At certain seasons of the year what an active life the red-headed woodpeckers are compelled to lead, in order to satisfy the demands of their stomachs! With intervals of scarcely more than a few seconds, they bound out from a perch, seize an insect on the wing, and wheel back again. For hours this half work, half frolic is kept up. By the way, almost all birds sometimes engage in this flycatcher game of taking their prey on the wing. The Baltimore orioles, the bluebirds, the yellow-bellied woodpeckers, the crested tits, the chippies, the indigo-birds, and even the white-breasted nuthatches and English sparrows, to say nothing of many species of warblers, catch insects in this way.
Many birds have to “scratch for a living,” and that in a literal sense. There is the towhee bunting, for example. Instead of getting down on his breast, however, like the hen or the partridge, he stretches himself up on his legs as if they were stilts, and then bobs up and down in an amusing fashion, while he scatters leaves and dirt to side and rear. I do not know whether the robins scratch or not, but they often jerk the leaves from the ground with their bills, and hurl them away with a half-disdainful air. Several young wood-thrushes kept in a cage removed obstructions in the same way.
Even the merry bobolink, the Beau Brummel of our meadows and clover-fields, cannot spend every day
“Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony;”
for the time comes when he must do the work of a staid husband and father, and help to take care of the growing brood. With all his pirouetting in the air, he carries in his bosom an anxious heart, as you will quickly see if you go too near his snuggery in the grass. The wild scramble in which birds of all kinds often have to engage, in order to secure a refractory insect, proves that there is ample room for the play of their best energies. Thus we see that the birds have plenty to do besides rollicking, singing, enjoying gala-days, and taking excursions to gay watering-places. Like their human brothers and sisters, they must toil patiently on “through the every-dayness of this work-day world.” They, too, may have their literature—unwritten, however—on the “dignity of labor.”
V.
BIRD PLAY.
How strange it is that animals never laugh! If you watch a group of monkeys playing their antics, you will find their faces as sedate as a judge’s, save, perhaps, a merry twinkle of the eye. Comical as their gambols are, one would think they would break into convulsions of merriment. True, animals have various ways of giving vent to their exuberant feelings, but this is done very slightly by means of facial expression. Their risibles must be meagrely developed. What has been said in regard to animals in general is also true of birds, whose eyes often twinkle and are intensely expressive, but whose countenances proper reveal very little of the emotion swelling in their breasts.
Yet by the movements of their bodies you can easily read their feelings. You can tell at a glance by the conduct of a bird whether or not it is alarmed at your presence, or whether it is engaged in a frolic or in watching a wily foe. How different is the behavior of most birds in the breeding-season, with a nest near at hand, from their demeanor at other times! Look at that brown thrasher perched in a tree-top on a spring morning, singing his pæan to the surrounding woodland, and notice how fearless he appears. Contrast his manners two months later when he goes skulking through the tanglewood, afraid to be seen. Conceal their secret as they may, an expert student of birds can almost always tell if there is a nest in the neighborhood.
It is, therefore, by their conduct rather than by their facial expression that birds reveal their love of play. That they do have their frolics, no one can doubt. Much of their time is occupied in labor, and that often of the most serious, if not arduous, kind, and they frequently combine toil and play; but there are times when they seem to give themselves up to unmixed sportiveness. There is not much system in their games, so far as I have observed. They mostly engage in frolics of a rough-and-tumble kind, for the pure love of the fun, and perhaps with no thought of winning a prize.