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VII DEVIOUS PATHS THERE is no better type or epitome of wild nature than the bird’s-nest — something built, and yet as if it grew, a part of the ground, or of the rock, or of the branch upon which it is placed; beginning so coarsely, so irregularly, and ending so finely and symmetrically; so unlike the work of hands, and yet the result of a skill beyond hands; and when it holds its complement of eggs, how pleasing, how suggestive! The bird adapts
means to an end, and yet so differently from the way of man, — an end of which
it does not know the value or the purpose. We know it is prompted to it by the
instinct of reproduction. When the woodpecker in the fall excavates a lodge in
a dry limb, we know he is prompted to it by the instinct of self-preservation,
but the birds themselves obey the behests of nature without knowledge. A bird’s-nest
suggests design, and yet it seems almost haphazard; the result of a kind of
madness, yet with method in it. The hole the woodpecker drills for its cell is
to the eye a perfect circle, and the rim of most nests is as true as that of a
cup. The circle and the sphere exist in nature; they are mother forms and hold
all other forms. They are easily attained; they are spontaneous and inevitable.
The bird models her nest about her own breast; she turns round and round in it,
and its circular character results as a matter of course. Angles, right lines,
measured precision, so characteristic of the works of man, are rarely met with
in organic nature. Nature reaches her
ends by devious paths; she loiters, she meanders, she plays by the way; she
surely “arrives,” but it is always in a blind, hesitating, experimental kind
of fashion. Follow the tunnels of the ants or the crickets, or of the moles
and the weasels, underground, or the courses of the streams or the paths of the
animals above ground — how they turn and hesitate, how wayward and undecided
they are! A right line seems out of the question. The oriole often
weaves strings into her nest; sometimes she binds and overhands the part of the
rim where she alights in going in, to make it stronger, but it is always done
in a hit-or-miss, childish sort of way, as one would expect it to be; the
strings are massed, or snarled, or left dangling at loose ends, or are caught
around branches; the weaving and the sewing are effective, and the whole nest
is a marvel of blind skill, of untaught intelligence; yet how unmethodical,
how delightfully irregular, how unmistakably a piece of wild nature! Sometimes the
instinct of the bird is tardy, and the egg of the bird gets ripe before the
nest is ready; in such a case the egg is of course lost. I once found the nest
of the black and white creeping warbler in a mossy bank in the woods, and under
the nest was an egg of the bird. The warbler had excavated the site for her
nest, dropped her egg into it, and then gone on with her building. Instinct is
not always inerrant. Nature is wasteful, and plays the game with a free hand.
Yet what she loses on one side she gains on another; she is like that least
bittern Mr. Frank M. Chapman tells about. Two of the bittern’s five eggs had
been punctured by the long-billed marsh wren. When the bird returned to her
nest and found the two eggs punctured, she made no outcry, showed no emotion,
but deliberately proceeded to eat them. Having done this, she dropped the empty
shells over the side of the nest, together with any straws that had become
soiled in the process, cleaned her bill, and proceeded with her incubation.
This was Nature in a nut-shell, — or rather egg-shell, — turning her mishaps to
some good account. If the egg will not make a bird, it will make food; if not
food, then fertilizer. Among nearly all
our birds, the female is the active business member of the partnership; she has
a turn for practical affairs; she chooses the site of the nest, and usually builds
it unaided. The life of the male is more or less a holiday or picnic till the
young are hatched, when his real cares begin, for he does his part in feeding
them. One may see the male cedar-bird attending the female as she is busy with
her nest-building, but never, so far as I have observed, assisting her. One
spring I observed with much interest a phoebe-bird building her nest not far
from my cabin in the woods. The male looked on approvingly, but did not help.
He perched most of the time on a mullein stalk near the little spring run where
Phoebe came for mud. In the early morning hours she made her trips at intervals
of a minute or two. The male flirted his tail and called encouragingly, and
when she started up the hill with her load he would accompany her part way, to
help her over the steepest part, as it were, then return to his perch and watch
and call for her return. For an hour or more I witnessed this little play in
bird life, in which the female’s part was so primary and the male’s so secondary.
There is something in such things that seems to lend support to Professor
Lester F. Ward’s contention, as set forth in his “Pure Sociology,” that in the
natural evolution of the two sexes the female was first and the male second;
that he was made from her rib, so to speak, and not she from his. With our phalarope
and a few Australian birds, the position of the two sexes as indicated above is
reversed, the females having the ornaments and bright colors and doing the
courting, while the male does the incubating. In a few cases also the female is
much the more masculine, noisy, and pugnacious. With some of our common birds,
such as the woodpeckers, the chickadee, and the swallows, both sexes take part
in nest-building. It is a very pretty
sight to witness a pair of wood thrushes building their nest. Indeed, what is
there about the wood thrush that is not pleasing? He is a kind of visible
embodied melody. Some birds are so sharp and nervous and emphatic in their movements,
as the common snowbird or junco, the flashing of whose white tail quills
expresses the character of the bird. But all the ways of the wood thrush are
smooth and gentle, and suggest the melody of its song. It is the only bird
thief I love to see carrying off my cherries. It usually takes only those
dropped upon the ground by other birds, and with the red or golden globe
impaled upon its beak, its flight across the lawn is a picture delightful to
behold. One season a pair of them built a nest in a near-by grove; morning
after morning, for many mornings, I used to see the two going to and from the
nest, over my vineyard and currant patch and pear orchard, in quest of, or
bringing material for, the structure. They flew low, the female in the lead,
the male just behind in line with her, timing his motions to hers, the two
making a brown, gently undulating line, very pretty to look upon, from my
neighbor’s field where they obtained the material, to the tree that held the
nest. A gentle, gliding flight, hurried but hushed, as it were, and expressive
of privacy and loving preoccupation. The male carried no material; apparently
he was simply the escort of his mate; but he had an air of keen and joyous
interest. He never failed to attend her each way, keeping about a yard behind
her, and flying as if her thought were his thought and her wish his wish. I
have rarely seen anything so pretty in bird life. The movements of all our
thrushes except the robin give one this same sense of harmony, — nothing sharp
or angular or abrupt. Their gestures are as pleasing as their notes. One evening, while
seated upon my porch, I had convincing proof that musical or song contests do
take place among the birds. Two wood thrushes who had nests near by sat on the
top of a dead tree and pitted themselves against each other in song for over
half an hour, contending like champions in a game, and certainly affording the
rarest treat in wood thrush melody I had ever had. They sang and sang with
unwearied spirit and persistence, now and then changing position or facing in
another direction, but keeping within a few feet of each other. The rivalry
became so obvious and was so interesting that I finally made it a point not to
take my eyes from the singers. The twilight deepened till their forms began to
grow dim; then one of the birds could stand the strain no longer, the limit of
fair competition had been reached, and seeming to say, “I will silence you,
anyhow,” it made a spiteful dive at its rival, and in hot pursuit the two disappeared
in the bushes beneath the tree. Of course I would not say that the birds were
consciously striving to outdo each other in song; it was the old feud between
males in the love season, not a war of words or of blows, but of song. Had the
birds been birds of brilliant plumage, the rivalry would probably have taken
the form of strutting and showing off their bright colors and ornaments. An English writer
on birds, Edmund Selous, describes a similar song contest between two nightingales.
“Jealousy,” he says, “did not seem to blind them to the merit of each other’s
performance. Though often one, upon hearing the sweet, hostile strains, would
burst forth instantly itself, — and here there was no certain mark of
appreciation, — yet sometimes, perhaps quite as often, it would put its head on
one side and listen with exactly the appearance of a musical connoisseur,
weighing, testing, and appraising each note as it issued from the rival bill. A
curious, half-suppressed expression would steal, or seem to steal (for Fancy
may play her part in such matters), over the listening bird, and the idea
appear to be. ‘How exquisite would be those strains were they not sung by, and
yet I must admit that they are exquisite.’” Fancy no doubt does play a part in
such matters. It may well be doubted if birds are musical connoisseurs, or have
anything like human appreciation of their own or of each other’s songs. My
reason for thinking so is this: I have heard a bobolink with an instrument so
defective that its song was broken and inarticulate in parts, and yet it sang
with as much apparent joy and abandon as any of its fellows. I have also heard
a hermit thrush with a similar defect or impediment that appeared to sing
entirely to its own satisfaction. It would be very interesting to know if these
poor singers found mates as readily as their more gifted brothers. If they did,
the Darwinian theory of “sexual selection” in such matters, according to which
the finer songster would carry off the female, would fall to the ground. Yet it
is certain that it is during the mating and breeding season that these “song
combats” occur, and the favor of the female would seem to be the matter in
dispute. Whether or not it be expressive of actual jealousy or rivalry, we have
no other words to apply to it. A good deal of
light is thrown upon the ways of nature as seen in the lives of our solitary
wasps, so skillfully and charmingly depicted by George W. Peckham and his wife
in their work on those insects. So whimsical, so fickle, so forgetful, so
fussy, so wise, and yet so foolish, as these little people are! such victims of
routine and yet so individual, such apparent foresight and yet such
thoughtlessness, at such great pains and labor to dig a hole and build a cell,
and then at times sealing it up without storing it with food or laying the egg,
half finishing hole after hole, and then abandoning them without any apparent
reason; sometimes killing their spiders, at other times only paralyzing them;
one species digging its burrow before it captures its game, others capturing
the game and then digging the hole; some of them hanging the spider up in the
fork of a weed to keep it away from the ants while they work at their nest, and
running to it every few minutes to see that it is safe; others laying the insect
on the ground while they dig; one species walking backward and dragging its
spider after it, and when the spider is so small that it carries it in its
mandible, still walking backward as if dragging it, when it would be much more
convenient to walk forward. A curious little people, leading their solitary
lives and greatly differentiated by the solitude, hardly any two alike, one
nervous and excitable, another calm and unhurried; one careless in her work,
another neat and thorough; this one suspicious, that one confiding Ammophila
using a pebble to pack down the earth in her burrow, while another species uses
the end of her abdomen, — verily a queer little people, with a lot of wild
nature about them, and a lot of human nature, too. I think one can see
how this development of individuality among the solitary wasps comes about. May
it not be because the wasps are solitary? They live alone. They have no one to
imitate; they are uninfluenced by their fellows. No community interests
override or check individual whims or peculiarities. The innate tendency to
variation, active in all forms of life, has with them full sway. Among the
social bees or wasps one would not expect to find those differences between
individuals. The members of a colony all appear alike in habits and in
dispositions. Colonies differ, as every bee-keeper knows, but probably the
members composing it differ very little. The community interests shape all
alike. Is it not the same in a degree among men? Does not solitude bring out a
man’s peculiarities and differentiate him from others? The more one lives
alone, the more he becomes unlike his fellows. Hence the original and racy
flavor of woodsmen, pioneers, lone dwellers in Nature’s solitudes. Thus
isolated communities develop characteristics of their own. Constant
intercommunication, the friction of travel, of streets, of books, of
newspapers, make us all alike; we are, as it were, all pebbles upon the same
shore, washed by the same waves. Among the larger of
vertebrate animals, I think, one might reasonably expect to find more
individuality among those that are solitary than among those that are
gregarious; more among birds of prey than among water-fowl, more among foxes
than among prairie-dogs, more among moose than among sheep or buffalo, more
among grouse than among quail. But I do not know that this is true. Yet among none of
these would one expect to find the diversity of individual types that one finds
among men. No two dogs of the same breed will be found to differ as two men of
the same family often differ. An original fox, or wolf, or bear, or beaver, or
crow, or crab, — that is, one not merely different from his fellows, but
obviously superior to them, differing from them as a master mind differs from
the ordinary mind, — I think, one need not expect to find. It is quite
legitimate for the animal-story writer to make the most of the individual
differences in habits and disposition among the animals; he has the same
latitude any other story writer has, but he is bound also by the same law of
probability, the same need of fidelity to nature. If he proceed upon the theory
that the wild creatures have as pronounced individuality as men have, that
there are master minds among them, inventors and discoverers of new ways, born
captains and heroes, he will surely “o’erstep the modesty of nature.” The great diversity
of character and capacity among men doubtless arises from their greater and
more complex needs, relations, and aspirations. The animals’ needs in
comparison are few, their relations simple, and their aspirations nil. One cannot see what could give rise
to the individual types and exceptional endowments that are often claimed for
them. The law of variation, as I have said, would give rise to differences, but
not to a sudden reversal of race habits, or to animal geniuses. The law of
variation is everywhere operative — less so now, no doubt, than in the earlier
history of organic life on the globe. Yet Nature is still experimenting in her
blind way, and hits upon many curious differences and departures. But I suppose
if the race of man were exterminated, man would never arise again. I doubt if
the law of evolution could ever again produce him, or any other species of
animal. This principle of
variation was no doubt much more active back in geologic time, during the early
history of animal life upon the globe, than it is in this late age. And for the
reason that animal life was less adapted to its environment than it is now, the
struggle for life was sharper. Perfect adaptation of any form of life to the
conditions surrounding it seems to check variability. Animal and plant life
seem to vary more in this country than in England because the conditions of
life are harder. The extremes of heat and cold, of wet and dry, are much greater.
It has been found that the eggs of the English sparrow vary in form and color
more in the United States than in Great Britain. Certain American shells are
said to be more variable than the English. Among our own birds it has been
found that the “migratory species evince a greater amount of individual
variation than do non-migrating species” because they are subject to more
varying conditions of food and climate. I think we may say, then, if there were
no struggle for life, if uniformity of temperature and means of subsistence
everywhere prevailed, there would be little or no variation and no new species
would arise. The causes of variation seem to be the inequality and imperfection
of things; the pressure of life is unequally distributed, and this is one of
Nature’s ways that accounts for much that we see about us. |
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