Cries of the Day and Night 



nearer than any others to something remotely 

 akin to human speech. Several times I have 

 known a tame crow to learn a few of our words and, 

 what is much more significant, to show his su- 

 periority over parrots and other mere mimics by 

 using one or more of the words intelligently. 

 There was one crow, for example, that would re- 

 peat the word "hungry" in guttural fashion when- 

 ever he thought it was time for him to dine. He 

 used this word very frequently when his dinner or 

 supper hour drew nigh, giving me the impression, 

 since he did not confuse it with two other words of 

 his vocabulary, that he associated the word with 

 the notion of food or of eating ; and if this impres- 

 sion be true to fact, it indicates more than appears 

 on the surface. We shall come to the wild crows 

 and their "talk" presently; the point here is, that 

 if this bird could use a new human word in asso- 

 ciation with a primal need, there is nothing to 

 prevent him from using a sound or symbol of his 

 ov/n in the same way. In other words, he must 

 have some small faculty of language. 



Another tame crow, which an imaginative boy 

 named Pharaoh Necho because of his hippety-hop 

 walk, proved himself inordinately fond of games, 

 play, social gatherings of every kind. To excite- 

 ment from any source, whether bird or brute or 

 human, he was as responsive as a weather-vane; 



[13] 



