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

Through the bloom-colored pane shines a glory
By which the vast shadows are stirred,
But I pine for the spirit and splendor
That painted the wing of that bird.

The organ rolls down its great anthem,
With the soul of a song it is blent,
But for me, I am sick for the singing
Of one little song that is spent.

The voice of the curate is gentle:
"No sparrow shall fall to the ground;"
But the poor broken wing on the bonnet
Is mocking the merciful sound.

GOD'S SILENCE AND HIS VOICES ALSO

DR. N. D. HILLIS

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.

CONCEALMENTS OF NATURE

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

PROF. HENRY C. MERCER

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.

So the guns of humanity were loaded for the owls. The birds were too strange, too interesting, too wonderful to live. The court house was no sanctuary. Late one August night one fell at a gun shot on the grass at the poplar trees. Then another on the pavement by the fountain. Another, driven from its fellows, pursued in mid air by two crows, perished of a shot wound by the steps of a farm-house, whose acres it could have rid of field mice.

The word went out in Doylestown that the owls were a nuisance. But we visited them and studied their ways, cries, and food, to find that they were not a nuisance in their town sanctuary.

In twenty of the undigested pellets, characteristic of owls, left by them around the young birds, we found only the remains, as identified by Mr. S. N. Rhoads of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, of the bones, skulls, and hair of the field mouse (Microtus pennsylvanicus) and star nose mole (Condylura cristata). "They killed the pigeons," said someone, speaking without authority, after the manner of a gossip who takes away the character of a neighbor without proof. But they had not killed the pigeons. About twelve pairs of the latter, dwelling continually with their squabs in the garret, though they had not moved out of the particular alcove appropriated by the owls, had not been disturbed. What better proof could be asked that THE BARN OWL IS NOT A POULTRY DESTROYER?

It was objected that the owls' cries kept citizens awake at night. But when, one night last week, we heard one of their low, rattling cries, scarcely louder than the note of a katydid, and learned that the janitor had never heard the birds hoot, and that the purring and hissing of the feeding birds in the garret begins about sundown and ceases in the course of an hour, we could not believe that the sleep of any citizen ever is or has been so disturbed.

When I saw the three little white creatures yesterday in the court-house garret, making their strange bows as the candle light dazzled them, hissing with a noise as of escaping steam, as their brown eyes glowed, seemingly through dark-rimmed, heart-shaped masks, and as they bravely darted towards me when I came too near, I learned that one of the young had disappeared and that but one of the parent birds is left, the mother, who will not desert her offspring.

On October 28 two young birds were taken from their relatives to live henceforth in captivity, and it may be that two members of the same persecuted band turned from the town and flew away to build the much-talked-of nest in a hollow apple tree at Mechanics' Valley. If so, there again the untaught boy, agent of the mother that never thought, the Sunday school that never taught, and the minister of the Gospel that never spoke, was the relentless enemy of the rare, beautiful, and harmless birds. If he failed to shoot the parents, he climbed the tree and caught the young.

If the hostility to the owls of the court house were to stop, if the caged birds were to be put back with their relatives, if the nocturnal gunners were to relent, would the remaining birds continue to add an interest to the public buildings by remaining there for the future as the guests of the town? Would the citizens of Doylestown, by degrees, become interested in the pathetic fact of the birds' presence, and grow proud of their remarkable choice of sanctuary, as Dutch towns are proud of their storks? To us, the answer to these questions, with its hope of enlightenment, seems to lie in the hands of the mothers, of the teachers of Sunday schools, and of the ministers.

THE WATER THRUSH

C. C. MARBLE

I never see a skylark fly
Straight upward, singing, to the sky,
Or hear the bobolink's glad note
Issue with frenzy from his throat,
As though his very heart would break
In bars of music, but straight
I think, brave, happy bridegrooms they,
And this must be their wedding-day.

    C. C. M.
THE water thrush (Seiurus noveboracensis) has so many popular names that it will be recognized by most observers by one or more of them. It is called small-billed water-thrush, water wagtail, water kick-up, Besoy kick-up, and river pink (Jamaica), aquatic accentor, and New York aquatic thrush. It is found chiefly east of the Mississippi River, north to the Arctic coast, breeding from the north border of the United States northward. It winters in more southern United States, all of middle America, northern South America, and all of West Indies. It is accidental in Greenland. In Illinois this species is known as a migrant, passing slowly through in spring and fall, though in the extreme southern portion a few pass the winter, especially if the season be mild. It frequents swampy woods and open, wet places, nesting on the ground or in the roots of overturned trees at the borders of swamps. Mr. M. K. Barnum of Syracuse, New York, found a nest of this species in the roots of a tree at the edge of a swamp on the 30th of May. It was well concealed by the overhanging roots, and the cavity was nearly filled with moss, leaves, and fine rootlets. The nest at this date contained three young and one egg. Two sets were taken, one near Listowel, Ontario, from a nest under a stump in a swamp, on June 7, 1888; the other from New Canada, Nova Scotia, July 30, 1886. The nest was built in moss on the side of a fallen tree. The eggs are creamy-white, speckled and spotted, most heavily at the larger ends, with hazel and lilac and cinnamon-rufous.

As a singer this little wagtail is not easily matched, though as it is shy and careful to keep as far from danger as possible, the opportunity to hear it sing is not often afforded one. Though it makes its home near the water, it is sometimes seen at a considerable distance from it among the evergreen trees.

THE TARSIER

ALONG with Tagals, Ygorottes, and other queer human beings Uncle Sam has annexed in the Philippine islands, says the Chronicle, is the tarsier, an animal which is now declared to be the grandfather of man.

They say the tarsier is the ancestor of the common monkey, which is the ancestor of the anthropoid ape, which some claim as the ancestor of man.

A real tarsier will soon make his appearance at the national zoological park. His arrival is awaited with intense interest.

Monsieur Tarsier is a very gifted animal. He derives his name from the enormous development of the tarsus, or ankle bones of his legs. His eyes are enormous, so that he can see in the dark. They even cause him to be called a ghost. His fingers and toes are provided with large pads, which enable him to hold on to almost anything.

Professor Hubrecht of the University of Utrecht has lately announced that Monsieur Tarsier is no less a personage than a "link" connecting Grandfather Monkey with his ancestors. Thus the scale of the evolution theorists would be changed by Professor Hubrecht to run: Man, ape, monkey, tarsier, and so on, tarsier appearing as the great-grandfather of mankind.

Tarsier may best be described as having a face like an owl and a body, limbs, and tail like those of a monkey. His sitting height is about that of a squirrel. As his enormous optics would lead one to suppose, he cuts capers in the night and sleeps in the daytime, concealed usually in abandoned clearings, where new growth has sprung up to a height of twenty feet or more. Very often he sleeps in a standing posture, grasping the lower stem of a small tree with his long and slender fingers and toes. During his nightly wanderings he utters a squeak like that of a monkey. During the day the pupils of his eyes contract to fine lines, but after dark expand until they fill most of the irises. From his habit of feeding only upon insects he has a strong, bat-like odor.

John Whitehead, who has spent the last three years studying the animals of the Philippines, foreshadows the probable behavior of the tarsier when he arrives at the national "zoo." The Philippine natives call the little creature "magou."

"In Samar," says Mr. Whitehead, in a report just received at the Smithsonian, "where at different times I kept several tarsiers alive, I found them very docile and easily managed during the day. They feed freely off grasshoppers, sitting on their haunches on my hand. When offered an insect the tarsier would stare for a short time with its most wonderful eyes, then slowly bend forward, and, with a sudden dash, would seize the insect with both hands and instantly carry it to its mouth, shutting its eyes and screwing up its tiny face in a most whimsical fashion. The grasshopper was then quickly passed through the sharp little teeth, the kicking legs being held with both hands.

"When the insect was beyond further mischief the large eyes of the tarsier would open and the legs and wings were then bitten off, while the rest of the body was thoroughly masticated. My captive would also drink fresh milk from a spoon. After the sun had set this little animal became most difficult to manage, escaping when possible and making tremendous jumps from chair to chair. When on the floor it bounded about like a miniature kangaroo, traveling about the room on its hind legs with the tail stretched out and curved upward, uttering peculiar, shrill, monkeylike squeaks and biting quite viciously when the opportunity offered."

THE TRAILING ARBUTUS

WILLIAM K. HIGLEY