92 MY NATURE NOTEBOOK. 



our crops, have learned the meaning of a gun, but if 

 a man and his dog take a walk together, nature at 

 large thinks much more of the dog than of the man. 



OUR PARASITES KNOW us BEST. 



Our furred and feathered parasites, such as rats 

 and house-sparrows, respect our powers more than 

 wilder creatures do, for human ingenuity has almost 

 been exhausted in the effort to invent really effective 

 traps for either. They have learned to suspect 

 human mechanisms and contrivances, though the rat 

 is generally guided in his judgment of an apparatus 

 by his sense of smell. If the taint of human fingers 

 lingers upon it, he gives it a wide berth ; wherefore 

 we toast the cheese that baits the trap, in order that 

 its powerful aroma may overwhelm our own. The 

 sparrow, guided by his eyesight alone, extends a 

 wider caution to everything which looks like a 

 possible contrivance for catching sparrows. String 

 he especially abhors, wherefore we stretch strands of 

 cotton about our seed-beds and rail the " bird-tables " 

 in winter with string, which keeps off the sparrows 

 but not the invited guests in feathers. Only at this 

 season, with the burden of large families to feed, the 

 sparrow lays aside his caution and is easily caught, 

 even in cage-traps, and, as a measure of extermina- 

 tion, these are doubly effective now, because, when 

 the old birds are killed, the young broods die. But 

 it is cruel. 



