Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet.
Emerson.
FRIENDSHIP IN FEATHERS.
Emerson somewhere speaks of a friendship "on one side, without due correspondence on the other," and I often thought of it while watching the curious relation between two birds in my house last winter; for the more one studies our feathered neighbors, the better he comes to realize that the difference between their intelligence and that of man himself is "only of less and more."
This friendship, then, was all on one side. It was not a case of "love at sight"; on the contrary, it was first war, and the birds had been room-mates for months before any unusual interest was shown; neither was it simple admiration of beauty, for the recipient of the tenderness was at his worst at the moment; nor, again, could it be the necessity of loving somebody, for the devotee had lived in the house ten years, and had seen forty birds of almost as many kinds come and go, without exhibiting any partiality. The parties to this curious affair were, first, the beloved, a male scarlet tanager, whose summer coat was disfigured with patches of the winter dress he was trying to put on; and secondly, the lover, a male English goldfinch, scarcely half his size.
The tanager, as perhaps every one knows, is one of our most brilliant birds, bright scarlet with black wings and tail. He is as shy as he is gay, living usually in the woods, and not taking at all kindly to the enforced companionship of mankind. I had long been anxious to make the acquaintance of this retiring bird, partly because I desire to know personally all American birds, and partly because I wanted to watch his change of plumage; for the scarlet uniform is only the marriage dress, and put off at the end of the season. Hence whenever I saw a tanager in a New York bird store I brought it home, though dealers always warned me that it would not live in confinement. My first attempts were disastrous, certainly. The birds refused to become reconciled, even with all the privileges I gave them, and one after another died, I believe for no other reason than their longing for freedom. Let me say here that feeling thus, they would have received their liberty, much as I wished to study them, only their plumage was not in condition to fly, and they would go out to certain death. My hope was to make them contented through the winter, while they put on a new suit of feathers, and open the doors for them in summer.
The subject of this tale, and the last of the series, I procured of a dealer who has learned to keep tanagers in good condition, and I never had trouble with this bird's health or spirits. It was not until May that he wished to leave me. When he joined the circle in the room he had just thoroughly learned that a cage was a place he could not get out of, and he had ceased to try. The first morning when his neighbors came out of their cages he was as much astonished as if he had never seen birds out of a bird store. He stretched up and looked at them with the greatest interest. When one or two began to splash in the large shallow bathing dishes on the table, he was much excited, and plainly desired to join them. I opened his door and placed in it a long perch leading to freedom. For some time he did not come out, and when he did, the sudden liberty drove out of his head all thoughts of a bath. When he flew, he aimed straight for the trees outside the window, and of course came violently against the glass.
This experience all house birds have to go through, and it is sometimes several days before they learned the nature of glass. The tanager learned his lesson more quickly. He fell to the floor at first, from the shock, but in a few moments recovered himself and returned, this time alighting on the top of the lower sash and proceeding to examine the strange substance through which he could see, but could not go. He gently tapped the glass with his beak the whole length of the window, passing back and forth several times till satisfied. Turning at last from that, he cast his eye around for another exit, and settled on the white ceiling as the most likely place. Then he flew all about the room close to the ceiling, touched it now and then with his beak, and finding it also impassable, he came down to the window again. He had not the least curiosity about the room, and was not at all afraid of me. The world outside the windows and his cage when he was hungry, were all that he cared for at present—except the bath.