JOHN
N. Y.
An attendant of whom I inquired if any New England men were here, answered that there were a few members of the Thirty-third Massachusetts. I hope the New Englanders resident in Chattanooga do not forget them on Memorial Day.
Twice in the year, at least, the place has many Northern visitors. They arrive on wings, mostly by night, and such of them as came under my eye acted as if they appreciated the quiet of the inclosure, a quiet which their own presence made but the more appreciable. Scattered over the lawns were silent groups of white-throated sparrows,—on their way to New Hampshire, perhaps, or it might be to upper Michigan; and not far from the entrance, and almost directly under the mocking-bird, were two or three white-crowned sparrows, the only ones found in Tennessee. On an earlier visit (April 29) I saw here my only Tennessee robins—five birds; and most welcome they were. Months afterward, a resident of Missionary Ridge wrote to me that a pair had nested in the cemetery that year, though to his great regret he did not know of it till too late. He had never seen a robin's nest, he added, and was acquainted with the bird only as a migrant. Such are some of the deprivations of life in eastern Tennessee. May and June without robins or song sparrows!
On the last of my three visits, a small flock of black-poll warblers were in the trees, and two of them gave me a pleasant little surprise by dropping to the ground, and feeding for a long time upon the lawn. That was something new for black-polls, so far as my observation had gone, and an encouraging thing to look at: another sign, where all signs are welcome, that the life of birds is less strictly instinctive—less a matter of inherited habit, and more a matter of personal intelligence—than has commonly been assumed. In general, no doubt, like human beings, they do what their fathers did, what they themselves have done heretofore. So much is to be expected, since their faculties and desires remain the same, and they have the same world to live in; but when exceptional circumstances arise, their conduct becomes exceptional. In other words, they do as a few of the quicker-witted among men do—suit their conduct to altered conditions. A month ago I should have said, after years of acquaintance, that no birds could be more strictly arboreal than golden-crowned kinglets. But recently, I happened upon a little group of them that for a week or more fed persistently on the ground in a certain piece of wood. Then and there, for some reason, food was plentiful on the snow and among the dead leaves; and the kinglets had no scruples about following where duty called them.
At the same time a friend of mine, a young farmer, was at his winter's work in the woods; and being alone, and a lover of birds, he had taken a fancy to experiment with a few chickadees, to see how tame a little encouragement would make them. A flock of five came about him day after day, at luncheon-time, and by dint of sitting motionless he soon had two of them on terms of something like intimacy; so that they would alight on his hand and help themselves to a feast. He was not long in discovering, and reporting to me, that they carried much of the food to the trees round about, and packed it into crannies of the bark.
"Are you sure of that?" I asked.
"Oh, yes," he answered; "I saw them do it, and then I went to the trees and found the crumbs."
Did any one ever suspect the chickadee of such providence? If so, I never heard of it; and it is more likely, I think, that the birds had never before done anything of the sort; but now, finding suddenly a supply far in excess of the demand (one day they ate and carried away half a doughnut), they had sense enough to improve the opportunity. What they had done, or had not done, in times past, was nothing to the point, since they were creatures not of memory alone, but of intelligence and a measure of reason.