The Audubon Societies 219 



Panama, Nicaragua, and Honduras and I didn't know anything about 

 Jamaica and Cuba. You know most of tlic things we birds do is from force 

 •of habit and it's a lot easier for us to do anything the way we have done it 

 before than it is for us to try a brand-new way. That's the reason you 

 humans have advanced so much farther than we ha\e and the reason why 

 some of you are so much better off than others. A person who is a slave to 

 his habits never gets very far. 



"I should like to tell you all about my trip through Central America 

 and what I saw of the Panama Canal, about my long flight across the Gulf 

 of Mexico when I almost got drowned when overtaken by a storm, and 

 .all the things I saw in the Southern States as I worked my way north keeping 

 just behind the advance of spring and trying not to get ahead of the opening 

 foliage and the insects that go with it until I arrived home again once 

 more, but it is too long a story to be told at one time." 



FROM YOUNG OBSERVERS 

 CROWS BATHING 



In the November-December number of Bird-Lore Ernest Thompson 

 'Seton makes the statement that he has never seen a Crow take a cold- 

 water bath. 



I thought perhaps some of the readers of Bird-Lore might be interested 

 in hearing about a pair of pet Crows we had last summer at Lake Itasca, 

 in Itasca State Park. 



They were taken from the nest about a week before they could fly. At 

 first we kept them in a cage at night, and put them on a perch hung between 

 two birch trees near the lake in the daytime. They would stay there all 

 day, and we fed them with a spoon which they did not seem to mind. We 

 gave them hard-boiled eggs, minnows, bread, fruit, and other things, and 

 My, how those Crows did eat. Later, after they were old enough to hunt 

 grasshoppers and other food for themselves, we gave them mice, and it 

 was a comical sight to see them strutting around with a mouse partly 

 swallowed, and the tail and part of the body hanging from the bill. 



When the Crows could fly we turned them loose, but as they did not go 

 away far we threw food out for them. Before they could fly they had learned 

 to bathe in the pan of water we had put out for drinking purposes, and as 

 they grew older it frequently happened that one Crow would splash so much 

 water out of the pan that it would have to be refilled before the other Crow 

 could take his bath. We filled the pan many times a day. They were 

 always given cold water, and the hotter the day the oftener they bathed. 

 I have seen them soak up so much water that when they started to fly the 

 water would drip from wings and body. Before they could fly we often 



