14 INTRODUCTION. 



Much has been written upon the instincts of birds, 

 and a great deal of this would have been better had 

 the authors treated of intelligence instead. Birds, 

 of course, have instincts ; so have men ; but the 

 former are not guided by them blindly, as so com- 

 monly was taught in the not very distant past. In- 

 stead, they depend upon the exercise of a faculty 

 which in ourselves we call " common sense." 



Nuttall, in the Introduction to his " Manual of the 

 Ornithology of the United States and Canada," says, 

 " In respect to the habits of birds, we well know that, 

 like quadrupeds, they possess, though in a lower 

 degree, the capacity for a certain measure of what may 

 be termed education, or the power of adding to their 

 stock of invariable habits the additional traits of an 

 inferior degree of reason." This is both true and not 

 true. They are, I hold, at least the equals of quadru- 

 peds, and the "degree of reason" is not so very inferior. 

 Compare, without prejudice or preconceived notion, 

 a mouse and a sparrow, an opossum and a crow, a 

 weasel and a hawk, and invariably you will find that 

 the feathered is the superior of the furred creature 

 in just this very point of what I call common sense, 

 or, more properly speaking, cunning. The mammal 

 when surprised is most frequently confused, and if 

 the simplest methods of escape fail, it falls a victim , 

 but a bird is equal in more than one way to the occa- 

 sion, and by pure brain-power escapes when a merely 

 physical effort would not avail. Birds have not been 

 sufficiently studied in this respect. We have been 

 content to determine the ordinary events of their 

 daily lives, and forget that with them, as with our- 



