1 88 The Ottawa Naturalist. [November 



MY FEATHERED JESTER. 



By a. C. Tynd.\ll. 



If anyone who has recog-nised the leading characteristics of 

 that problem of humanity known in the abstract as the Boy — 

 whose manners and habits suggest not more an absorbing interest 

 in life and all that belongs thereto, than an emulative admiration 

 for the ways and works, in his lighter moods, of the great enemy 

 of mankind — if such a one I say can imagine a like joyous spirit 

 embodied in a feathered person some eighteen inches from beak to 

 tip of tail, he or she will have a fair idea of the individual whose 

 manners and habits have impressed the writer as entitling him to 

 more than a passing notice. 



The subject of this biography is, to all appearances, one of 

 those rarely met with and most enviable of mortals who find their 

 lot in life entirely to their liking. He displays an amount of energy 

 and an enthusiasm in his daily doings, whether his occupation be 

 seeking a suitable place of burial for a toad he has slain or that of 

 arranging his toilet in an elm top, which I feel sure entitle him to a 

 high place in the esteem of that gifted bard who sings untiringly 

 the praise of " things as they are." This is not because he views 

 life with the eyes of the unsophisticated denizen of the wilds. His 

 earliest recollections of life on this planet being associated with 

 his surroundings as a privileged member of the family circle, it 

 may be regarded as a pardonable mistake on the part of this, in 

 some respects, amiable bird, to suppose, as he evidently does, 

 that it is the ties of blood which unite him to the friends of his 

 youth of a widely different description zoologically. Nothing at 

 all cares he for the opinion of his black-coated brothers, though 

 they jeer and scoff at him for a corvine molly-coddle, since he pre- 

 fers civilization and its luxuries to the joys of the life Bohemian 

 and the companionship of the birds of ill omen. 



It is, I believe, not often that anyone meeting a member of 

 the crow family daily fails to be impressed by the force of charac- 

 ter and amount of will power — not infrequently wrongly exercised 

 — common to the crow kind, independently of difference in species, 

 or sub-species. And although my feathered friend is responsible 



