Birds and Nature, Vol 10 No. 2 [September 1901]

And as of old my longing eyes delight,
Thou, fairest climber of the rustic throng;
And I take courage by thy bravery,
My much-plumed friend of tangled copse and vale,
That fain would hide the mars of autumn’s hour,
Henceforth I strive that others only see
My higher self as outward graces fail,
And see that self through love’s ennobling power.

    Jenny Terrill Ruprecht.

TOPSY

Ethel Tyler has a tame crow for a pet. It is so black and such a mischievous creature that Ethel named her Topsy.

Topsy was quite small when given to Ethel, and she has learned to say a number of words.

There is a large orchard back of the house, and Topsy seems to think this her special playground. Here she can play about and “caw” to her heart’s content.

She loves to hide among the branches of a tree, then call, “Ethel, Ethel,” expecting Ethel to come and hunt for her.

Topsy is very amusing, for there is no end to her tricks and pranks, but she can also be very troublesome if she is so disposed.

Her greatest fault is that of stealing. Small articles, as keys, thimbles, spools of thread and such things have to be kept where she cannot get at them or they will be missing.

Her eyes are quick and she is so sly that she generally gets away with the things without being caught.

When articles are missed, we know whom to blame, but it is quite another thing to find them, for she seldom uses a hiding place after it has once been discovered and her plunder removed.

There is one member of the Tyler family that has not a high opinion of Topsy, and that is Tony, Ethel’s cat.

Topsy does her part towards making the poor cat’s life miserable, and I guess Tony thinks she is quite successful.

She tips over his saucer of milk, pecks at his tail, swoops down upon him when he is eating, seizes his meat and flies to a place of safety before Tony realizes that he has been robbed. Topsy then proceeds to eat her booty, chattering to herself as though she had done a brave deed.

Tony stands in fear of Topsy, and she knows it, and is not slow in taking advantage of the knowledge whenever an opportunity presents itself.

When Topsy calls, “Tony, Tony,” the cat lengthens the distance between himself and the artful crow, for he knows by experience that she only wants the tuft of fur at the tip of his tail or a piece of the rim of his ear.

There is no trouble about feeding Topsy. As long as she has plenty to eat it does not matter what the food might be and she never stops to inquire whether it is fresh or not.

She is very fond of fish, and it is amusing to watch her when a fish cart comes along.

Mrs. Tyler patronizes a certain man that sells fish, and he stops in front of the house and blows his horn so that she will know he is there. Topsy has learned to associate the blast from the horn with “fish,” and the minute she hears a horn blown she starts for the street.

She always receives a piece of fish if it is Mrs. Tyler’s fish monger that is passing, but it often happens that it is a stranger going by and then Topsy follows the cart down the street to see if he will not throw her a piece of fish. If he does not, she comes back chattering angrily at being cheated out of so enjoyable a meal.

Ethel will call, “Topsy, Topsy,” and the crow will come hopping to her. “Shake hands,” and Topsy will raise one of her black feet and put it in Ethel’s hand for her to shake.

When Topsy wishes to go into the house she stands on the door step and calls, “Mamma, Papa or Ethel” until some one comes and lets her in.

She has many opportunities to leave the place and shift for herself, but she never goes far from the house and seems to prefer making her home with the Tyler family.

    Martha R. Fitch.

THE WALRUS

(Trichechus rosmarus.)

The Walrus (Trichechus rosmarus) is a very fat, clumsy brute, much uglier than his picture, with a coarse, oily skin all wrinkled and scarred; long, protruding tusks; bristly whiskers and scuffling flippers that barely serve to move his bulky body over the land. In the water he is more at home, and though it does not require a high degree of strength and skill to dig clams, that being his daily occupation, yet he is able to keep very fat on the fruits of his industry and has much leisure to swim about or doze on ice floes and sea beaches.

It is only in the arctic regions that Walrus are found. Before the attacks of whalers and ivory hunters they were found as far south as Nova Scotia and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but now they have retreated as far as possible into the frozen north, living in limited numbers about Hudson’s Bay, Davis Straits and Greenland and in Spitzbergen and Northern Europe. In the northern Pacific before the slaughter began the Walrus swarmed by thousands in the broad, shallow bays from the Alaskan Peninsula to Point Barrow, where the ice never melts.

The food of the Walrus consists of mollusks and crustaceans, which he digs from the muddy bottom with his long tusks, and the roots and stalks of sea-weed. He crushes the clams, shells and all, and swallows the mass, leaving digestion to proceed as it may. The stomach of a Walrus killed in Bering Sea by Mr. Henry W. Elliott contained more than a bushel of crushed clams in their shells, with enough other food to make half a barrel.

It is principally for its ivory tusks and the accumulated fat which comes from heavy eating that the Walrus is now being exterminated by whalers and hunters. To the Eskimo the Walrus means life itself. He eats the flesh, burns the fat for fuel and light, makes his boats, houses, harness and harpoon lines from the hide and trades what ivory he has not made into implements for the guns and whisky so acceptable to primitive man. The extermination of the Walrus will probably mean the extermination of the Eskimos, or at least an entire change in their habits of life.

Although a very fierce looking animal, the Walrus is reputed to be peaceful and inoffensive except when attacked in the water. At such times he has been known to hook his tusks over the edge of the boat and swamp it or even to call in his friends by bull-like roars and smash the boat to pieces. Besides man, his one enemy is the polar bear, which creeps upon him as he sleeps and worries him to death. As the Walrus’ skin is anywhere from half an inch to two inches thick and padded out by an average of six inches of fat, it is almost impossible to reach a vital place even with long teeth and bear claws, and the Walrus is often able to flounder into the deep water and escape by remaining under water until the bear has to come up for breath.

One of the favorite amusements of the Walrus is to float in the water with his hind flippers hung down and his nose comfortably above the wash and either fall asleep or indulge in deep roarings which are said to sound like something between the mooing of a cow and the baying of a mastiff and which often serve, like whistling buoys, to warn sailors from rocks and shoals.

The young are born in the spring, and generally on the ice floes, but being born fat the ice floes are probably as warm to them as is a nest to a little mouse. The mothers show great affection for their young, and will not abandon them in danger, even allowing themselves to be speared while protecting their offspring. As the Walrus are social by nature, wandering about in great herds, and as they also show a marked sympathy for each other’s misfortunes, it is very dangerous to wound one in the water lest the whole herd join in a common defense.

An adult male Walrus measures about twelve feet from the end of his nose to that of his very short tail, or fourteen feet to the end of his hind flippers, and weighs something over a ton. His girth is as great as his length, in fact, it has been often observed that his great circumference and too-loose skin seem rather a source of annoyance than otherwise to him, especially when he tries to land on a sandy beach. Even with the wash of the breakers he is rarely able to get beyond the water line, except as the tide goes down and leaves him, dry perhaps, but yet at the mercy of men and polar bears.

    Dane Coolidge.

TOUCHING INCIDENTS ABOUT PIGEONS

The homing pigeon has proved that locality is a faculty fully developed in the bird’s little brain, but I heard, the other day, an instance of memory in the species that was most touching. A lady living in the top story of a Boston skyscraper had been in the habit of feeding the pigeons and sparrows who flew to the little balcony before her window, and had succeeded in taming some of her pensioners, one or two pigeons even eating out of her hand. One day, while passing along Park street, this lady was surprised to see a pigeon flutter away from some companions strutting in the middle of the road, and come upon the sidewalk, where it almost tripped her up in its efforts to attract her attention. It fluttered around her, evincing every sign of pleasure and recognition, and when she called it by name the little creature fairly flew at her! Now, in the midst of all that passing throng the pigeon knew its benefactor, who, with tears in her eyes, says its recognition gave her more joy than if the queen had saluted her. Under the circumstances, it was to her great regret that she had no crumbs to give him then and there. But who ever dreamed of being accosted in the street by a pigeon?

Our attention has been called by a traveling friend to an incident which occurred recently in the family of G. F. Marsh, a member of the Pacific Coast Pigeon Society. It certainly proved to him, and to all his friends in that region, in a most impressive manner the valuable services which may sometimes be rendered by the carrier pigeon, and probably explains some of his enthusiasm in that direction. His little baby boy was taken suddenly sick with most alarming symptoms of diphtheria.

The mother, watching by the bedside of the little one, dispatched a message tied on a carrier pigeon to her husband at his store on Market street, San Francisco. In the message she wrote the nature of the child’s alarming illness, and made an urgent appeal for medicine to save its life. The bird was started from the home of the family near the Cliff House, five miles from Mr. Marsh’s store.

The bird flew swiftly to the store, where Mr. Marsh received it. He read the message, called a doctor, explained the child’s symptoms as his wife had detailed them in her message, and received the proper medicine. Then tying the little vial containing the precious restorative to the tail of the pigeon, he let it go.

The pigeon sped away swiftly through the air straight for the Cliff. It made the distance, five miles, in ten minutes, a distance which would have required the doctor three-quarters of an hour to cover.

In twenty minutes from the time the mother’s message was sent to her husband the baby was taking the medicine.

Naturally enough Mr. Marsh is partial to pigeons, for he considers that he owes his baby’s life to one.

    George Bancroft Griffith.

ON THE SAN JOAQUIN

It was in the latter part of the month of March that we started out from Fresno for a day’s outing on the San Joaquin river, hunting for hawk and owl eggs. The day was bright and warm, and we keenly enjoyed the ride of nine miles across the plains. Out past the old, deserted Holland Colony, where stumps of vines showed that the settlers had once made an honest attempt to win their daily bread out of the hard pan. The last half of the way lay across the hog-wallow country, that peculiar effect which has puzzled many scientists, but which all attribute to the action of water in long past ages. The rolling motion of rising over and descending these mounds was like the riding of a small boat over the waves of the sea. Here and there a burrow in the top of one of the mounds, the domicile of the frisky ground-squirrel or the billy owl, gave the landscape the appearance of a dish of mush cooking, with the air bubbles swelling up, and some bursting, leaving the little holes. On across canals, past a wheat country, and then the virginal hog-wallow lands that no plowshare has ever touched, covered with a short green growth which gives nourishment to bands of sheep, dirty, and with numerous lambkins, guarded by a few sagacious shepherd dogs and lonely, and equally dirty, bearded Mexican herders.

The mounds grow higher and the hollows deeper until we wonder if they stretch on forever and if we are lost among them, when all at once we come out right on the top of a high bluff overlooking the San Joaquin. The unexpectedness is quite startling. One could not possibly have suspected a moment before that we were within miles of a great river bed more than a mile wide, with steep bluffs more than 300 feet high on either side and a swift river sweeping down its channel in the center, but here we were right on the edge of it. We can look down almost perpendicularly and see, three or four hundred feet below us, great green meadows stretching to the north and south and to the trees and thickets that edge the river. The river from this distance and height seems but a thread in its once vast bed. What a sight – what a power it must have been when once it filled all this vast bed, which often is more than a mile across from bluff to bluff. On the further side a few trees grow right on the edge of the water, and then the bluff rises abruptly even higher than on our side. Buzzards and hawks are sweeping around us in the air, and dark spots in the tops of far-off trees betoken the presence of the objects of our search, the nests of the hawks. We begin the descent, which at first seems extremely hazardous, and even on further trial sufficiently steep to make walking down more of a pleasure than riding, as we find. The road or path winds around and around, as necessarily it must unless one would go head-first to the bottom. It is narrow and steep and the ruts deeply worn in places by the action of water. About half way down we come upon what was once a canal, and we can see the level ridge of its embankment stretching away above and below us along the side of the bluff, as it curves in and out. What a vast undertaking it must have been to build this great waterway along the face of the bluff. As we near the bottom clumps of elderberry and scraggly greasewood appear, and we come upon two little white eggs of the dove, laid in a hollow in the ground – an early bird surely.