242 Wild Birds 



this respect with the Bohemian Waxwing, the Arctic repre- 

 sentative of the Cedar-bird. 



This tameness found among many Arctic species has been met 

 with on a much wider scale in remote oceanic islands, where man 

 is almost unknown and where the conditions of life are very 

 different from those of the mainland. Darwin remarks I that 

 the most anomalous fact on this subject which he had met was 

 the wildness of certain small birds in the Arctic portions of 

 North America, while some of the same species were said to be 

 tame in their winter quarters in the United States. "How 

 strange it is," says he, "that the English wood-pigeon, generally 

 so wild a bird, should very frequently rear its young in shrub- 

 beries close to houses!" 



Respecting the wildness which birds exhibit towards man, 

 Darwin could find no way of accounting for it except as in- 

 herited habit, but in another work, he thus refers to the same 

 subject 2 : "If we look to successive generations, or to the race, 

 there is no doubt that birds and other animals gradually both 

 acquire and lose caution in relation to man and other enemies ; 

 and this caution is certainly in chief part an inherited habit or 

 instinct, but in part the result of individual experience." 



The observations which have been made on the behavior of 

 old and young birds do not support any theory of the inheritance 

 of habits to account for tameness in animals, but as already 

 shown afford a better clue of how this has been brought about. 

 Let us go back to the Pine Grosbeak which, when fresh from his 

 sub-Arctic home, can be approached and caught with your hat 

 as could many of the birds in the Galapagos Islands when 

 Darwin visited them in 1835. So far as I know, no one has 

 studied the young of this species in the nest and ascertained 

 whether they show the same instincts of fear in general toward 

 strange sights and sounds, as we find in passerine birds nesting 

 farther south. Assuming that they do, and there can be little 

 doubt of it, the instinct has lapsed through disuse in adult life, 

 although the capacity of expressing fear remains and may be 



1 Journal of Researches, chapter xvii. 



2 The Descent of Man, p. 80. 



