The crow is a noisy bird. All his tribe are noisy, but the noise probably has little psychic significance. The raven in Alaska appears to soliloquize most of the time. This talkativeness of the crow tribe is probably only a phase of crow life, and signifies no more and no less than other phases—their color, their cunning, the flick of their wings, and the like. The barn-yard fowls are loquacious also, but probably their loquacity is not attended with much psychic activity.
In the mornings of early summer the out-of-door sleeper is more likely to be awakened by the song-birds. In June and early July they strike up about half-past three. “When it is light enough to see that all is well around you, it is light enough to sing,” they carol. “Before the early worm is stirring, we will celebrate the coming of day.” During the summer the song-sparrows have been the first to nudge me in the morning with their songs. One little sparrow especially would perch on the telephone-wire above the roadside and go through his repertoire of five songs with great regularity and joyousness. He will long be associated in my mind with those early, fragrant, summer dawns. One of his five songs fell so easily into words that I had only to call the attention of my friends to it to have them hear the words that I heard: “If, if, if you please, Mr. Durkee,”—the last word a little prolonged, and with a rising inflection. Another was not quite so well expressed by these words: “Please, please, speak to me, sweetheart.” The third one suggested this sentence: “Then, then, Fitzhugh says, yes, sir!” The fourth one was something like this: “If, if, if you seize her, do it quick.” The fifth one baffled me to suggest by words. But in August his musical enthusiasm began to decline. His different songs lost their distinctiveness and emphasis. It was as if they had faded and become blurred with the progress of the season.
The little birds are insignificant and unobtrusive on the great background of nature, yet if one learns to distinguish them and to love them, their songs may become a sort of accompaniment to one’s daily life. In May, while I was much occupied in repairing and making habitable an old farm-house, a solitary, mourning, ground-warbler, which one rarely sees or hears, came and tarried about the place for a week or ten days, singing most of each forenoon in the orchard and garden about the house, and giving to my occupation a touch of something rare and sylvan. He lent to the apple-trees, which I had known as a boy, an interest that the boy knew not. Then he went away, whether on the arrival of his mate or not I do not know.
Photograph, copyright, by Alvin Langdon Coburn. Color-tone made for THE CENTURY by Henry Davidson
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LARGER IMAGE
A butternut-tree stands across the road in front of Woodchuck Lodge. One season the red squirrels stored the butternuts in the wall of one of the upper rooms of the unoccupied house, to which they gained access through a hole in the siding. When we moved in, in the summer, the squirrels soon became uneasy, and one day one of them began removing the butternuts, not to some other granary or place of safety, but to the grass and dry leaves on the ground in the orchard. He was unwittingly planting them by the act of hiding them. The automatic character of much animal behavior, the extent to which their lives flow in fixed channels, was well seen in the behavior of this squirrel. His procedure in transferring the nuts from his den in the house to the ground in the orchard, a distance of probably one hundred feet, was as definite and regular as that of a piece of machinery. He would rush up and over the roof of the house with a nut in his mouth, by those sharp, spasmodic sallies so characteristic of the movements of the red squirrel, down the corner of the house to the ground by the same jerky movements, across some rubbish and open ground in the same manner, alert and cautious, up the corner of a small building ten feet high and eight long, over its roof, with arched tail and spread feet, snickering and jerking, down to the ground on the other side, dashing to the trunk of an apple-tree ten feet away, up it a few feet to make an observation, then down to the ground again, and out into the grass, where he would carefully hide his nut, and cover it with leaves. Then back to the house again by precisely the same route and with precisely the same movements, and bring another nut. Day after day I saw him thus engaged till apparently all the nuts were removed. He probably did not know he was planting butternut-trees for other red squirrels, but that was what he was blindly doing. The crows and jays carry away and plant acorns and chestnuts in the same blind way, thereby often causing a pine forest to be succeeded by these trees.
The red squirrel is only an irregular storer of nuts in the autumn. In this respect he stands half-way between the chipmunk and the gray squirrel, one of which regularly lays up winter stores and the other none at all.
How diverse are the ways of nature in reaching the same end! Both the chipmunk and the woodchuck lay up stores against the needs of winter, the latter in the shape of fat upon his own ribs, and the former in the shape of seeds and nuts in his den in the ground; and I fancy that one of them is no more conscious of what he is doing than the other. Animals do not take conscious thought of the future; it is as if something in their organization took thought for them. One November, seized with the cruel desire to go to the bottom of the question of the chipmunk’s winter stores, I dug out one after he had got his house settled for the season. I found his den three feet below the surface of the ground—just beyond the frostline—and containing nearly four quarts of various seeds, most of them the little black grains of wild buckwheat—two hundred and fifty thousand of them, I estimated—all cleaned of their husks as neatly as if done by some patent machine.