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                         TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.

The words phoebe, manoeuvre, manoeuvring, Pooecetes and phoeniceus use
"oe" ligature in the original text.

The printer's inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, hyphenation,
and ligature usage have been retained.




                            WAYS OF NATURE


                    [Illustration: A BIRD IN SIGHT]




                            WAYS OF NATURE

                                  BY

                            JOHN BURROUGHS


                          BOSTON AND NEW YORK
                       HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
                     The Riverside Press Cambridge


                   COPYRIGHT 1905 BY JOHN BURROUGHS
                          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
                       _Published October 1905_




                                PREFACE


My reader will find this volume quite a departure in certain ways from
the tone and spirit of my previous books, especially in regard to the
subject of animal intelligence. Heretofore I have made the most of
every gleam of intelligence of bird or four-footed beast that came
under my observation, often, I fancy, making too much of it, and
giving the wild creatures credit for more "sense" than they really
possessed. The nature lover is always tempted to do this very thing;
his tendency is to humanize the wild life about him, and to read his
own traits and moods into whatever he looks upon. I have never
consciously done this myself, at least to the extent of willfully
misleading my reader. But some of our later nature writers have been
guilty of this fault, and have so grossly exaggerated and
misrepresented the every-day wild life of our fields and woods that
their example has caused a strong reaction to take place in my own
mind, and has led me to set about examining the whole subject of
animal life and instinct in a way I have never done before.

In March, 1903, I contributed to "The Atlantic Monthly" a paper called
"Real and Sham Natural History," which was as vigorous a protest as I
could make against the growing tendency to humanize the lower
animals. The paper was widely read and discussed, and bore fruit in
many ways, much of it good and wholesome fruit, but a little of it
bitter and acrid. For obvious reasons that paper is not included in
this collection. But I have given all the essays that were the outcome
of the currents of thought and inquiry that it set going in my mind,
and I have given them nearly in the order in which they were written,
so that the reader may see the growth of my own mind and opinions in
relation to the subject. I confess I have not been fully able to
persuade myself that the lower animals ever show anything more than a
faint gleam of what we call thought and reflection,--the power to
evolve ideas from sense impressions,--except feebly in the case of the
dog and the apes, and possibly the elephant. Nearly all the animal
behavior that the credulous public looks upon as the outcome of reason
is simply the result of the adaptiveness and plasticity of instinct.
The animal has impulses and impressions where we have ideas and
concepts. Of our faculties I concede to them perception, sense memory,
and association of memories, and little else. Without these it would
be impossible for their lives to go on.

I am aware that there is much repetition in this volume, and that the
names of several of the separate chapters differ much more than do the
subjects discussed in them.

When I was a boy on the farm, we used to thrash our grain with the
hand-flail. Our custom was to thrash a flooring of sheaves on one side,
then turn the sheaves over and thrash them on the other, then unbind
them and thrash the loosened straw again, and then finish by turning
the whole over and thrashing it once more. I suspect my reader will
feel that I have followed the same method in many of these papers. I
have thrashed the same straw several times, but I have turned it each
time, and I trust have been rewarded by a few additional grains of truth.

Let me hope that the result of the discussion or thrashing will not be to
make the reader love the animals less, but rather to love the truth more.

  June, 1905.




                               CONTENTS


                                                        PAGE
     I.  WAYS OF NATURE                                    1
    II.  BIRD-SONGS                                       29
   III.  NATURE WITH CLOSED DOORS                         47
    IV.  THE WIT OF A DUCK                                53
     V.  FACTORS IN ANIMAL LIFE                           59
    VI.  ANIMAL COMMUNICATION                             87
   VII.  DEVIOUS PATHS                                   109
  VIII.  WHAT DO ANIMALS KNOW?                           123
    IX.  DO ANIMALS THINK AND REFLECT?                   151
     X.  A PINCH OF SALT                                 173
    XI.  THE LITERARY TREATMENT OF NATURE                191
   XII.  A BEAVER'S REASON                               209
  XIII.  READING THE BOOK OF NATURE                      231
   XIV.  GATHERED BY THE WAY
         I.  THE TRAINING OF WILD ANIMALS                239
        II.  AN ASTONISHED PORCUPINE                     242
       III.  BIRDS AND STRINGS                           246
        IV.  MIMICRY                                     248
         V.  THE COLORS OF FRUITS                        251
        VI.  INSTINCT                                    254
       VII.  THE ROBIN                                   261
      VIII.  THE CROW                                    265

         INDEX                                           273




                                   I

                            WAYS OF NATURE


I was much amused lately by a half-dozen or more letters that came to
me from some Californian schoolchildren, who wrote to ask if I would
please tell them whether or not birds have sense. One little girl
said: "I would be pleased if you would write and tell me if birds have
sense. I wanted to see if I couldn't be the first one to know." I felt
obliged to reply to the children that we ourselves do not have sense
enough to know just how much sense the birds and other wild creatures
do have, and that they do appear to have some, though their actions
are probably the result of what we call instinct, or natural
prompting, like that of the bean-stalk when it climbs the pole. Yet a
bean-stalk will sometimes show a kind of perversity or depravity that
looks like the result of deliberate choice. Each season, among my
dozen or more hills of pole-beans, there are usually two or three
low-minded plants that will not climb the poles, but go groveling upon
the ground, wandering off among the potato-vines or cucumbers,
departing utterly from the traditions of their race, becoming
shiftless and vagrant. When I lift them up and wind them around the
poles and tie them with a wisp of grass, they rarely stay. In some way
they seem to get a wrong start in life, or else are degenerates from
the first. I have never known anything like this among the wild
creatures, though it happens often enough among our own kind. The
trouble with the bean is doubtless this: the Lima bean is of South
American origin, and in the Southern Hemisphere, beans, it seems, go
the other way around the pole; that is, from right to left. When
transferred north of the equator, it takes them some time to learn the
new way, or from left to right, and a few of them are always
backsliding, or departing from the new way and vaguely seeking the
old; and not finding this, they become vagabonds.

How much or how little sense or judgment our wild neighbors have is
hard to determine. The crows and other birds that carry shell-fish
high in the air and then let them drop upon the rocks to break the
shell show something very much like reason, or a knowledge of the
relation of cause and effect, though it is probably an unthinking
habit formed in their ancestors under the pressure of hunger. Froude
tells of some species of bird that he saw in South Africa flying amid
the swarm of migrating locusts and clipping off the wings of the
insects so that they would drop to the earth, where the birds could
devour them at their leisure. Our squirrels will cut off the chestnut
burs before they have opened, allowing them to fall to the ground,
where, as they seem to know, the burs soon dry open. Feed a caged <DW53>
soiled food,--a piece of bread or meat rolled on the ground,--and
before he eats it he will put it in his dish of water and wash it off.
The author of "Wild Life Near Home" says that muskrats "will wash what
they eat, whether washing is needed or not." If the <DW53> washes his
food only when it needs washing, and not in every individual instance,
then the proceeding looks like an act of judgment; the same with the
muskrat. But if they always wash their food, whether soiled or not,
the act looks more like instinct or an inherited habit, the origin of
which is obscure.

Birds and animals probably think without knowing that they think;
that is, they have not self-consciousness. Only man seems to
be endowed with this faculty; he alone develops disinterested
intelligence,--intelligence that is not primarily concerned with his
own safety and well-being, but that looks abroad upon things. The wit
of the lower animals seems all to have been developed by the struggle
for existence, and it rarely gets beyond the prudential stage. The
sharper the struggle, the sharper the wit. Our porcupine, for
instance, is probably the most stupid of animals and has the least
speed; it has little use for either wit or celerity of movement. It
carries a death-dealing armor to protect it from its enemies, and it
can climb the nearest hemlock tree and live on the bark all winter.
The skunk, too, pays for its terrible weapon by dull wits. But think
of the wit of the much-hunted fox, the much-hunted otter, the
much-sought beaver! Even the grouse, when often fired at, learns, when
it is started in the open, to fly with a corkscrew motion to avoid the
shot.

Fear, love, and hunger were the agents that developed the wits of the
lower animals, as they were, of course, the prime factors in
developing the intelligence of man. But man has gone on, while the
animals have stopped at these fundamental wants,--the need of safety,
of offspring, of food.

Probably in a state of wild nature birds never make mistakes, but
where they come in contact with our civilization and are confronted by
new conditions, they very naturally make mistakes. For instance, their
cunning in nest-building sometimes deserts them. The art of the bird
is to conceal its nest both as to position and as to material, but now
and then it is betrayed into weaving into its structure showy and
bizarre bits of this or that, which give its secret away, and which
seem to violate all the traditions of its kind. I have the picture of
a robin's nest before me, upon the outside of which are stuck a muslin
flower, a leaf from a small calendar, and a photograph of a local
celebrity. A more incongruous use of material in bird architecture it
would be hard to find. I have been told of another robin's nest upon
the outside of which the bird had fastened a wooden label from a
near-by flower-bed, marked "Wake Robin." Still another nest I have
seen built upon a large, showy foundation of the paper-like flowers of
antennaria, or everlasting. The wood thrush frequently weaves a
fragment of newspaper or a white rag into the foundation of its nest.
"Evil communications corrupt good manners." The newspaper and the
rag-bag unsettle the wits of the birds. The phoebe-bird is capable
of this kind of mistake or indiscretion. All the past generations of
her tribe have built upon natural and, therefore, neutral sites,
usually under shelving and overhanging rocks, and the art of adapting
the nest to its surroundings, blending it with them, has been highly
developed. But phoebe now frequently builds under our sheds and
porches, where, so far as concealment is concerned, a change of
material, say from moss to dry grass or shreds of bark, would be an
advantage to her; but she departs not a bit from the family
traditions; she uses the same woodsy mosses, which in some cases,
especially when the nest is placed upon newly sawed timber, make her
secret an open one to all eyes.

It does indeed often look as if the birds had very little sense. Think
of a bluebird, or an oriole, or a robin, or a jay, fighting for hours
at a time its own image as reflected in a pane of glass; quite
exhausting itself in its fury to demolish its supposed rival! Yet I
have often witnessed this little comedy. It is another instance of how
the arts of our civilization corrupt and confuse the birds. It may be
that in the course of many generations the knowledge of glass will get
into their blood, and they will cease to be fooled by it, as they may
also in time learn what a poor foundation the newspaper is to build
upon. The ant or the bee could not be fooled by the glass in that way
for a moment.

_Have_ the birds and our other wild neighbors sense, as distinguished
from instinct? Is a change of habits to meet new conditions, or the
taking advantage of accidental circumstances, an evidence of sense?
How many birds appear to have taken advantage of the protection
afforded by man in building their nests! How many of them build near
paths and along roadsides, to say nothing of those that come close to
our dwellings! Even the quail seems to prefer the borders of the
highway to the open fields. I have chanced upon only three quails'
nests, and these were all by the roadside. One season a scarlet
tanager that had failed with her first nest in the woods came to try
again in a little cherry tree that stood in the open, a few feet from
my cabin, where I could almost touch the nest with my hand as I
passed. But in my absence she again came to grief, some marauder,
probably a red squirrel, taking her eggs. Will her failure in this
case cause her to lose faith in the protective influence of the shadow
of a human dwelling? I hope not. I have known the turtle dove to make
a similar move, occupying an old robin's nest near my neighbor's
cottage. The timid rabbit will sometimes come up from the bushy fields
and excavate a place for her nest in the lawn a few feet from the
house. All such things look like acts of judgment, though they may be
only the result of a greater fear overcoming a lesser fear.

It is in the preservation of their lives and of their young that the
wild creatures come the nearest to showing what we call sense or
reason. The boys tell me that a rabbit that has been driven from her
hole a couple of times by a ferret will not again run into it when
pursued. The tragedy of a rabbit pursued by a mink or a weasel may
often be read upon our winter snows. The rabbit does not take to her
hole; it would be fatal. And yet, though capable of far greater speed,
so far as I have observed, she does not escape the mink; he very soon
pulls her down. It would look as though a fatal paralysis, the
paralysis of utter fear, fell upon the poor creature as soon as she
found herself hunted by this subtle, bloodthirsty enemy. I have seen
upon the snow where her jumps had become shorter and shorter, with
tufts of fur marking each stride, till the bloodstains, and then her
half-devoured body, told the whole tragic story.

There is probably nothing in human