These little narratives, which are certainly interesting if true—as they are not—are good examples of the failure to exercise what may be called the common-sense of science.
Extraordinary indeed are the foolish things that used to be told of birds by men apparently wise and observant in other, even kindred, matters. Isaak Walton,[[40]] for example, so well informed as to fish, seemed to swallow falsities about other animals as readily as did the gudgeon Isaak’s bait. He writes in one place, after quoting some very mistaken remarks about grasshoppers, that “this may be believed if we consider that when the raven hath hatched her eggs she takes no further care, but leaves her young ones to the care of the God of Nature, who is said in the Psalms ‘to feed the young that call upon him.’ And they be kept alive, and fed by a dew, or worms that breed in their nests, or some other ways that we mortals know not.”
The origin of this is plain. The ancient Jews told one another that ravens left their fledglings to survive by chance, not feeding them as other birds did. This is manifested in several places in the Bible, as in the 147th Psalm: “He giveth to the beast his food and to the young ravens which cry”; but this absurd notion is far older, no doubt, than the Psalms. Aristotle[[41]] mentions that in Scythia—a terra incognita where, in the minds of the Greeks, anything might happen—“there is a kind of bird as big as a bustard, which ... does not sit upon its eggs, but hides them in the skin of a hare or fox,” and then watches them from a neighboring perch. Readers may guess at the reality, if any, behind this. Aristotle seems to have accepted it as a fact, for he goes on to describe how certain birds of prey are equally devoid of parental sense of duty; but we cannot be sure what species are referred to, despite the names used in Cresswell’s translation of the History of Animals, as follows:
The bird called asprey ... feeds both its young and those of the eagle ... for the eagle turns out its young ... before the proper time, when they still require feeding and are unable to fly. The eagle appears to eject its young from the nest from envy ... and strikes them. When they are turned out they begin to scream, and the phene comes and takes them up.
Why so strange notions of maternal care in birds should ever have gained credence in the face of daily observation of the solicitude of every creature for its young, is one of the puzzles of history, but that they were widespread is certain, and also that they persisted in folklore down to the time when, at the dawn of the Renaissance, observation and research began to replace blind confidence in ancient lore. Thus J. E. Harting,[[42]] in his well-known treatise on the natural history in Shakespeare, quotes from a Latin folio of 1582 in support of his statement that “it was certainly a current belief in olden times that when the raven saw its young newly hatched, and covered with down, it conceived such an aversion that it forsook them, and did not return to its nest until a darker plumage showed itself.”
Ravens have quite enough sins to answer for and calumnies to live down without adding to the list this murderous absurdity, contrary to the very first law of bird-nature. Nevertheless the poets, as usual, take advantage of the thought (for its moral picturesqueness, I suppose), as witness Burns’s lines in The Cotter’s Saturday Night—
That he who stills the raven’s clamorous nest
Would in the way his wisdom sees the best,
For them and for their little ones provide.