Birds and all Nature, Vol. V, No. 5, May 1899

EGG COLLECTING

To the Editor of Birds and All Nature:

I AM glad the magazine of birds is furnishing its readers so many points about the good qualities of our birds. And as they are being protected more every year by the state laws and by the lovers of birds, I think they are sure to increase. I have often been asked about the decrease in bird life. The blame is generally put on the taxidermist, collector, sportsman, and schoolboy, which I claim is all wrong. The taxidermist collector of to-day is a lover of bird-life, and only hunts specimens to mount for a scientific purpose. This gives our school children a better chance to study them. The schoolboy and girl of to-day are doing great good in the protection of bird-life, and your book of birds has a warm friend among them. The true sportsman always lives up to the laws and takes a fair chance with dog and gun. The plume and bird collector will soon be a thing of the past, as hats trimmed with choice ribbons and jets are fast taking the place of those covered with feathers and birds. Now the persons who hide behind all these, and who destroy more bird-life in a single season than all the hunters and collectors of skins, are never brought to the eyes of the press. These are the people who have a fad for egg-collecting. They not only rob the nest of its one setting, but will take the eggs as long as the bird will continue to lay, and, not satisfied with that, will take the eggs from every bird as long as they can find them. They will even take the eggs after incubation has begun, and often-times, after a hard climb for the eggs, will destroy the nest. There are thousands upon thousands of settings of eggs of every kind taken every year by these fad egg collectors and you will see in some of our magazines on ornithology offers of from fifty to five hundred settings for sale. Now, what is an egg to this egg collector? Nothing. But to the lover of birds there is a great deal in that shell. There is a life; the song of the woods and of the home. In that shell is the true and faithful worker who has saved our farmers and our city homes and parks from the plagues of insects that would have destroyed crops and the beauty of our homes. Shall the law allow these nest-robbers to go on summer after summer taking hundreds of thousands of settings? If it shall I am afraid the increase in our bird-life will be slow. With the help of our game wardens and sporting-clubs a great deal of this could be stopped, and a great saving could be made in game birds' eggs. Our country school children can protect our song birds' nests by driving these collectors, with their climbing irons and collecting cans, from their farms in the breeding-season. Yes, it often looks sad to see a song bird drop at the report of the gun of the skin collector. But when we think of the bird-egg collector sneaking like a thief in the night up a tree or through a hedge, taking a setting of eggs on every side while the frightened mother sits high in the tree above, and then down and off in search of more, only to come back in a short time to take her eggs again – what is bird-life to him? What would he care to be sitting in the shade by the lake or stream listening to the song of the robin, or after a hard day's work in the hot summer, be seated on his porch to hear the evening song of the warbler and the distant call of the whippoorwill? Let the lovers of bird-life commence with the spring song, with the building of the nest, and save each little life they can from the egg collector. Will this man, if he may be called a man, look into his long drawers filled with eggs, and his extra settings for sale and trade? Let him think of the life he has taken, the homes he has made unhappy. I should think he would go like Macbeth from his sleep to wash the blood from his hands.

THE BABOON

NATURALISTS seem to be agreed that the baboons (cynocephalus), while one of the most remarkable groups of the monkey family, are the ugliest, rudest, coarsest, and most repulsive representatives of it. The animal stands in the lowest degree of development of the monkey tribe, and possesses none of the nobler shapes and qualities of mind of other species. Aristotle called the baboons dog-headed monkeys, on account of the shape of their heads, which have a resemblance to that of a rude, fierce dog.

The baboons are found throughout Africa, Arabia, and India. In the main they are mountain monkeys, but also live in forests and are excellent tree-climbers. In the mountains they go as high as nine thousand to thirteen thousand feet above the sea-level, but give preference to countries having an elevation of three thousand or four thousand feet. Old travelers assert that mountainous regions are their true home.

The food of the baboons consists chiefly of onions, tubers, grass, fruit, eggs, and insects of all kinds, but, as they have also a greedy appetite for animal food, they steal chickens and kill small antelopes. In plantations, and especially vineyards, they cause the greatest damage, and are even said to make their raids in an orderly, deliberate, and nearly military manner.

Brehm, who observed them closely, says that they resemble awkward dogs in their gait, and even when they do stand erect they like to lean on one hand. When not hurried their walk is slow and lumbering; as soon as they are pursued, they fall into a singular sort of gallop, which includes the most peculiar movements of the body.

The moral traits of the baboons are quite in accord with their external appearance. Scheitlin describes them as all more or less bad fellows, "always savage, fierce, impudent, and malicious; the muzzle is a coarse imitation of a dog's, the face a distortion of a dog's face. The look is cunning, the mind wicked. They are more open to instruction than the smaller monkeys and have more common sense. Their imitative nature seems such that they barely escape being human. They easily perceive traps and dangers, and defend themselves with courage and bravery. As bad as they may be, they still are capable of being tamed in youth, but when they become old their gentle nature disappears, and they become disobedient; they grin, scratch, and bite. Education does not go deep enough with them. It is said that in the wild state they are more clever; while in captivity they are gentler. Their family name is 'dog-headed monkeys.' If they only had the dog's soul along with his head!" Another traveler says that they have a few excellent qualities; they are very fond of each other and their children; they also become attached to their keeper and make themselves useful to him. "But these good qualities are in no way sufficient to counterbalance their bad habits and passions. Cunning and malice are common traits of all baboons, and a blind rage is their chief characteristic. A single word, a mocking smile, even a cross look, will sometimes throw the baboon into a rage, in which he loses all self-control." Therefore the animal is always dangerous and never to be trifled with.

The baboons shun man. Their chief enemy is the leopard, though it oftener attacks the little ones, as the old fellows are formidable in self-defense. Scorpions they do not fear, as they break off their poisonous tails with great skill, and they are said to enjoy eating these animals as much as they do insects or spiders. They avoid poisonous snakes with great caution.

This animal is said to be remarkable for its ability in discovering water. In South Africa, when the water begins to run short, and the known fountains have failed, it is deprived of water for a whole day, until it is furious with thirst. A long rope is then tied to its collar, and it is suffered to run about where it chooses. First it runs forward a little, then stops, gets on its hind feet, and sniffs the air, especially noting the wind and its direction. It will then, perhaps, change its course, and after running for some distance take another observation. Presently it will spy out a blade of grass, pluck it up, turn it on all sides, smell it, and then go forward again. Thus the animal proceeds until it leads the party to water. In this respect at least, baboons have their uses, and on occasions have been the benefactors of man.

The baboons have, in common with the natives, a great fondness for a kind of liquor manufactured from the grain of the durra or dohen. They often become intoxicated and thus become easy of capture. They have been known to drink wine, but could not be induced to taste whisky. When they become completely drunk they make the most fearful faces, are boisterous and brutal, and present altogether a degrading caricature of some men.

As illustrating the characteristics of fear and curiosity in the baboon, we will quote the following from the personal experience of Dr. Brehm, the celebrated traveler. He had a great many pets, among others a tame lioness, who made the guenons rather nervous, but did not strike terror to the hearts of the courageous baboons. They used to flee at her approach, but when she really seemed to be about to attack one of them, they stood their ground fairly well. He often observed them as they acted in this way. His baboons turned to flee before the dogs, which he would set upon them, but if a dog chanced to grab a baboon, the latter would turn round and courageously rout the former. The monkey would bite, scratch, and slap the dog's face so energetically that the whipped brute would take to his heels with a howl. More ludicrous still seemed the terror of the baboons of everything creeping, and of frogs. The sight of an innocent lizard or a harmless little frog would bring them to despair, and they would climb as high as their ropes would permit, clinging to walls and posts in a regular fit of fright. At the same time their curiosity was such that they had to take a closer look at the objects of their alarm. Several times he brought them poisonous snakes in tin boxes. They knew perfectly well how dangerous the inmates of these boxes were, but could not resist the temptation of opening them, and then seemed fairly to revel in their own trepidation.

THE SUMMER POOL

THE FEATHER CRUSADE

JUST as the Audubon societies and the appeals of humanitarians in general have had some effect in lessening the demand for the aigrette for millinery purposes, and their banishment, as officially announced, from the helmets of the British army, there springs up a new fashion which, if generally adopted, will prove very discouraging – especially to the birds.

"She made a decided sensation last evening at the opera," says Miss Vanity's fond mamma. "Those blackbirds with outspread wings at either side of her head were simply fetching. They drew every lorgnette and every eye in the house upon her. Not a woman of fashion, or otherwise, I venture to say, will appear at a public function here-after without a pair of stuffed birds in her hair."

A melancholy outlook truly, though as an onlooker expressed it, the effect of the spreading wings was vastly more grotesque than beautiful. The poor little blackbirds! Their destruction goes on without abatement.

"I like the hat," said a gentle-looking little lady in a fashionable millinery establishment the other day, "but," removing it from her head, "those blackbirds must be removed and flowers put in their place."

"A member of the Audubon Society, probably," queried the attendant, respectfully.

"No," was the answer, "but for years the birds have been welcome visitors at our country place, great flocks of blackbirds, especially, making their homes in our trees. This year, and indeed the last, but few appeared, and we have in consequence no love for the hunters and little respect for the women who, for vanity's sake, make their slaughter one of commercial necessity and greed."

'Tis said fashion is proof against the appeals of common sense or morality, and one must accept the statement as true when, in spite of all that has been said upon the subject, the Paris journals announce that "birds are to be worn more than ever and blouses made entirely of feathers are coming into fashion." The use of bird skins in Paris for one week represent the destruction of one million three hundred thousand birds; in London the daily importation ranges from three hundred to four hundred thousand. It is honestly asserted that, in the height of the season, fifty thousand bird skins are received in New York City daily.

At the annual meeting of the Audubon Society of New York state a letter was read from Governor Roosevelt in which he said that he fully sympathized with the purpose of the society and that he could not understand how any man or woman could fail to exert all influence in support of its object.

"When I hear of the destruction of a species," he added, "I feel just as if all the works of some great writer had perished; as if one had lost all instead of only a part of Polybius or Livy."

Rev. Dr. Henry Van Dyke sent a letter in which he said the sight of an aigrette filled him with a feeling of indignation, and that the skin of a dead songbird stuck on the head of a tuneless woman made him hate the barbarism which lingers in our so-called civilization. Mr. Frank M. Chapman, at the same meeting, stated that the wide-spread use of the quills of the brown pelican for hat trimming was fast bringing about the extinction of that species.

GOD'S SILENCE AND HIS VOICES ALSO

NATURE loves silence and mystery. Reticent, she keeps her own counsel. Unlike man, she never wears her heart upon her sleeve. The clouds that wrap the mountain about with mystery interpret nature's tendency to veil her face and hold off all intruders. By force and ingenuity alone does man part the veil or pull back the heavy curtains. The weight of honors heaped upon him who deciphers her secret writings on the rock or turns some poison into balm and medicine, or makes a copper thread to be a bridge for speech, proclaims how difficult it is to solve one of nature's simplest secrets. For ages man shivered with cold, but nature concealed the anthracite under thick layers of soil. For ages man burned with fever, but nature secreted the balm under the bark of the tree. For ages, unaided, man bore his heavy burdens, yet nature veiled the force of steam and concealed the fact that both wind and river were going man's way and might bear his burdens.

Though centuries have passed, nature is so reticent that man is still uncertain whether a diet of grain or a diet of flesh makes the ruddier countenance. Also it is a matter of doubt whether some young Lincoln can best be educated in the university of rail-splitting or in a modern college and library; whether poverty or wealth does the more to foster the poetic spirit of Burns or the philosophic temper of Bach. In the beautiful temple of Jerusalem there was an outer wall, an inner court, "a holy place," and afar-hidden within, "a place most holy." Thus nature conceals her secrets behind high walls and doors, and God also hath made thick the clouds that surround the divine throne.

Marvelous, indeed, the skill with which nature conceals secrets numberless and great in caskets small and mean. She hides a habitable world in a swirling fire-mist. A magician, she hides a charter oak and acre-covering boughs within an acorn's shell. She takes a lump of mud to hold the outlines of a beauteous vase. Beneath the flesh-bands of a little babe she secretes the strength of a giant, the wisdom of a sage and seer. A glorious statue slumbers in every block of marble; divine eloquence sleeps in every pair of human lips; lustrous beauty is for every brush and canvas; unseen tools and forces are all about inventors, but they who wrest these secrets from nature must "work like slaves, fight like gladiators, die like martyrs."

For nature dwells behind adamantine walls, and the inventor must capture the fortress with naked fists. In the physical realm burglars laugh at bolts and bars behind which merchants hide their gold and gems. Yet it took Ptolemy and Newton 2,000 years to pick the lock of the casket in which was hidden the secret of the law of gravity. Four centuries ago, skirting the edge of this new continent, neither Columbus nor Cabot knew what vast stretches of valley, plain, and mountain lay beyond the horizon.

If once a continent was the terra incognita, now, under the microscope, a drop of water takes on the dimensions of a world, with horizons beyond which man's intellect may not pass. Exploring the raindrop with his magnifying-glass, the scientist marvels at the myriad beings moving through the watery world. For the teardrop on the cheek of the child, not less than the star riding through God's sky, is surrounded with mystery, and has its unexplored remainder. Expecting openness from nature, man finds clouds and concealment. He hears a whisper where he listens for the full thunder of God's voice to roll along the horizon of time.

THE OWLS' SANCTUARY

SEVEN bluish-white, almost spherical eggs, resting on the plaster floor of the court-house garret, at Doylestown, Pennsylvania, caught the eye of the janitor, Mr. Bigell, as one day last August he had entered the dark region by way of a wooden wicket from the tower. Because the court-house pigeons, whose nestlings he then hunted, had made the garret a breeding-place for years, he fancied he had found another nest of his domestic birds. But the eggs were too large, and their excessive number puzzled him, until some weeks later, visiting the place again (probably on the morning of September 20), he found that all the eggs save one had hatched into owlets, not pigeons.

The curious hissing creatures, two of which seemed to have had a week's start in growth, while one almost feather-less appeared freshly hatched, sat huddled together where the eggs had lain, close against the north wall and by the side of one of the cornice loop-holes left by the architect for ventilating the garret. Round about the young birds were scattered a dozen or more carcasses of mice (possibly a mole or two), some of them freshly killed, and it was this fact that first suggested to Mr. Bigell the thought of the destruction of his pigeons by the parent owls, who had thus established themselves in the midst of the latter's colony. But no squab was ever missed from the neighboring nests, and no sign of the death of any of the other feathered tenants of the garret at any time rewarded a search.

As the janitor stood looking at the nestlings for the first time, a very large parent bird came in the loop-hole, fluttered near him and went out, to return and again fly away, leaving him to wonder at the staring, brown-eyed, monkey-faced creatures before him. Mr. Bigell had thus found the rare nest of the barn owl, Strix pratincola, a habitation which Alexander Wilson, the celebrated ornithologist, had never discovered, and which had eluded the search of the author of "Birds of Pennsylvania." One of the most interesting of American owls, and of all, perhaps, the farmer's best friend, had established its home and ventured to rear its young, this time not in some deserted barn of Nockamixon swamp, or ancient hollow tree of Haycock mountain, but in the garret of the most public building of Doylestown, in the midst of the county's capital itself. When the janitor had left the place and told the news to his friends, the dark garret soon became a resort for the curious, and two interesting facts in connection with the coming of the barn owls were manifest; first, that the birds, which by nature nest in March, were here nesting entirely out of season – strange to say, about five months behind time; from which it might be inferred that the owls' previous nests of the year had been destroyed, and their love-making broken up in the usual way; the way, for instance, illustrated by the act of any one of a dozen well remembered boys who, like the writer, had "collected eggs;" by the habitude of any one of a list of present friends whose interest in animals has not gone beyond the desire to possess them in perpetual captivity and watch their sad existence through the bars of a cage; or by the "science" of any one of several scientific colleagues who, hunting specimens for the sake of a show-case, "take" the female to investigate its stomach.

Beyond the extraordinary nesting date, it had been originally noticed that the mother of the owlets was not alone, four or five other barn owls having first come to the court-house with her. Driven by no one knew what fate, the strange band had appeared to appeal, as if in a body, to the protection of man. They had placed themselves at his mercy as a bobolink when storm driven far from shore lights upon a ship's mast.

But it seemed, in the case of the owls, no heart was touched. The human reception was that which I have known the snowy heron to receive, when, wandering from its southern home, it alights for awhile to cast its fair shadow upon the mirror of the Neshaminy, or such as that which, not many years ago, met the unfortunate deer which had escaped from a northern park to seek refuge in Bucks County woods. At first it trusted humanity; at last it fled in terror from the hue and cry of men in buggies and on horseback, of enemies with dogs and guns, who pursued it till strength failed and its blood dyed the grass.