FABLE AND FOLKLORE 221 



ourselves — not the birds ! They are dealing with danger- 

 ous conditions, and leave it to us to do the theorizing. 



One feature of the behavior of the fish-hawks in Wil- 

 son's story was their restlessness, taken by fishermen to 

 betoken a rising storm. There may be some value in this 

 "sign," since it is noted in many other cases. Dozens of 

 proverbs mention as indications various unusual actions 

 noticeable in poultry, such as crowing at odd times, clap- 

 pings of the wings, rolling in the dust, standing about in a 

 distraught kind of way, a tendency to flocking, and so 

 forth. Many popular sayings tell us that both barnyard 

 fowls and wild birds become very noisy before an un- 

 favorable change in the weather. 



When the peacock loudly bawls 

 Soon we'll have both rain and squalls, 



is one such. Virgil's statement that "the owl" screeches 

 unduly at such a time is supported by modern testimony. 



A reasonable explanation of this uneasiness is that it 

 is the effect of that increased electrical tension in the at- 

 mosphere that often precedes a shower, to which small 

 creatures are perhaps more sensitive than are men and 

 large animals. It will not do, then, to reject all the 

 weather-signs popularly alleged to be given by animals. 



At the same time, as has been suggested, much of the 

 current weather-prophecy relating to animals is silly, 

 such, for example, that a solitary turkey-buzzard seen at 

 a great altitude indicates rain; that blackbirds' notes are 

 very shrill before rain ; that there will be no rain the day 

 a heron flies down the creek ; that when woodpeckers peck 

 low on the tree-trunks expect a hard winter. These, and 

 many other nonsensical maxims, are in fact spurious. 

 Most of them, no doubt, were uttered originally in jest, 



