Birds and Nature Vol. 9 No. 1 [January 1901]

Bacteriology is now being studied and investigated as a field of research in hundreds of laboratories, and in every university in Europe and America. Bacteriology has added as much to man’s wealth and happiness as any of the applied sciences. All the methods of preservation of food depend upon bacteriological principles, while modern sanitary science is based on the recognition of the cause of infectious diseases. The presence of specific bacteria in the secretions or tissues of man and animals is now such a certainty for many diseases that the work of making bacteriologic diagnoses is in itself an extensive vocation. Within the next few years every city in America will have a diagnosis laboratory for infectious diseases. We can safely predict that the trained bacteriologist will be called upon to stand between each sick person or animal and the community to direct measures that will prevent infection of others. Hygienists are learning more every day as to the exact way in which disease bacteria pass from person to person, and the reasons for the occurrence of diseases. They have learned that the accidental and unusual circumstance is least important, but that there is a regular train of cause and effect, and in the knowledge of how to break this chain is the key to the proper control of an epidemic. Veterinary medicine has been able to obtain benefits from bacteriology much beyond those already so important to human medicine. This is so because of the persistent prejudice opposed to bacteriology in medicine, while the veterinarian has been allowed to treat his patients practically as the experiment animals are treated in the laboratory.

Bacteriologists are frequently meeting demands made of their science that are beyond its present stage of progress. It is frequently forgotten that this is biology whose deductions are always subject to the variation of growing things, and not chemistry or mathematics, with their definite determinations and strict limitations. Bacteriology is now an established science, and it is as competent to render service in due proportion to its development and with the same integrity as any biological subject. There are now many known facts in bacteriology that cannot be made useful because intermediate steps in their study have not been learned. It will require long series of experiments in some cases, but when added to the present usefulness of bacteriology the results may be expected to satisfy the most severe critics.

    Adolph Gehrmann.

THE YELLOW-BREASTED FLYCATCHER

“Come here! come here! come here!
My Philip dear, come here! come here!
Philip, my dear! Philip, Philip, my dear!”

Poor mournful Mrs. Flycatcher,
With ample breast of dainty buff,
Now don’t you think you’ve called your mate, —
To say the very least – enough?

I’m sorry for you, plaintive one;
I would be glad to make him fly
From his long tarrying place to you,
If that would stop your weary cry.

Can’t you decide to give him up?
All over town you’ve called his name;
I heard you calling this week, last,
The week before you called the same.

Perhaps some boy with “twenty-two”
Has shot him for his sister’s hat.
Go! search the churches through and through;
If he’s not there, accuse the cat.

    – Carrie B. Sanborn.

THE TOWNSEND’S WARBLER

(Dendroica townsendi.)

Dr. Robert Ridgway, in the Ornithology of Illinois, uses the following words in speaking of that family of birds called the American Warblers (Mniotilidae), “No group of birds more deserves the epithet of pretty than the Warblers; Tanagers are splendid; Humming-birds are refulgent; other kinds are brilliant, gaudy or magnificent, but Warblers alone are pretty in the proper and full sense of that term.”

As they are full of nervous activity, and are “eminently migratory birds,” they seem to flit rather than fly through the United States as they pass northward in the spring to their breeding places, and southward in the fall to their winter homes among the luxuriant forests and plantations of the tropics. All the species are purely American, and as they fly from one extreme to the other of their migratory range they remain but a few days in any intermediate locality. Time seems to be an important matter with them. It would seem as if every moment of daylight was used in the gathering of food and the night hours in continuing their journey.

The American Warblers include more than one hundred species grouped in about twenty genera. Of these species nearly three-fourths are represented in North America at least as summer visitants, the remaining species frequenting only the tropics. Though woodland birds they exhibit many and widely separated modes of life, some of the species preferring only aquatic regions, while others seek drier soils. Some make their homes in shrubby places, while others are seldom found except in forests. As their food is practically confined to insects, they frequent our lawns and orchards during their migrations, when they fly in companies which may include several species. Mr. Chapman, in his Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America, says, “Some species flit actively from branch to branch, taking their prey from the more exposed parts of the twigs and leaves; others are gleaners, and carefully explore the under surfaces of leaves or crevices in the bark; while several, like Flycatchers, capture a large part of their food on the wing.”

The Townsend’s Warbler is a native of Western North America, especially near the Pacific coast. Its range extends from Sitka on the north to Central America on the south, where it appears during the winter. In its migration it wanders as far east as Colorado. It breeds from the southern border of the United States northward, nesting in regions of cone-bearing trees. It is said that the nest of this Warbler is usually placed at a considerable height, though at times as low as from five to fifteen feet from the ground. The nest is built of strips of fibrous bark, twigs, long grasses and wool, compactly woven together. This is lined with hair, vegetable down and feathers.

The eggs are described as buffy white, speckled and spotted with reddish brown and lilac-gray, about three-fifths of an inch in length by about one-half of an inch in diameter.

THE STORY OF SOME BLACK BUGS

We were going to visit Aunt Bessie, and John and I like few things better than that. To begin with, she lives in the country, and there is always so much to do in the way of fun that the days never seem half long enough.

Then, besides, Aunt Bessie knows everything, and can tell such famous stories. So when she asked us one morning to go to the pond with her and see something interesting, you may be sure we were not slow in following her.

The rushes grew thickly along the sides, but the water was clear, and we could plainly see the black bugs she pointed out to us crawling, slowly and clumsily, over the muddy bottom.

“Those things!” said John, not a little disgusted. “I don’t think they are much. Are they tadpoles?”

“Tadpoles!” I echoed. “Why, whoever saw tadpoles with six legs and no tail?”

“The absence of a tail is very convincing,” laughed Aunt Bessie. “They are certainly not tadpoles. Now watch them closely, please, and tell me all about them.”

“They are abominably ugly. That is one thing,” broke in John. “They look black, and have six legs. But how funny their skin is. More like a crust, or lots of crusts laid one on the other. They are about the stupidest things I ever saw. They seem to do nothing but crawl over that mud and – Hello! they aren’t so stupid, after all. Did you see that fellow snatch a poor fly and gobble him up quicker than you could say Jack Robinson? And there’s another taken a mosquito just as quick. I’ll take back what I said about the slow business. But really, Auntie, do you think them very interesting?”

“I’ll ask you that question when you have learned something more about them,” was her answer. “Tell me now what you think of that Dragon-fly darting over the water?”

“Oh, he is a beauty,” we answered in a breath. “But please let us hear something about those things down there.”

“Not to-day, boys. I wish you to see something for yourselves first. Watch here for a few days and your patience will be rewarded, I promise you. Then I will have a story to tell you.”

I knew that Auntie never spoke without reason, so John and I kept a close watch on those bugs. For two days nothing happened. The old things just crawled over the mud or ate flies and mosquitoes, as usual.

But the third day one big fellow decided to try something new. It was nothing less than to creep up the stem of one of the rushes. I suppose it was hard work, for he took a long time to get to the surface of the water. Here he stopped a while and then seemed to make up his mind to go further. Soon he was quite out of the water and could breathe all the air and sunshine he wished. I believe he did not like it very well. He seemed so restless and uneasy. I was expecting to see him go back, when I heard John cry out:

“Look! oh, do look!”

I did look, and could scarcely believe my eyes.

His skin (the bug’s, I mean), was actually cracking right down the back, just as though the air and sunshine had dried it too much.

Poor fellow, he seemed in great trouble about it. Then, to make matters worse, a part of his coat broke off at the top and slipped down over his eyes, so that he could not see. After a moment, however, it dropped further, quite under the place where his chin would have been, had he had a chin.

“Oh! he is getting a new face. A prettier one, too, I am glad to say.”

It seemed as if John was always first to notice things, for it was just as he said; as the old face slipped away a new one came in its place.

I guess that by this time that old bug was as much astonished as we were. He was wriggling about in a very strange fashion, and at last quite wriggled himself out of his old shell. Then we saw two pairs of wings, which must have been folded away in little cases by his side, begin to open like fans. Next, he stretched his legs, and it was easy to see that they were longer and more beautiful than those he had had before.

Then, before we could admire his slender, graceful body, or fully realize the wonderful change that had occurred in him, he darted away before our astonished eyes, not a black bug, but a beautiful Dragon-fly.

“Hurrah!” we both shouted. The next second we were rushing at top speed to tell Auntie all about it; just as though she had not known all along what was going to happen.

She listened and then told us what we did not know.

How months before the mother Dragon-fly had dropped her tiny eggs in the water, where they hatched out the black bugs, which were so unlike their mother that she did not know them for her children, and had no word to say to them during the long hours she spent in skimming over the water where they lived.

These bugs were content at first to live in the mud. But soon came the longing for sun and air. And then followed the wonderful transformation from an ugly black bug to the beautiful dragon-fly.

If you will go beside some pond in the spring or early summer, and find among the water grasses such a bug as I have described, and will then watch long enough you will see just what John and I saw. Afterwards I am sure you will agree with us that it is very wonderful indeed.