It must amuse the birds immensely to see big, clumsy mankind trying to ferret out the gipsy moth, for example. The sparrows do eat some insects’ eggs and larvæ, for I have seen them do it inside and outside my aviary—but it is a hopeless task to try to defend these poor little fellows—these “avian rats,” these “cosmopolitan pests,” as ornithologists call them. I cannot dislike them nor call them names. They are brave little birds, and when I throw open my window on a cold winter morning, and see them waiting on the opposite roofs for their breakfast, and reflect that they alone of all the summer birds are left to us in the city, I cannot deal harshly with them.
Under a certain tree, is emptied each day a certain amount of grain, no more no less, and it is put there whether I am at home or not. Birds like to know what to depend on. They don’t want to be fed spasmodically any more than we do. All day the sparrows flutter about the house. As far as I can make out we have a flock of sixty or seventy in our neighborhood. When night comes they tuck themselves away under the house-eaves, getting near the chimneys if they can. When the time comes to exterminate them I will help. In the meantime I do not see what good it would do to carry on an unsystematic and shocking killing of the helpless young ones—the pets of my children friends.
CHAPTER XXV
A MOTHER CAREY’S CHICKEN
Perhaps the strangest pet I had in my aviary was a black bird that was brought to the door one evening by a boy. He said that a young man had picked up this pigeon on the common, and had told him to bring it to me. I found that it was a sooty-looking bird, with a tubular bill and white feathers at the end of its tail—evidently a Mother Carey’s chicken—that had probably been flying across the peninsula on which the city of Halifax is built, and had dropped in exhaustion. I saw that it was ill, and as soon as I could, hurried to the fish market and interviewed an old sailor who had fished on the banks of Newfoundland. He told me that flocks of these petrels used to follow his ship, eating the fish livers that were thrown overboard and that floated for days behind them. He had no liver on hand, but he gave me a whiting, for he said that fish would also float on the water.
I knew nothing about these deep-sea matters—I only know Mother Carey’s chickens by seeing them follow Atlantic steamers; but finding that the petrel would not eat the whiting, I went back to the sailor and got some liver that he had managed to secure for me.
The petrel would not eat this either, so I called my sister and asked her to kindly get out our feeding-sticks. After cutting up pieces of the liver she took them one by one on her sticks and dropped them into the bird’s long bill that I held open for her. After a meal was over I wiped his face and put him on the floor, and he scuttled under the radiator. One day I put him in a bath, but he went right under the water, and I had to take him out.
He never fed himself, and three times a day we got out our sticks and the fish liver. He was gentle but feeble, and was more lively at night than during the day.
When displeased he made a peeping noise, and at all times he possessed a strong and peculiar smell.
I had him for three weeks, and for a time he improved, and would fly low over the floor, ascending and descending as if going over waves of the sea.