Bobolink has forgotten to call his own name, so he answers to any nick- 

 name the epicurean lovers of him please to call him by — "rice-bird," "reed- 

 bird," "Boblincoln." 



Do Birds Have Sense ? 



By John Burroughs 



I was much amused lately by a half-dozen or more letters that came to 

 me from some California school children who wrote to ask if I would please 

 tell them whether or not birds have sense. One little girl said: "I would be 

 pleased if you would write and tell me if birds have sense. I wanted to see 

 if I couldn't be the first one to know." I felt obliged to reply to the children 

 that we ourselves do not have sense enough to know just how much sense 

 the birds do have, and that they do appear to have some, though their actions 

 are probably the result of what we call instinct, or natural prompting like that 

 of the bean-stalk when it climbs the pole. 



How much or how little sense or judgment our wild neighbors have is 

 hard to determine. The crows and other birds that carry shell-fish high in the 

 air and then let them drop upon the rocks to break the shell show something 

 very like reason, or a knowledge of the relation of cause and effect. Froude 

 tells of some species of bird that he saw in South Africa flying amid the 

 swarm of migrating locusts and clipping off the wings of the insects so that 

 they would drop to the earth, where the birds could devour them at their 

 leisure. 



The birds probably think without knowing that they think; that is they 

 have not self-consciousness. 



Probably in a state of wild nature birds never make mistakes, but where 

 they come in contact with our civilization and are confronted by new condi- 

 tions, they very naturally make mistakes. For instance, their cunning in nest 

 building sometimes deserts them. The art of the bird is to conceal its nest 

 both as to position and as to material, and now and then it is betrayed into 

 weaving into its structure showy and bizarre bits of this or that, which give 

 its secret away and which seem to violate all the traditions of its kind. I 

 have the picture of a robin's nest before me, upon the outside of which are 

 stuck a small muslin flower, a leaf from a small calendar, and a photograph of 

 a local celebrity. A more incongruous use of material in bird architecture it 

 would be hard to find. I have been told of another robin's nest upon the 

 outside of which the bird had fastened a wooden label from a near-by flower 

 bed, marked "Wake Robin." Still another nest I have seen built upon a large, 

 showy foundation of the paper-like flowers of Antennaria, or everlasting. The 



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