However, I did not like their ruffled plumage and the bare places on their heads. All Java sparrows, when in condition, should be as smooth as marble.
The dealer assured me that they had only been pecking each other. I believed him then. I would not now. I never saw Java sparrows pull out each other’s feathers, and a bare head to me at this time means disease or vermin.
However, I got the little birds and was pleased to learn something about them. They seem to be a kind of English sparrow in their native country, and do an immense amount of damage to the rice crops, eluding the natives who try to capture them. They have a very happy, “chuckie, chuckie,” note, as they fly about an aviary. I have never heard them warble, but they are said to do so.
To return to the cardinals. I took them with the Javas in the train with me to Canada, and suffered many pricks of conscience in so doing. I know how hateful and terrifying railway travel is to birds. Had I done right to subject them to it? Well, if I had not bought them in order to give them freedom in a large place, some one would probably have got them and forced them to spend the rest of their lives in tiny cages.
The cardinals were apparently none the worse for their day and a half in the train. When I opened their traveling-cages, they sprang out, ran over the earth in the aviary, then spread their handsome wings and flew to tree branches.
I think they were a little surprised at finding they had room enough to spread their wings. I did not know how long they had been caged. One of my most exquisite pleasures is to release a bird captive, either in my aviary or in the open, then to watch him and imagine what his feelings are.
I probably project a little too much of my own personality into bird bodies, but by dint of drinking and eating, sleeping, playing, and passing day after day with bird companions, I feel myself enabled to interpret some of their bodily and facial expressions, and I can surely and safely say that the uncaged bird is a happy bird. My Javas did not stand the journey so well as the cardinals. One of them was weak and ill, and instead of putting it in a warm, quiet place with its food and water close at hand, I dosed it with a few drops of brandy and water and killed it.
This was a blow to me, and out of that failure and many others arose an intense sympathy for the medical profession. Later on, I naturally became more experienced in treating sick birds, but often the question arose: Here are two remedies. One may mean life, the other death. Which shall I adopt?
At present I practise the Chinese method—I doctor the patient before he gets ill. In China physicians are said to be paid to keep their patients in health, and when sickness comes fees are withheld.
All my energies are bent toward keeping my birds in good health, and at intervals they are caught and examined. I practise with birds the same method that I advocate in the treatment of children—save the child before he is lost. That is the only way to have healthy stock of any kind.