Birds of Song and Story

by Elizabeth Grinnell; Joseph Grinnell

Not having anything of importance to do save to eat all day and sleep all night, he was on the alert for employment. One dreadful morning, when the mother was attending to breakfast, this father canary espied some, tatters sticking out of the bottom meshes of the nest basket, bits of string ends and threads, carelessly and innocently overlooked.

"Ah," thought he, "here is something that ought to be attended to at once."

And he went to work! He thrust his sharp beak up between the round meshes of the basket bottom and pulled at every thread he could lay hold of, struggling beneath, fairly losing his foothold in his eagerness to pull them out. Having succeeded in dragging most of the material from beneath the birdlings, he caught sight of a few more straight pink strings lying across the meshes, and began tugging at them. The mother, feeding the babies from the edge of the nest above, noticed the little ones each in its turn crouching farther and farther into the bottom of the cradle, faintly opening their mouths as if to cry, but being too young and weak to utter a sound. It was a mystery, but the deepest mystery of it all was the fact that little Dicky, the dwarf of the family, came to the top as the rest worked down, and was getting more than his share of the breakfast.

About this time the mistress of the canary-cage came to see after her pets, and beheld a sight which made her scream as hard as if she had seen a mouse. There, beneath the nest, was the father bird tugging at protruding feet and legs of baby birds with all his might, growing more and more excited as he saw his supposed strings resisting his attempts to pull them through.

When the affair was looked into, there was but one bird left alive of the five little infants no more than five days old, and they were released from their predicament to have a decent burial in the garden at the foot of a motherly-looking cabbage head that stood straight up in disgust of the cruel affair, "as if she would ever have such a thing happen to her little cabbages!" True, she had no little cabbages of her own, but that made no difference.

Now that we have tucked away these four little canary-birds, who never saw the light of day, and therefore never could realize what they missed by not holding on harder to what little they had by way of feet and legs, we will drop the painful subject and attend to Dicky.

Of course the father bird was excluded from the nursery, as he should have been weeks before, and there was only one mouth to feed. And that mouth was never empty unless the owner of it was sleeping. In fact, the babe was stuffed; though, strange to say, his stomach grew no bigger, but less and less, as the rest of his body filled out.

At the end of a couple of weeks he had a pretty fair shirt on his back, of delicate down, softer than any shirt of wool that ever warmed a human baby's body. And the mother stood on the edge of the basket and admired it. She didn't make it, of course, but she was in some way responsible for it, and no doubt felt proud of the bit of fancy work. She noticed, also, that the eyes of the little one did not bulge so much as they did, and a tiny slit appeared at the center, widening slowly, until one happy hour they opened fairly out, and "the baby had eyes." But they were tired eyes to start with, like the eyes of most young things, and they wearied with just a glimpse of the light. So the lids closed, and it was several days before Dicky actually took in the situation as he ought.