Taming Wild Birds without a Cage. 137 



" How strange it is," says he, "that the English wood-pigeon, generally so wild a bird, 

 should very frequently rear its young in shrubberies close to houses ! " 



Respecting the wildness which birds exhibit towards man, Darwin could find no way 

 of accounting for it except as inherited habit, but in another work, he thus refers to the 

 same subject ' : "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 quickly aroused and directed towards particular objects. The timidity of 

 this bird in March after a brief experience with the ways of men is therefore virtually 

 an acquired character, and there is no evidence that it is handed down by inheritance. 



The breeding range of many northern birds covers a vast area, and in different 

 sections there is reason to expect much variation in the habits of the same species. The 

 timidity of the Arctic birds referred to may have been due to local conditions affecting 

 a relatively small number, or the birds may have been young individuals whose intuitive 

 fear had not been worn away, or old ones possessed of a wisdom derived from extensive 

 travel southward. Among birds which are reputed to be shy, tamer individuals are 

 to be found, and many acquire the habit of nesting in gardens and often close to houses. 

 In the Galapagos Islands, where birds had lived in comparative security for ages with 

 no fierce and relentless enemies to mar their tranquillity, the instinct of fear had not 

 only lapsed, but the power of forming new habits had weakened. It is therefore not 

 surprising that they should be slow in acquiring a fear of man, but any animal which 

 finally fails in the face of constant persecution to profit by experience has touched 

 the lowest depths of stupidity, and its days are numbered. 



1 The Descent of Man, p. 80. 



