528 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



VILD ANIMALS AS MAN'S ASSOCIATES. 



By Professor EDWARD S. MORSE. 



IT would be a curious study to ascertain at what time certain wild 

 animals came to be associated with man. We do not mean those 

 which have become domesticated, though many of these run back far 

 beyond the historical epoch. By wild animals we mean those which, 

 still continuing in a wild state, build their nests or construct their bur- 

 rows near, or within, the habitations of man. 



The first advances in this direction must have been made by cer- 

 tain members that differed slightly, in their impulses, from others. It 

 might have been the more courageous and intelligent ones, which, not 

 fearing the presence of man, and recognizing the advantage to be 

 gained in the greater abundance of food, selected human habitations 

 as their abiding-places ; or it might have been individuals so stupid 

 as not to be aware of the possible danger of man's proximity, and 

 thus unwittingly selected places in or about his dwellings. 



The birds that nest in our trees we generally protect through hu- 

 mane or selfish motives, while with the rats, mice, and certain insects, 

 we keep up a perpetual warfare. Yet, that these latter animals survive, 

 indicates that, in spite of this opposition, the favorable conditions must 

 outweigh the adverse ones, otherwise they would soon be exterminated. 



A special investigation in regard to birds would be of great interest. 

 The change that has taken place in the habits of birds in forsaking the 

 forests and fields, and building their nests in the trees of towns and 

 villages, must have occurred since the first settlement of this coun- 

 try by Europeans. After the incoming of each species from the wilder- 

 ness their increase must have been rapid, as the favorable conditions 

 far outbalanced the unfavorable ones. Not only does the bird secure 

 a certain immunity from danger, in the shape of predatory birds like 

 the hawk, but it finds itself in the midst of a plentiful supply of insect- 

 life, which has in turn been lured from the wilderness, and which has 

 developed with frightful rapidity, owing to the dense crops which man 

 raises, and which were not always to be destroyed by every forest fire 

 or persistent drought. Many species have been forced in by the de- 

 struction of large tracts of forest, which compelled them to seek other 

 food, or become extinct. The destruction of forest-trees still goes on 

 in this country with criminal celerity, and new insects injurious to 

 vegetation will be added from year to year. 



Audubon somewhere remarks that in passing through a dense for- 

 est it was the rarest thing to hear the notes of those song-birds most 

 familiar to him, and he could always recognize his approach to a vil- 

 lage by the notes of those birds which most commonly frequent our 

 trees and fields. It is known historically when the cave-swallow first 



