Further Observations on Young Birds. 87 



and threw the bacon to him, instead of picking it up, he 

 stood quite still, with his eye laboriously turned towards 

 the zenith ; and so he remained staring. . . . Then I 

 opened the window wide and looked up ; and there passing 

 over the house and flying at a great height was a heron. 

 That was what the robin was watching." Although a 

 heron may occasionally make a meal of a robin, I question 

 whether we may legitimately infer that there was any 

 instinctive recognition of an enemy as such. At the same 

 time, it is commonly believed that fowls in a yard evince 

 an excitement when a hawk flies overhead, which they do 

 not show when a rook passes over. It is, however, prob- 

 able that such discrimination, if it be a fact, is due to the 

 hen handing on the traditional fear of a hawk by uttering 

 a warning note, as her parents had done when she was 

 a chick. If so, chicks hatched in the incubator should 

 show no such discrimination. Those who have shot 

 under a kite know that game-birds are deceived by a 

 passable but very inexact imitation of a bird of prey. 



So, too, with regard to the cry of a hawk which startled 

 Spalding's young turkey. I have seen young birds startled 

 by such a variety of strange and unusual sounds, that I 

 am inclined to believe that had Spalding struck a loud 

 chord on a violin, his turkey would have behaved in much 

 the same way ; that, in a word, there is in this observa- 

 tion no evidence of instinctive knowledge of the hawk as 

 a bird of prey, and therefore dangerous, but an instinctive 

 response to a sharp, unusual sound. 



To ascertain whether there was any instinctive avoid- 

 ance of a snake-like animal on the part of young pheasants, 

 I procured a large blind worm and set it in front of the 

 incubator drawer in which the birds passed the night. On 

 opening the drawer, the pheasants hopped out almost on 

 to the top of the blind worm, which was fairly active ; but 



