Cries of the Day and Night 



with regret; for I admire the crow, and consider 

 him as, of all birds, the most intelligent and the 

 most considerate of his own kind. I know that it 

 is a moot question whether the crow does more 

 harm or good, and that some naturalists have set- 

 tled it in his favor; but I have too often caught 

 him plundering nests in the springtime to be much 

 impressed by his alleged usefulness at other sea- 

 sons. I think that he may have been once useful 

 in preserving the so-called balance of nature ; but 

 that balance is now dangerously unequal. The 

 crow has flourished even in well-settled regions, 

 thanks to his superior wit, while other useful 

 birds have fearfully diminished, and this at a time 

 when our orchards and gardens call more and more 

 insistently for their help. Because of his dispro- 

 portionate numbers the crow now appears to me, 

 like our destructive and useless cats, as a positive 

 menace in a country where he once occupied a 

 modest or inconspicuous place such a place as he 

 still occupies in the wilderness, where I meet him 

 but rarely, and where I am glad to leave him in 

 peace, since he does not seriously interfere with his 

 more beautiful or more useful neighbors. But we 

 are wandering from the dim trail of animal com- 

 munication, which we set out to follow. 



The inarticulate but variously accented cries of 

 which we have spoken constitute the only animal 



[31] 



