YOUNG Oriole was rescued from the water where it had evidently just fallen from the nest. When taken home it proved a ready pet and was given full freedom of the place. Some weeks later a nestling from another brood was placed in the same cage with the other. The newcomer had not yet learned to feed himself, and like a baby as it was, cried incessantly for food. The first captive though but a fledgling himself, proceeded to feed the orphan with all the tender solicitude of a parent.
"It was irresistably cunning and heartsome, too," says the narrator, W. L. Dawson, in the Bulletin, "to see the bird select with thoughtful kindness a morsel of food and hop over toward the clamoring stranger and drop it in his mouth, looking at it afterward with an air as much as to say, 'there, baby, how did you like that?' This trait was not shown by a chance exhibition, but became a regular habit, and was still followed when the older bird had attained to fly catching. It upset all ones notions about instinct and made one think of a Golden Rule for birds."
A GOOSE THAT TAKES A HEN SAILING.
The following remarkable instance of the communication of ideas among the lower animals is narrated by the Rev. C. Otway:
"At the flour mills of Tubberakeena, near Clonmel, while in the possession of the late Mr. Newbold, there was a Goose, which by some accident was left solitary, without mate or offspring, gander or goslings. Now it happened, as is common, that the miller's wife had set a number of Duck eggs under a hen, which in due time were incubated; and of course the ducklings, as soon as they came forth, ran with natural instinct to the water, and the hen was in a sad pucker—her maternity urging her to follow the brood, and her instinct disposing her to keep on dry land.
"In the meanwhile, up sailed the Goose, and with a noisy gabble, which certainly (being interpreted) meant, 'Leave them to my care,' she swam up and down with the ducklings, and when they were tired with their aquatic excursion, she consigned them to the care of the hen.
"The next morning, down came again the ducklings to the pond, and there was the Goose waiting for them, and there stood the hen in her great flustration. On this occasion we are not at all sure that the Goose invited the hen, observing her maternal trouble; but it is a fact that she being near the shore, the hen jumped on her back, and there sat, the ducklings swimming and the Goose and hen after them, up and down the pond.
"This was not a solitary event; day after day the hen was seen on board the Goose, attending the ducklings up and down, in perfect contentedness and good humor—numbers of people coming to witness the circumstance, which continued until the ducklings, coming to days of discretion, required no longer the joint guardianship of the Goose and Hen."—Witness.
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| From col. Chi. Acad. Sciences. | EGGS. Life-size. | Copyright by Nature Study Pub. Co., 1898. Chicago. |
