioneer writer on the economic value
of bird life, their value in protecting growing
things was seemingly as well known to the poet-
naturalist as to any scientist who has followed
him, examining stomachs and counting noxious in-
sects found therein. In his vision he saw a mighty
army of victorious worms, slimy, hideous, crawl-
ing everywhere, with nothing left to check their
onward march, now that the birds had all been
killed.

The birds were massacred by the very farmers
whom they protected, for the reason that they
were robbers of the harvest. It’s the same class
of men today who are doing nothing to save what
is left of our bird neighbors, an allied army of
bird soldiers fighting the onrush of wave after
wave of insect life that will, if not checked, sweep
the earth. When the men who had massacred
the birds saw the ruinous nature of the thing they
had done, they sent to other provinces and
brought back those forms of life of which their
fields and forests had been bereft and restored
what was lost. A thing impossible when the
countries of the earth have all exterminated their
birds. The present bird massacre means bird
extermination, final, eternal.

While it may be true that we only know of the
absolute extermination of a dozen to twenty

A Saint Bartholomew of Birds 223

species, a vast number of species are close to
extermination. I, myself, have seen the awful
decimation in the lost half century. I recall
photographs of the aquatic life of the Saint John’s
River, Florida, taken forty years ago. I con-
fess it seemed to be fairly crowded with a prodi-
gal wealth of bird life, the like of which I had
never even dreamed of, or waking, thought pos-
sible. When I saw the river for the first time, a
little over a dozen years ago, the almost com-
plete absence of all life was more appalling than
the teeming life that I still had in my mind’s eye.
Thousands were no longer represented by tens.
From Jacksonville to Sanford, some two hundred
miles, with the exception of blackbirds, I did not
see altogether, fifty birds in the aggregate. With
a good pair of glasses I watched from the upper
deck, the dawn come over the lonely floods of
water and for a long time nothing moved upon
the face of the waters, and then far away some
fugitive remnants of the life that had been and
was gone. Yes! Longfellow was a prophet, had
seen a vision and told the story, not only of the
Saint John’s River, but of the whole world in two
lines. Did I recall them or were they actually
spoken into my ear, so vivid and astonishing they
seemed:
“The wild wind went moaning everywhere,
Lamenting the dead children of the air.”

224 What Birds Have Done With Me

I, myself, witnessed the exodus of the Passen-
ger Pigeon; saw the flocks grow less and less, and
finally vanish. ‘The repulsive story of that great
massacre is too well known to need repetition,
and it is only worth while from its possible power
to point a moral and adorn a tale. People said
then, are saying now, you can’t kill a species, they
were not killed, they died of disease. The grace-
ful Pigeon and the lordly Bison, strangely enough,
were both afflicted with the same disease—human-
itis, caused by the sting of a tiny microbe, the
very deadliest on the earth. Within the historic
period no race of creatures has become extinct
without the aid of man, microbe, or “Lord High
Executioner,” call him what you will.

Massacre is defined as indiscriminate slaughter,
but not so of necessity as it may be very discrimi-
nating, so things killed in great numbers by star-
vation or the sly, prowling decimation of secret
enemies, are scarcely slaughtered with violence.
I wish to define my poetic sentence, at the head
of this chapter as extensive, unnecessary killing
with or without discrimination or violence. The
destruction of a bird’s natural environment with
nothing to take its place, may look toward the
final destruction of that species as certainly as
work done with gun or club. ‘The wholesale de-
struction of great forests and the draining and
cultivation of great areas of low land has meant

A Saint Bartholomew of Birds aps

death to certain species. Civilization does not
mean bird extermination and certain harmless
beneficial birds would flourish where the soil is
largely cultivated, were they not harmed by en-
emies having nothing to do with a changed en-
vironment. Were districts reforested and tangles
left along hedge-rows for hiding and _ nesting
places, there need be slight loss of bird life. To
this, if food was added in inclement weather in
winter, these wild neighbors would become more
than half domesticated in many instances.

Among causes resulting in extensive destruction
of bird life, I would put first of all, the all but
universal armament of young boys with air-guns.
Military training of boys makes the efficient
army; the air-guns develop and make efficient,
the adult hunter, killer, slaughterer. Three-year-
olds go to camp in the space under the sitting-
room table and there is enough witchery in the
air-gun to connect their present camp with one in
the wilderness, where this plaything shall be trans-
formed into a real gun, and they, into mighty
hunters. If you would question the ‘‘true sports-
man,’ asking him when he became interested in
hunting and if he answered truthfully, ninety-five
per cent. would say, “Why, always, ever since I
had my first air-gun.”

Children utterly ignorant of the commonest

226 What Birds Have Done With Me

birds are sent out with the injunction to kill only
English sparrows, if they belong to families in
that small minority who happen to know some-
thing of the value of bird life, otherwise without
any limitation as to what they shall kill, but the
inability of the juvenile hunter to tell birds apart
results in both cases, in the slaughter of all vari-
eties of sparrows and other small brown birds.
A couple of fairly-grown boys here in Biloxi shot
seventy-one Cedar-Waxwings, calling them, and
I think, honestly believing them, to be ‘‘a kind of
English Sparrow.” ‘Thus many a bird has suf-
fered death by proxy and the killing of one variety
leads to the indiscriminate killing of all. Boys,
air-guns, Sparrows,—all taken together, may
seem of small significance and be only remotely
related to bird annihilation, but are certainly ante-
cedent causes. Why mob law for English Spar-
rows?

In the treatment of this small stranger within
our gates we have made an exception, if there
was ever any reason for charging us with being
Anglo-maniacs; the rule has been open hatred
and in the neutrality of those professing it was
the usual element of prejudice.

Even State Audubon Societies have been made
to seemingly endorse the “sparrow-trap’’ man
and publications, carried on in the interest of
bird protection, have advertised a scheme to help

A Saint Bartholomew of Birds 225

destroy a whole family of friendly little birds,
and the members of civic organizations have often
turned themselves into cunning Borgias with the
same end in view.

These visitors from over the sea have signed
on living in close proximity to their worst enemy,
man, who has betrayed their trust and mobbed,
killed, and persecuted them in every conceivable
way, and done it in the name of bird protection.
The cry has been: ‘“They drive away our wild
birds, rob their nests and even kill them.”’ As a
matter of fact, there isn’t a word of truth in the
charge; man, the killer, has the monopoly in that
kind of sorry persecution and destruction. After
years of this treatment we are just beginning to
find out that the English Sparrow is a real help
in the struggle for existence and a beneficial bird
in our war with noxious insects. The Federal
Department of Agriculture is certainly in error
when it proposes to incite Boy Scouts and school
children in carrying out mob law against a bird
really deserving protection. That the public
press, somewhat generally, is protesting against
this proposed “St. Bartholomew Massacre’ of
English Sparrows is most timely and may prevent
a modern enactment of Longfellow’s ‘Birds of
Killingworth,” which, if pulled off would be apt
to cause ‘‘the spirits of the wise to sit in the clouds
and mock us.’’ It now looks as though the Eng-

228 What Birds Have Done With Me

lish Sparrow might soon be allowed to take out
his first papers.

No one thing would result in so great a saving
of bird life as the passage of a law making the
air-gun, like ‘‘a bird-cannon,” a thing contraband,
as detrimental, enormously destructive to forms
of life, essential to the very continuance of vege-

tation on the planet. The Federal Agricultural ©

Department, having the enforcement of the
Migratory Bird Law should stop the manufactory
and sale of the harmless little air-gun, that like
a dumb watch a little later on is sure to be changed
to a live one. With no air-gun in the hands of
the callow youngster, and no license to hunt till a
boy has attained legal manhood, a mob
is transformed into a drilled army. Can any-
thing be more unwise than to make sportsmen
out of the rising generation, and then hire War-
dens to stay the killing of useful birds? Certain
evils are best controlled as near as possible to the
fountain head.

The church and the school and the home must
be made active in the cultivation of a superhuman
soul against killing. Why prattle about the cul-
tivation of human education? Education is always
on the side of the killer; it’s a wilderness where
flesh-pots are the things most to be desired.
“Thou shalt not kill” must some way be put into
the super-soul of mankind, a new religion in which

4

A Saint Bartholomew of Birds 229

the non-shedding of blood shall be the central
tenant. When such a_ super-consciousness be-
comes universal a stain shall be removed from
church, and the school and from all homes.

Back of the Plume Pirates, shall we say higher
up, are the women of our best society and back
of them hideous, merciless Dame Fashion. Is
there no flash of sympathy common to all moth-
ers? Is it really possible that a human mother
knowing that her borrowed plumes are secured
at the cost of death to other mothers, dumb moth-
ers, and the slow starvation of nestlings, can still
want to wear trophies of a savagery that would
shock savages?

Men are not a whit behind the mothers of men
in showing themselves merciless, though in their
own cases they themselves are the killers, and
back of the killing of big game you have but to
scrutinize the so-called prowess to discover in it
a vanity akin to that of the plume wearer. The
great Arctic explorer, Stefansson, puts this thing
in its true light: ‘‘With me, the matter of big
game hunting is another case of swords sticking
to hands that seek the plough. I am afraid that
I am not a true sportsman. It is impossible for
me to get enjoyment out of killing and if I did;
I should get a job in the Chicago stock-yards
rather than follow poor frightened wild things
around with a rifle.” ;

230 What Birds Have Done With Me

It is mere nonsense to talk of wild animals
having a chance for their lives against the hunter.
No matter how well provided by nature with claw
and teeth and stout muscles, they have scarce more
chance against a man with a modern rifle than a
“fly against a sledge-hammer.”

When the whole people become aware of the
value of insectivorous birds, they will not permit
their annual massacre by what have been called,
and in most quarters are still considered, “per-
fectly good tabby cats.” In a late issue of the
New Orleans Times-Picayune was published: “In
memoriam of five thousand perfectly good tabby
cats.’’ There is no such thing as a perfectly good
tabby cat, except a dead one. The world would
be better off if these Huns, these alien enemies,
these marauding vermin, were every one forced to
“go west.”

They are costly pets, pets that make no return

for the affection lavished upon them, and are

menaces, as spreaders of contagion, to the house-
holds that foster them. Its irresistibly charm-
ing purr is the camouflage of a diminutive tiger
that never has been really domesticated.

The vast majority of cats secure their soft ©

cushions and warm places by the fire through false
pretenses; not one in ten will catch a mouse, and
not one in a hundred will kill a rat. Your ‘‘per-
fectly good tabby cat” is the most blood-thirsty

Pa
ae
He
4

:

A Saint Bartholomew of Birds 231

of all animals and the most terrible scourge to
bird life—the vanishing wild life—of America.
“True sportsmen,” “‘pot hunters,” ‘“‘the negro with
the $3 gun” all together do not begin to kill as
many birds as dear, innocent Tabby. Some-
where around 300,000,000 annually is supposed
to be a fair estimate of puss’s destruction of game
and insectivorous birds.

It has been well said that the cat fears no law
and knows no master; you cannot train his claws
not to rend, nor his teeth not to tear. It goes
without saying that a creature that has taken pos-
session of the home is bound to be protected by the
affection of the whole household and much in the
way of education will be required to dislodge it.
The cat menace to bird life is ten times as great in
the South as in the North, for there, the animals
breed to starvation lines and the milder climate
seems favorable to Tabby’s attaining length of
days; her nine lives being increased to at least
eighteen.

Sportsmen are only comparatively recently fac-
ing the killing off of whole species and the best in-
formed among their number, are appalled by facts
that no longer can be ignored. They quite gen-
erally admit the Massacre of the Passenger
Pigeon, but the latest palliation is the statement
that it was a good thing for the farmer. The
threatened extinction of Ducks comes home to

232 What Birds Have Done With Me

them and they protest against the general massa-
cre of the past.

Close upon the heels of worry among sportsmen
over the disappearance of the wild pigeon and the
early extinction of the prairie chicken, comes pre-
diction of the end of the mallard duck. An East-
ern writer observes:

“Formerly mallards existed in abundance, hard
to realize at the present time. Until after the war
(1861-1865) the ponds of middle South Carolina
supported millions of them each winter. The
noise of their flight sometimes deafened one.
They were killed by the wagonload. At Big Lake,
Arkansas, in the winter of 1893-1894, a single
pot hunter sold 8000 mallards, and 120,000 were
sent to market. In Calcasieu parish, Louisiana,
last winter 250,000 mallards were killed. Hun-
dreds of tons were killed at Lake Malheur, Ore-
gon, for their feathers. In Canada and along the
many lakes up to Hudson Bay, duck eggs were
sold by the million, their contents to be used in
glue factories and for the refining of sugar.”

The Superior Telegram, deploring the ruthless
treatment of the mallard, contrasts him with the
wild pigeon to the latter’s disadvantage. The
bird, it says, was a good riddance, though tooth-
some when young and fat. The farming industry
could not afford to maintain him, because he was
a vegetarian, and never harmed an insect. The

A Saint Bartholomew of Birds 233

mallard, on the other hand, robs nobody. ‘He
lives on the cresses and celeries of the waters, and
his flesh is superior to that of his canvasback or
redhead cousin. Every state ought to take meas-
ures to conserve him, else soon we shall know him
no more.’ What is needed in addition to game
laws is public sentiment backed by public spirit
that will condemn their non-observance. Without
enlightened civic consciousness on the subject of
protecting the wild birds, their numbers will rapid-
ly decrease, and beyond question a time will come
when the multiplication of insect pests will avenge
the slaughter of the feathered races.

Most of the hunting on our Lake, is at the
Head, or down at the inlet; both localities having
a more or less variety of attractive duck food.
At the head the ducks cross from their feeding
ground on a near-by marshy lake to the protection
of the open water of our lake and were frequently
slaughtered in great numbers, night and morning,
on the portage between the lakes. If there are
Ducks anywhere you can safely count on finding
a goodly number at the inlet. When the country
was first settled Adolph Buzze not infrequently
used to bring a ‘““Dugout”’ full from the inlet, the
result of a few hours’ shooting.. Adolph was ut-
terly without education, as we understand the
meaning of the word, though he actually under-
stood more than the average man, the mystery of

234. What Birds Have Done With Me

the teeming life in the world about him. Though
he may often have wandered and lost his way,
every trail he followed led him back to God. Sim-
ple minded, good hearted, he hunted and trapped
as he chopped wood to support his family. He
was a “pot hunter,” an epithet of loathing and
contempt to every ‘“‘true sportsman,” and it is at
men of this class that all of our protective game
laws are aimed.

The other day a very different style of a man
hunted at the inlet. Everything about him was
strictly up-to-date, or rather of the 1919 model.
He was the antipode of Adolph, the “‘pot hunter,”
he killed for sport, as every true sportsman does.
In the twilight of a November day he came into
his store with a single trophy, a solitary Mallard,
the only living thing that he had seen to shoot
at, down at the inlet. He gave an animated de-
scription of his kill: “‘I thought I was going to be
‘skunked’ when I saw the vagabond in the rushes
near shore. He let me come so close that a first
I thought he must have a broken wing and could
not fly, but just as Billy was going to give him one
with the paddle he got up like a flash and I natu-
rally blew that green head of his into the middle
of next week.” There were not wanting those
who laughed and called him lucky in letting noth-
ing get away, and none had any appreciation of
the fact that it was a wounded or a sick bird that

A Saint Bartholomew of Birds 2.315

had furnished the animated target for one who
only shot according to law in the “Open Sea-
son.”

A leading business man, and an exceptionally
fine fellow, who has hunted all his life, said only
yesterday: “I have only recently learned that I
can get my necessary exercise out of doors at Golf
and am no longer lending a hand in helping de-
stroy our vanishing wild life.”

When Theodore Roosevelt was collecting ma-
terial for his bloody ‘African Game Trails,” his
friend and admirer, John Burroughs, said of his
passion to kill things: “‘Later on he’ll slough this
Of.”

Is it too much to hope that America, the most
progressive and civilized country on the face of
the earth, will: ‘Later on slough off” an “Open
Season’’?

In a general way it is better to look ahead than
to look backward, but progress must be measured
by the backward look. Everything is comparative
and conditions actually bad, showing betterment
are not without hope. It is the wide view that
often makes Giant Despair, at the mouth of his
cave, look like a single plant louse on the thorny
stem of Time.

Our Government needs ammunition to fight
the great battle for world-wide Democracy, but
the “true sportsman” needs his recreation and we

236 What Birds Have Done With Me

hear nothing of any restriction on the amount of
fixed ammunition to be poured into our vanishing
wild life, during the coming “open season.” The
slaughter of our bird neighbors for sport is a
shameful reversion to savage ancestors—I beg
pardon of these same ancestors—they were sav-
ages but not guilty of that civilized, smug, blood-
thirstiness. However great the discouragements
of our immediate surroundings, the wide look
shows real progress in bird protection. If straws
show in what direction the wind blows, the tiny
fact that Metropolitan Newspapers are devoting
space to bird lore indicates a better future for our
birds. May we not go farther and see the ap-
proach of Halcyon days in that future when we
find reference in a department of ‘‘Woods and
Waters,” to the kingfisher as a brother fisher-
man?

Oh! soul of mine remember,

There is really naught to fear,

The days are growing brighter,

Each day throughout the year. Hig

tC

CHAPTER XIX
SOME INVISIBLE DEFENDERS

In one of our recent magazines there were seven
articles pertaining to the world war, and one,
beautifully illustrated, giving some account of an-
other army, rarely noticed by the average person,
whose annual campaign against hordes of noxious
insects saves every forest in America. This is
no insignificant Council of Defence, working for
the general good, unhonored and unsung.

Igdrasil, according to Norse mythology, is
the ash tree of existence, and all life is represented
by this fabulous tree. The winds among its
branches are both shouting and whispering the
messages of Igdrasil. The forests are its
children and lovingly, devotedly, the birds watch
and protect these children, scattered so widely
over the face of the earth. All flesh is grass,
and grass, protected by the bird soldier, stands
for food and nourishment, but the tree has its
direct relationships, vast and tender, with home,
and home in very fact is the substance of things
hoped for. The singing army going through the

237

238 What Birds Have Done With Me

tree-tops is in reality providing you with a roof-
tree and a back-log, and this Dr. Henshaw, in the
“National Geographic Magazine,” the one re-
ferred to, calls ‘‘A Supreme Service.” ‘Think of
it; an aviation service, raining only blessings upon
the earth.

There is not a tree, symbol of strength and
beauty and receiving station for messages from the
unseen, that did not have hundreds of insect ene-
mies waiting for it when it came into existence,
and without the immediate protection of the birds
would have been quickly destroyed, and on the
other hand, there is not a giant among all the
trees of the forest who would long exist without
its Guardian Angel, the bird soldier. The only
real fairy stories are the ones that are actually
taking place around us all the time, but for which
we have no eyes. Solomon in all his glory was
not apparelled like many of our birds, and their
service belongs to a vaster temple than he ever
dreamed of—a temple not made with hands, in
which music and service are one and inseparable.

Now that the war is over and the professional
tree slaughter is organizing to meet an unpre-
cedented demand for lumber of all kinds, the Na-
tion’s sylvan treasury will be ruthlessly exploited
as never before. It almost seems as though both
the tree and the bird soldier are doomed, but the
apprehension must give place to greater determi-

Some Invisible Defenders 239

nation to conserve both. The poor narrow-mind-
ed lumberman, who sees in a tree only possible
lumber must be made to dip into the future and
conserve a natural resource for his children and
his children’s children, protecting and renewing
rather than destroying. God save the world from
the greed of ignorant little men.

Arrogance and ignorance shroud the morning
and the evening of existence of the dyed-in-the-
wool money grubber, who would sell his Lord for
fifteen pieces of silver if he could not get thirty.
To them, outside of a sordid commercialism, there
is nothing; and were beauty and song exposed on
the block, among them all there would not be
found a single bidder. People who know all can’t
be told a single thing.

That we are the people and wisdom will die
with us, is probably the conviction of most races
of human beings. Any idea of kinship with other
forms of life is not to be tolerated; we are the
proud possessors of a god-like reason, the brute
creation of a blind instinct far removed from
man’s lofty endowment. Such a belief makes
easier the universally accepted notion of a divinely
given dominion over the beasts of the fields and
the fowls of the air and all that passeth through
the depths of the sea. Careful investigation goes
to show that there is not such a mighty chasm
between reason and instinct as has been commonly

240 What Birds Have Done With Me

supposed to separate us from our little brothers of
the field and forest. The word instinct is a blan-
ket term covering a world of ignorance. When a
toothless old man soaks his crust in his coffee, the
act is prompted by reason; when a duck, that has
only rudimentary salivary glands carries a hard
crust some little distance to soak it in water, it
acts from instinct. A man through local attach-
ment prompted by reason, may travel across a con-
tinent to get back to the place of his birth; but a
wild duck, hatched in an incubator, may have
the same kind of local attachment, prompting it to
leave a body of water, its native element, and cross
a busy street that it might again enjoy a familiar
environment in close contact with human crea-
tures, the barrier of fear having been broken
down. Instinct is a great matter for it enabled
the wild ducks, spoken of above, to find their way
back over a road that they had never seen, over
which a man with all his reason might have wan-
dered and lost his way. It is said of man that
“Joy and grief and hope and fear alternate tri-
umph in his breast,” as though these were the
distinguishing qualities of the great gift of rea-
son, but as a matter of fact, dumb creatures, with
only instinct for a guide, are not strangers to like
emotions. True religion and undefiled is in a
recognition of the inestimable value of life, that

the highest and lowest hold in common, something

Some Invisible Defenders 241

to be guarded with the greatest care and never
recklessly sacrificed. Love and pity are two angels
guarding a sacred flame that once extinguished
may not be rekindled—Love’s Red Cross protect-
ing all life. ‘‘He who in his own soul perceives
the supreme soul in all beings, and acquires equa-
nimity toward them all, attains the highest state of
bliss.”

According to high authority, civilization means
“to reclaim from a savage state; instruct in the
arts and refinements of civilized life.’ Thus we
are taught to regard civilization and not savagery
as the adornments of a condition of splendid prog-
ress. Facts are stubborn things and lend no coun-
tenance to such very superficial conclusions. As
a matter of fact, the centuries grow weary over
the slowness of the thing we call civilization as it
creeps in petty pace from age to age. Man has
spent Aeons in getting on his hind feet, and it
seems as though more Aeons will have to drift
down the abyss of time before he is really re-
claimed from his innate savagery. To civilize is
a process; civilization a dream. The arts flour-
ish and refinement dies.

The soul of refinement is consideration for
everything that lives. A universal sense of com-
passion for every form of being that in common
with ourselves, fears and would escape death.
Across the beautiful Lawson Road, between the

242 What Birds Have Done With Me

Maplewood and the village of Green Lake, I re-
cently found the bloody body of a mother Coot
done to death by some fine gentleman, to whom
the creature was but an animated target. He gave
no thought of a possible callow brood in a nest
that stood for skill and mother love, where waters
dream and green flags tell their story to the pass-
ing breeze. Peradventure his friends congratu-
lated him on his skill as a mighty hunter; no stain
of blood, in the estimation of people of the high-
est refinement, follows such a petty murder.

Here is the whole thing in a nutshell. Humane
education is preparedness for Civilization.

There is a story that after all their defeats
when the victorious army of crusaders marched
into the Holy City, all comrades who had been
killed in battle, and from disease had fallen out
by the way, joined the army once more to take
part in the final triumph. It is not only a pretty
story but is symbolical of the way victories are
won to-day; thus are all battles fought by the liv-
ing and the dead, the visible and the invisible. In
the late war in Europe, take our part in it; Grant
and Sherman, Lee and Stonewall Jackson were
Pershing’s Aids, and Washington and Lincoln
stand close to Woodrow Wilson. Woe to that
nation or that cause that has no invisible defend-
ers. Visible orators are as children playing in the
market place compared to the deathless eloquence

Some Invisible Defenders 243

of those whom we call dead. What matter if the
body lies mouldering in the grave so long as the
soul goes marching on? The death of Audubon
in no way interfered with his work as poet-natu-
ralist—a real John the Baptist in the wilderness
preparing the way for all naturalists who could
but follow after him along the trail he blazed.
Among the living of to-day there is not to be found
among bird-students another whose work and in-
fluence is to be compared in virile force and power
of inspiration with the first Commander-in-Chief
of the present army of bird-lovers. William Dut-
cher, voiceless, speechless for nearly ten years,
through the influence of the Audubon Society,
never spoke more eloquently in all his useful, beau-
tiful life than to-day. Audubon and Dutcher
rank high as two mighty invisible defenders of
the bird kingdom and those on the firing line had
as well pull down their flag, were it not for them
and all other invisible defenders of our vanishing
wild life.

If bird-lovers were without the spiritual in-
sight that sees in death no intimation of the less-
ening of a man’s ability to still further his own
work, the passing of Theodore Roosevelt would
be a cause for putting on crépe, and hearing in
bird-song a vast, sad requiem. As President, he
established the principle of government bird-reser-
vations, and created thirty-eight of these national

244 What Birds Have Done With Me

wild-life sanctuaries. He was a man of the out-
of-doors, a hunter and a bird-lover. It was said
of him that “he shot lions with a rifle and birds
with a field glass. The second sport he loved
better than the first.” How much of a real bird-
lover he was is just becoming known and the
world is going to remember him not on account
of the lions, or other wild animals he killed and
thus preserved, but for the efforts he put forth to
make bird protection respectable and popular.
The statesman and the writer will now be merged
into the invisible defender of the invisible de-
fenders of forest and field and all growing things.

““Mourny,” ‘‘Moses,” ‘Mr. Esau” and ‘‘Can-
ada’’ have long been dead, but death, only made
them, through me, invisible defenders of things
very much alive. The hard bitter materialism so
dominant in life to-day has to be reckoned with
and we have to learn the lesson of a higher, finer
civilization that takes cognizance of the invisible
and spiritual that moves the obvious and material.
I, for one, love to think of every hard dollar
that Mrs. Russell Sage gave to establish a Bird-
refuge in the South, for instance, as being trans-

muted into tender spiritual impulses for better
things that invisibly will flow on and on so long’

as Hope shall prompt Love to conquer. human
selfishness.

in
i te

lO ee OS

Some Invisible Defenders 245

The vision of to-day is the reality of to-morrow
and on the reality of many to-morrows, faith will
stand to catch the visions of all the coming years.

CHAPTER XX
GETTING ACQUAINTED

In whatever direction we turn, we are con-

fronted with certain visible or invisible barriers

that have to be surmounted before any progress
can be made. Indeed we are strangers and pil-
grims here and will so remain unless we become
acquainted with our environment and make friends
with other forms of life. In the oldest Poem in
the language is this imperative command: ‘“‘Ac-
quaint now thyself with Him and be at peace;
thereby good shall come unto thee.” The thought
is self-evident. Immediate acquaintance, imme-
diate peace, and both followed by unqualified good.
Taking the old commandment to pieces, in an-
other way it may be justly inferred that acquaint-
ance has been procrastinated and there has been
no realization that there is a benediction of peace
following knowledge. The ancients located truth
at the bottom of a well and we are just learning
that good flows only in certain fixed channels,
knowledge finds the channels.

Knowledge is that quality that enables us to
246

Getting Acquainted 247

recognize what is best. Knowledge is the Drago-
man among ancient Pyramids, and the interpreter
of whispering winds and the song of the open road.
Yesterday, its garden of memory, to-day, its work-
shop, to-morrow, its mount of visions. The police
dog that made the trip from San Diego to New
York and return, with Major Albert Smith
through the air, learned precious little of the
country over which he passed. And so it is with
us who make the journey of the years and fail to
acquaint ourselves with our environment. I sup-
pose the person who travels far and learns noth-
ing, might as well have remained at home and the
one who goes through life without learning any-
thing might just as well have never been born.
All education is just getting acquainted, finding
out things about things that actually exist. A real
teacher is a way shower and has nothing to do
with the fellow who pretends to be able to sell you
a big chunk of knowledge that you can carry home
with you, to be wrapped up in a sheep-skin, the
sheep-skin to be used to burnish the family escut-
cheon.

Erudition would lose most of its strut and an
like tail feathers if people only knew that back
of its fuss and feathers, it simply stands for get-
ting acquainted.

I have looked out of a car window and counted
as we rolled by, two hundred and fifty telegraph

248 What Birds Have Done With Me

poles. I knew them as telegraph poles, they all
looked alike, there was no question of the cor-
rectness of my identification of them, but there
was a lot of facts concerning them of which I
knew nothing. For many years I was the owner
of two hundred and fifty sheep. I knew that they
were sheep and looked much alike and there was
no question of the correctness of my identification
of the kind of animal that I called a sheep. How-
ever, my knowledge did not stop with a few facts,
as it did in the case of the telegraph poles, for all
my life I had a close and intimate acquaintance
with sheep, beginning with a single individual when
I was a lad. I came to know this individual so
well that when more were added and I became
the owner of a little flock, each remained an indi-
vidual, and when, much later in life, I owned the
big flock, each had its individuality as much as two
hundred horses I have owned and a thousand head
of cattle.

I knew my horses and cattle by name, and the
faces and voices and personality of every sheep
in my flock. Just as soon as you come to
know things as individuals, they cease to look
alike. J was making an address not so long ago
to an audience of tourists, most of whom were
well past middle life and few of whom I knew
personally, and I remember of having thought
that among them was a general resemblance great-

j

SL IR eh RA Ee ee ee

Getting Acquainted 249

er than among the last flock of sheep which I sold
twenty years ago and some of whose faces I still
remember. Those I remember best had: names
and nick names; their faces are unforgettable.
Beginning with the first colt I owned, when I was
fourteen years of age, I can give not only his
name and color, but his minute history—his per-
sonality—and that is equally true of at least a
hundred and ninety successors to skittish, panicky
Cruser.
__. Now I suppose that it would be possible to find
at the stock yards in Chicago, individuals who
have bought and sold millions of sheep, who have
utterly failed to learn as much of the animal
as an animal from their millions, as I learned
from my individual cosset lamb.

I know a man who, in the last forty years, has
approximately prepared and mounted the skins
of ten thousand birds, but, while thus in close
contact with birds, so far as really learning any-
thing of the real life of the creature he handled,
its possibilities and limitations, its good and evil,
its individuality and personality; he might as well
have spent his time sawing wood. Indeed, I think
that the more a man knows of the inside of a bird,
the less he knows about the outside; the more he
knows of a bird scientifically, the less he is apt to
know about the creature’s esthetic, spiritual, com-
panionable worth.

250 What Birds Have Done With Me

“To the making of books there is no end,”
said the wise man, before the invention of the
art of printing, and now, when they are being
scattered broad-cast like the leaves of Autumn, I
feel that a man should have some pretty valid
excuse for presuming to add another to an already
discouraging number. Now that my little craft
is on the ways preparatory to launching, I feel
that I must make this matter clear and give my
excuse for another bird book. It seems to me,
that so far, every writer on the subject has been
possessed to tell what he has done with birds, and
I approach the subject in an entirely opposite
direction, in an entirely opposite spirit; while I
admit the scientific side of bird study as valu-
able within stern limitations, I am dealing with
things alive, interesting, beautiful, wonderful,
with scarcely an exception, as a whole, valuable
beyond all computation, and individuals among
them ranking high among my most valued helpful
friends. Where it purports to be history, it is
real history and while I have been telling of what
birds have done for me, I have not dared to tell

how much they have done or how great their influ- _

ence has been. I will fail utterly if I fail to give
the personal touch; leaving your hearts unmoved
by my portrayal of the adorable little ways of
some of my adorable little friends. The only

Getting Acquainted Det

magic I have discussed has been the magic of
real friendship, my sympathies always on the side
of the hunted and always protesting against the
killer who killed for fun.

Here is the general law that governs all ac-
quaintance with animate things; from an intimate
acquaintance with individuals of a race we ar-
rive at a general acquaintance with all the mem-
bers of that race. Thinking of members of the
human race, for instance, as Japs, Slavs and
Orientals, is conclusive evidence that intimate ac-
quaintance with members of those races has not
enabled us to sink out of sight the big blur of
Nationality. Personality and friendship quickly
efface the mere tag of raciai distinction and aloof-
ness. We only know them when we know their
mentality, their place in the scheme of Nature,
their possible comradeship and affection.

John Sawyer, a Jap in my class in the Uni-
versity, whose name we could never learn to pro-
-nounce, and so called him that—stands to me for
all his race. Intellectually brilliant, gentle, kind-
ly, his personality, over enormous handicaps, car-
ried him forward to popularity, and though none
of us had seen his like before, he won the friend-
ship of all. After going back to his own country
he wrote me, I presume as a joke, quite a long let-
ter in his own language, not one word of which I

«

252 What Birds Have Done With Me

have been able to decipher, and I not only still
cherish it, but what is more, I never got so much
out of any other letter.

I never thought of Robins as a kind of bird
bearing that name, but to me they are all the rela-
tives of “‘Big-Bellied Hen,” with whose amazing
history I became familiar while still in kilts. Fig-
uratively speaking, I never see a “Cock-Robin”
without looking around apprehensively for the
“Sparrow with his Bow-and-Arrow.” Naturally
under these circumstances, I feel that I do well
to be angry when the Biological Survey, having
charge of the enforcement of the Federal Migra-
tory Law, yawns and asks the time of day when
I send them an account of a Negro having in his
possession “A Barrel of Pickled Robins.” How
many doves would it take to mourn for a barrel
of dead Robins? Not enough I fancy to reach the
ears of the officials at Washington.

Going back to those sheep again. A few years
ago I was being taken to a Hospital for an opera-
tion that promised one chance of recovery in five
thousand and the auto, in which I had been placed
to ride from the Station to the Hospital, was
stopped almost as soon as we got started, by a
vast flock of sheep on their way to the stock yards
and the shambles. ‘Their voices awoke ten thou-
sand old memories and I scrutinized each passing
face for resemblance to ‘‘Nan and Lilly” my two

Getting Acquainted 253

first Cosset lambs, and was relieved that there
was not a familiar look on a single face. Even
here, I was generalizing from ‘‘Nan and Lilly,” to
a personal knowledge of a whole bleating race.
It had been the night before when the passing
flock of wild Geese right over the house called me
back from the coma into which I seemed to be
sinking. Dead ‘“‘Canada”’ was the leader and was
pointing the way to the still waters that would
quench my intolerable thirst. Now I might have
shot and dressed and cooked a score of Geese, and
eaten a different part of each without coming to
know a thing worth while about ‘“‘Canada,” “The
element of life in God’s great picture of Autumn.”

Once upon a time (as all true stories begin),
we occupied my wife’s Uncle’s Cottage in Florida,
and the Post Master and general merchant in the
near-by village, wanting to discharge some obli-
gation to this Uncle, came with guns, dogs, Ponies,
and Buck-Board to take me hunting. He certain-
ly had not come because he knew me, and had
planned the expedition because he did not know
me. We drove directly to an entirely deserted
village four miles away, where private informa-
tion had reached him that game was simply wait-
ing to be killed. And so it proved, for we had not
hitched the Ponies in an old shed before he dis-
covered an immense covey of Quail in the rank
growth of weeds not ten feet away. He thrust

254 What Birds Have Done With Me

a cocked double-barreled shot gun into my hands
and said in a tense whisper: ‘‘Give ’em one bar-
rel on the ground and the next, when they get up.”
I am surprised that I heard him, for, in some un-
accountable way, I was back in that Wisconsin
swamp where I had helped round up the oxen on
that far way June morning, and these tiny feath-
ered things did not look much larger than “Mrs.
Stumpy’s chicks” and not nearly as wild. For
some reason this covey had not been hunted and
were unafraid. If very hungry, I might have
done it, or if wife or children needed meat, but
kill a Bob White, a thing in a wide sense related
to “Mrs. Stumpy,” for fun; that I could not do.
I scarcely remember how I tried to square myself,
I know it was no use to try to make him under-
stand, and I was quite willing to have him think
me “‘bug-house.”’

Only last winter a County official in a South-
ern City, with an auto, and dogs, and guns, and
another mighty hunter, and two women Dianas,
pulled up in front of a Drug Store and the host
called his father out to see the spoil of a two days’
hunt, eighty Bob Whites. The white haired old
gentleman, and he was a gentleman, congratulated
the party with beaming face, so sorry that he
could not have had a hand in the splendid sport.
Honestly, I did not understand their feeling any
more than they could understand mine while we

Getting Acquainted 255

were both looking on the same thing—a string of
dead birds. I grant them their point of view,
but honestly, had the string been Irish potatoes
instead of Quail that they as kitchen police in a
Cantonment, during the world war, had prepared
for use, by the process called peeling, I would
have thought it much more worthy of congratula-
tion.

Somewhere, I have seen a picture of a mighty
hunter, with a wide, wide smile on his refined face,
and Duck, and Ducks, and Ducks, and more
Ducks festooning, smothering his manly form.
Of course it was in a saloon, where only moder-
ate drinking is indulged in, and the joyous com-
pany is celebrating the grand victory of one of
their own number. It was almost like the ovation
we give to returning soldiers who have been mak-
ing the world safe for democracy. I do not see
this aggregation of dead things as ducks, but as
individual ducks, each with an unknown individu-
ality and personality, with somewhat rudimentary
traits and faculties in the main, but with other
traits far surpassing human reason, or human sen-
timent. They are nearly all Mallards and I knew
a certain Green-headed Mallard who opened the
door into the secret archives of his race. Else-
where in this volume I have told of ‘‘Mally’s”
mating with a single white Pekin Duck, and it
will be easy for these fine gentlemen to under-

256 What Birds Have Done With Me

stand his loyalty and devotion to his choice of a
single mate and perhaps they will take off their
hats to world voyagers, even though they have to
be taken home by the police, late at night.

The Rose-Breasted Grosbeak on the winter
hat of the florid lady, who sits just in front of us
at church, is no kind of a teacher of bird lore and
I am fully convinced that every florid and devout
lady in the congregation might boast the same
adornment, the aggregate amounting to quite a
little flock, and the flock would leave me in deep,
dark and awful ignorance of the things most
worth while in the individuality of one of their
number. I might even concentrate upon the near-
est bird, before and after the prayer and from
the opening hymn to the Doxology, without learn-
ing that the birds present, in life, could have made
that surpliced Choir sound like a Hawaiian Band.
Intense concentration upon the possibilities of this
bird during firstly, secondly, and thirdly, of the
long-winded sermon, might still have left me in
shameful ignorance of the fact that this bird, be-
yond all other birds, has a full-sized appetite for
potato bugs. On the other hand, “Mr. Esau”
was a living teacher and taught me all I need to
know about Grosbeaks, and at the close of the
term I was as much fed up with knowledge as he,
with White Grubs.

‘““Mourny” and ‘‘Mr. Moses” were my primary

Getting Acquainted 257

teachers; “Mr. Waxwing” and “Gooey Bill”
helped me through the grades, and the Chicka-
dees and Grackles saw me graduate from High
School, and when in College my thesis on: ‘“‘Yor-
ick’’ secured for me my degree of B. M.—Bird
Man. I am not quite clear on this point, but
fancy that I may have been admitted to the Bar,
as “The Birds’ Attorney’’ when I used to take
“Canada” down to the Lake every day for a
swim.

My Father’s experience as a teacher had mini-
mized the value to be obtained exclusively from
School Books, and he gave us children a large ad-
mixture of current reading, including all of Dick-
ens. [he characters became real personages to
us and we knew them just as well as we knew the
people in the near-by village. It’s not an ex-
aggeration to say that it would scarcely have sur-
prised any of us children to have turned the corner
and come face to face with Daniel Quilp, Sampson
Brass, or Miss Miggs, any more than it would
have surprised us to have met George Hyer, “Pug
Hamilton” and Miss Talker, all residents of the
town, whom we knew as well as we knew our own
names. Later on, when I went away to school, I
heard to my utter astonishment, people discus-
sing Dickens’ works in a well-bred and pedantic
manner and yet they did not know a single char-
acter intimately, and would not have stopped to

258 What Birds Have Done With Me

listen if they had heard Barnaby Rudge’s Raven
saying: ‘I’m a Devil, I’m a Devil, I’m a Devil.”
The glib talk of volumes, ignoring characters,
seemed most vague and unsatisfactory, as though
some one was setting up to have acquired a thor-

ough knowledge of China by memorizing the

names of all the different kinds of tea grown in
that country.

The veil of a temple has been rent and you are
being admitted into a Holy of Holies when the
barrier of fear between you and forms of wild life
is rolled up like a scroll, and you become friends
and comrades.

Is it not a shameful thing that man, the image
of his Maker, is an object of terror to his little
brothers of the field and forest? Among unnum-
bered monsters, there is nothing else that inspires
such universal fear, such a mad frenzy of appre-
hension. ‘They will complain that they found the
game wild. Which is the wilder, the hunted or the
hunters? ‘These wild things so relentlessly pur-
sued to their death were naturally tame and full
of confidence till man made of himself a “‘scare-
crow’ —a shamming presentiment of evil.

In the September “Recreation” there is a pic-
ture of a man, sitting on the ground, a grouse
perched on his arm. ‘Though often found near
human habitations, it is reckoned among our wild-
est birds. A lonely U.S. mail carrier, in a bit of

Getting Acquainted 259

woods, where he halts for dinner and to feed his
horse, convinces this shy denizen of the forest
that he is no Killer, and in no time they are
friends, each born again and each thrilled by the
indescribable joy of strange intimacies.

The Canada goose, world voyager of the upper
air, a vanishing picture of the day and a weird
voice of the heavy night, is commonly regarded as
the wildest of all things, and yet after a few weeks
of the close relations of surgeon and patient the
barrier of fear was broken down and my wild
goose would come at my call like a dog. ‘There is
no miracle about this. I have simply ceased to
stand for the most gruesome, hideous thing in
all the Universe of God—an eternal, all-embrac-
ing fear. Fi

Some years ago an American writer of books
gave one this title: ‘He Fell in Love With His
Wife,” and, though I never read the book, I can
imagine that the feeling must have been akin to
that experienced by the man who starts in to get
really well acquainted with a very familiar bird.
It’s a mutual surprise party, they knew each other
so well and yet they did not know each other at
all. They had passed the time of day for years, so
to speak, but never for a single hour had they
paused ‘‘to loaf and invite their souls.’ —The man
who fell in love with his wife was a worshipper of
beauty and his own wife was the most beautiful

260 What Birds Have Done With Me

woman in the world, but he did not know it. He
was always looking for comradeship and she was
the only person who could share fully every
thought and feeling that had ever swept his be-
ing; his parched lips had been seeking gladness
and though he knew it not, her heart was its over-
flowing fountain. Many a “Sir Galahad” has
ridden across the world in search of the Holy
Grail, returning old and blind to find it at his own
door.

“The poor you have ever with you,’ do not
pass them by for there is a divinity in common
things, and to be really acquainted with simple
forms of life is more than to dwell in marble halls.
Though far from the madding crowd, having
found one bird: ‘‘a fellow of infinite jest and
most excellent fancy,” let us be content.

CHAPTER XXI
THE UNKNOWN PATHWAY

The poetry of the Book of Job is not only
something that takes you back to the infancy of
Time, but with its minute insight, into the troubled
heart of universal man; it has in it a surge and
music touching the sublime. The great story
teller with a great epic to relate, stops to gather
flowers and comment on facts, minute facts of
natural history, and later on incorporates the
flower and the fact into the epic, which would not
have been so great without them. Listen to this
brief statement of natural history and open your
ear to the wonder and the strangeness that is
opened up by it: ‘“There is a path that no fowl
knoweth and which the Vulture’s eye hath not
seen.” The human Air-man in France did not
miss many paths, looking from the sky what won-
derful opportunities for observation; to say that
he missed one would seem to demand explana-
tion. Looking down from above, through all the
ages the birds have been watching and acquainting

themselves with the paths made by terrestrial crea-
261

262 What Birds Have Done With Me

tures. Nevertheless, there is one that they have
not known. Science has not apprehended the
sweep of the Vulture’s eye. Instruments for
measurement have been wanting, baffling mists in-
tervene between the bird in the sky and the thing
that he alone sees distinctly. Did you ever care-
fully scan the sky from the deck of a ship with a
good glass and be unable to find a glimpse of a
far off wing, and then cast your bread upon the
water and have white-winged things dine upon it
before you were out of sight? The sight of the
Vulture is presumably first of all, but there is a
path that he hath not seen. Here is the poetry
hiding behind the fact, the something unknown,
the something unseen.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago at the Maple-
wood, on Green Lake, the usual peace and quiet
of the place was changed into the wildest commo-
tion by the sudden disappearance of the only
daughter of the home, a child of four years of
age. It was late April and the lawn was green
and the Lake sparkling in the sunshine, but it was
capable of laughing on in merry glee after swal-
lowing tender innocence; and when she could not
be found elsewhere, a thousand hideous appre-
hensions all pointed to the Lake. ‘These were
dispelled when the shepherd came over the hill
beckoning wildly, the lost one both figuratively
and literally was safe in the fold. There we

‘

The Unknown Pathway 263

found her perched on the fence, screaming with
delight over the astounding gambols of the band
of young lambs. She was quite uncomprehending
of any alarm on her account. The cow-yard was
between the house and the sheep-yards; she could
not have crossed the first, with its forty head of
cattle; how had she reached the second? The
only statement made was one to which she stoutly
adhered: ‘“The chickens showed me the way.”
This was an incident never likely to be forgotten,
especially by a father who had been led into
strange regions by feathered things.

What a weird and wonderful pathway it has
been, invisible except as indicated by fluttering
wings, every future step hedged about and im-
penetrable, the past shining, sun-kissed, golden.
Little did the bare-footed boy realize when he
stepped into that first soft moist furrow that he
had started on a life journey over that hidden
pathway that no fowl knoweth and which the Vul-
ture’s eye had not seen. I saw a picture the other
day of an enormous Spider’s Web catching and
holding little creatures and letting the big ones
escape. What are big and what are little? Does
size indicate values? We need a revaluation. A
little peach is of more value than a big turnip.
A golden apple than a golden pumpkin. A tiny
diamond than a great boulder. I am so afraid
that we cannot get together on the matter of

264 What Birds Have Done With Me

values. You want to show me your fat steers
and pigs and bursting granaries and long corn-
cribs, and perhaps your bonds and mortgages, for
which you have exchanged all the days of your
lives, and when it’s too late to be happy, you are
saying, “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for
many days,” and before you have finished the com-
placent boast, mean old death is knocking at the
door, to tell you that the census taker Time has
put you on his list.

What shall a man get for a wasted life, eyes
self-blinded to flowers and waterfalls, rainbows,
sunsets, and stars; ears self-stopped to winds and
waves, and wild bird music? Oh! brother mine,
I have not been able to tell you before, but for a
fact, I have stood upon the golden hills of dawn
close by your side, and while you have prattled
of your vast wealth my heart has been bursting
with compassion over your indescribable poverty,
only counterfeit dollars that will buy nothing.
These fat fellows slap me on the back and ask
with well-assumed interest, if I have to engage a
lawyer to make out my income-tax schedule. It’s
one of the best jokes in the world for we both
enjoy it equally. They think I have no income and
I feel certain that if the hat was passed around
in a congregation of church mice, for their bene-
fit, the offering should be large.

Let me see, the unknown pathway first of all

The Unknown Pathway 265

led me into a society of aristocrats, some blue
coated, nearly all blue blooded, and each with
their own tree. What a big circle it was. If I
had been the Bishop of their souls, I could not
have made a pastoral call on each one once in
ten years. Some, that I knew first in the chart
class, I later on knew as fathers and mothers,
erand-fathers and grand-mothers, and as great
grand-fathers and great grand-mothers, uncles,
aunts and cousins without end.

Some birds that I have known, had an indi-
vidual acquaintance with, would reach into the
hundreds, possibly, up to the thousands, and all
have been more or less captivating friends. Human
friends drop in to dinner when there is nothing
to eat in the house, come and find you shaving
and instantly want to try your razor, only to find
that you don’t know how to strop a razor, and
yours should have been junked years ago. Every-
thing but your toothbrush you hold in common
with your friends; and one may not look in the
direction of five and ten dollar loans for in that
direction apoplexy lies. Boredom is one of the
unmitigated curses from which there is no escape
in the best society, unless that society is composed
of birds’ friends.

There are people whom we play host to in the
way that a horse plays host to a gad-fly and some-
times soul-savers come and want to pray, when

266 What Birds Have Done With Me

all out of doors is fairly bathed in the benedic-
tion of “Mighty God.’’ The Bird Kingdom is
free from our conventional abuses and there
climbers excite neither envy nor disgust. Excus-
ing considerable digression, we come back to the
real unhampered joy of bird friends where rela-
tions are cordial but never too intimate.

Without being too personal I have been tell-
ing you about some of these friends in earlier chap-
ters. I have not really attempted to tell you how
strong has been my attachment to some of these
close friends, for has not the great poet of human-
ity, Shakespeare, warned us that “I would love
but little if I could tell how much.”

Following along the unknown pathway not only
led me to the birds themselves, but into that
great department of our literature that pertains to
birds, rich, ample, and of absorbing interest. What
a surprise it was to find the trails blazed from
an early day, Aristotle and Pliny being volumin-
ous writers on the subject and a part of it being
good natural history today, the rest of a charac-
ter that even Herodotus would have chronicled
as having been a rumor over in Ethiopia. For
years, we were not occasional callers at the homes
of Frank M. Chapman, Mabel Osgood Wright
and Neltje Blanchan, but steady boarders, and
according to the customs of rural school teachers,
in an early day, we boarded around, and Chester

The Unknown Pathway 267

A. Reed was a pocket piece. ‘Nature Study and
Life” by Clifton Hodge, we fed to boys on Sat-
urdays around camp fires. This same unknown
pathway led me to the splendid pioneer work
on the “Economic Value of Birds” by Prof. F. H.
King, of the University of Wisconsin, unhappily
immured in a big volume on Geology and thus kept
out of general use.

Again the unknown pathway led to John o’
Birds and John o’ Mountains, Burroughs and
Muir. With John Burroughs we wandered and
lost our way, came back and started in again for
more little journeys in the wilderness of our set-
tled and cultivated States. Going afield with
others, you scarcely get beyond the sound of rural
life, bleat of sheep and low of kine, where Chan-
ticleer not only salutes the Dawn, but makes vocal
the passing hour; but “John o’ Birds” takes you
where Dryads glide and Pipes of Pan are heard
where: |

“Long lights shake across the Lake
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.”

With “John o’ Mountains” we climb dizzy
heights, and cross impossible crevasses, sharing
the wild rapture of ‘‘Stickeen” and Muir it is that
shows us a dandelion and dear homey Cock Robin
cuddled up close together on his very own glacier.
My daughter and I are agreed that no other

£68 What Birds Have Done With Me

water in this world has such a sparkle or can come
near to quenching all thirst as that from the Muir
deep well that his childish hands chiseled from
the rock at the family home near Pardeeville,
Wisconsin. And from the same associations, a
Loon on “Fountain Lake’? becomes one of the
sweet singers in Israel. What a calamity to have
lived and have passed out of life without know-
ing and feeling real kinship with two such splendid
unspoiled men. Only yesterday, I was introduced
to a gentleman, whose home is in California and
whose income tax this year will have to be ex-
pressed by at least six numerals. Wanting to
take his measure, I asked: ““What do you know
of John Muir?” The name was shrouded by a
certain mist and at first I had a feeling that he
was trying to run it down in “Bradstreet” so I
added, ‘‘He was something of a nature-lover.”’
Then the light dawned, ‘Oh! yes, I know about
him, we have a Prune named after him.” Mr.
Croesus—you poor beggar.

Long before the war, long before it had en-
tered into the heart of Woodrow Wilson, to con-
ceive of his magnificent project of a League of
Nations, William Dutcher had conceived of a
magnificent project of a Nature League, uniting
sportsmen, plume-wearers and all real Nature-
Lovers in a great Audubon League, for the pro-
tection of our vanishing wild life. I would insti-

The Unknown Pathway 269

tute no comparison between Woodrow Wilson and
William Dutcher, because in my estimation one
does not stand a quarter of an inch higher than
the other, and not knowing which is the older, I
am not prepared to say which should stand god-
father for the other. Dutcher’s League aims at
the preservation of vegetation, upon which life
depends, by saving the birds the natural check on
insect hordes, which menace all growing things
and consequently life itself. Wilson, by his
League, would preserve Justice and Freedom and
hold in check ignorant hordes that threaten Civ-
ilization. ‘These sages, seers, stand upon the
mountain top and whatever the surprises of the
future, the world will not soon look upon their
like again. |

The unknown pathway led me into Audubon
work. Some addresses made for the Agricultural
Department of the State University led to my
being selected as Secretary and Treasurer of the
Wisconsin Audubon Society, which put me on the
firing line for bird protection. The work opened
out more and more, and there came into my hori-
zon, such men as J. Gilbert Pearson, the gifted
and efficient Secretary of the National Associa-
tion of Audubon Societies, a veritable Pershing
in our army of bird protectors, and Dr. Theodore
S. Palmer, of the Biological Survey, that astute
strategist and indefatigable worker, the silent

270 What Birds Have Done With Me

partner in all legal firms having anything to do
with bird protection, and William Hornaday, re-
incarnation of General Grant, the live wire of the
National Museum of Natural History, whose
‘Vanishing Wild Life” has done more than all
other writings combined to reveal the brink of the
pit over which bird life trembles. His book, a
paper automatic, has done more to silence ma-
chine guns in the hands of sportsmen than an-
other man might have done with a bird cannon.
At a game warden school, held in Madison, Wis-
consin, I know to my certain knowledge, that two
thirds of the Game Wardens joined the Audubon
Society and arranged to purchase “Our Vanishing
Wild Life” as fixed ammunition to be carried in
their kits. The very best letter ever written me
was received, soon after that school, from oné of
the wardens, full of enthusiasm and anxious to do
‘something for the little birds.” The letter was
addressed to “The Birds’ Attorney” and signed
“John Eagan, your Office Boy.”

The unknown pathway led to a lecture field that
covered much of Wisconsin and part of Missis-
sippi, and articles on birds for the public press and
letters without end. Among bird workers in Wis-
consin, Prof. A. H. Burrill and E. A. Cleasby de-
serve special mention. Wisconsin bird-lovers can
never pay the debt they owe these splendid work-
ers, who are both out of the State and whose

The Unknown Pathway 271

places it will be difficult to fill. The Biological
Survey in Washington got Cleasby, and Burrill
finally went West, but not till he had done yeo-
man’s service in helping the writer in securing Bird
Sanctuaries aggregating more than sixty-five thou-
sand acres, throughout the State. Generous, big-
hearted Dr. A. M. Benson must come in for due
credit in having donated a full page in the Wis-
consin Humane Herald for Audubon work after
“By the Wayside,” the organ of the Society, had
died a natural death. W. W. Cook, formerly of
Ripon, Wisconsin, and later on of Washington,
D. C., aided by Prof. Mitchell, of the Milwau-
kee Normal School, did valuable Bird Work, in
which our State had a special interest.

Among the fine Nature Books written by Gene
Stratton-Porter, her ‘“‘Birds of the Bible” stands
out in my recollection as having been especially
interesting, for it furnishes evidence that an in-
structive volume can be written, not only on birds
mentioned in the Bible, but on those mentioned
in Shakespeare and the beauty of much poetry
would be utterly destroyed, were we to attempt
to eliminate all references to birds. Poetry with-
out its birds, would be as silent and desolate as the
coming of spring in the Northland without its re-
turning migrants—its very life, melody and glad-
ness.

Through more than a half century of reading,

272 What Birds Have Done With Me

the flutter of a bird’s wing has opened a window
for me to the wide, wide sky. Friends from every-
where have been clipping and sending me notices
of birds appearing in the daily press, and if old
Santa Claus found himself at my door with no
bird book in his pack for me, I have a notion
that he would feel that he had overlooked some-
thing. Mine is a bird world and I could not live
in any other. They are surely my birds for am I
not the ‘Bird Man” and “The Birds’ Attorney” ?
A Telephone Company once offered me a hundred
dollars if I would allow them to clean up a hun-
dred rods of trees and shrubs and vines and wild
roses growing along a public road near their poles.
It greeted me “air” to have to assure its field
man that I no longer had title through adverse
possession, the birds in more than twenty years
had gained that, and as their legal representative,
the best I could do would be to act, if he secured
their consent in writing. Not two minutes ago a
hardened coquette, aged three, perched on a gate-
post, called me, a mere passing acquaintance, to
her and whispered, “‘I seem to care more for you
than for any body else.” Following the example
of my youthful admirer, I want, in the strictest
confidence, to whisper into the big ear of the pub-
lic: “I seem to care more for some birds than
for some people and I don’t care if I do.”

Again I feel the lure of the pathway that no

The Unknown Pathway 273

fowl knoweth and which the Vulture’s eye hath
not seen. Is it not the wondrous pathway across
the sky, the unmapped, uncharted highway used
by the unnumbered billions of migrants that with .
the changing seasons, spring and fall, have gone
back and forth, leaving no trace behind? I am
writing these last words here in Dixie Land and
from my window I can see the Purple Martins
just demobilized from the advanced guard of mi-
grants and the mighty urge is being born again.
What matter if I go ahead or follow? I am going
back home with the birds, my singer, my song, but
yours as much as mine, if you will open your heart
to the singer and the song.
What means Alfred Tennyson by saying:

“Ah! sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering
square.”

A recognition of “The earliest pipe of the half
awakened birds” will banish the strangeness and
do much to eliminate the sadness and ‘While the
casement slowly grows a glimmering square’ to
dying eyes, dying ears may hear in these pipings,
the first faint notes of the choir invisible.

In very fact, the bird-lover, on the wings of

274. What Birds Have Done With Me

the birds he loves, is carried upward, where Alps
on Alps arise to far altitudes, that he never could

have reached alone.