Bobbie Yank 



7 



window of his room with a nut-meat riding on the toe of my boot, foot extended. 

 He came hopping in very cautiously, looking at me with head on one side, his 

 bright eyes questioning my face, plainly saying ''Will you keep still? Really, 

 will you?" Then in a most casual way he grasped the nut and made off with 

 it in no undue haste. 



Another outstanding quality of Bobbie's is his great love of playing to the 

 gallery. Give him an appreciative audience and he is made. One day I sat 

 down at my desk to write, glanced out of the window and saw Bob all tucked 

 into the corner of the seed-tray of the Packard feeding-station on his favorite 

 maple, obviously settled for a luxurious siesta after a large meal. As soon as 

 his eye caught mine he gave himself a quick shake, assumed the defensive 

 attitude of a man who has been caught napping, but won't own it, moved out 

 into the center of the tray and made his bill fly in all directions like a person 

 vigorously using a broom, scattering seeds to the winds. I rapped on the window 

 and shook my finger at him, mentioning Mr. Hoover's name. He stopped an 

 instant, then went at it again with all the recklessness of a drunken sailor on 

 first shore-leave after a long voyage, and "a fig for your Hoover" in every motion 

 of that active bill. 



And now I have come to an interesting psychological fact about Bobbie. 

 I have in my room a plaster Barye lioness standing out rather large and white 

 against a mahogany bookcase. Bob has taken nuts from every piece of furni- 

 ture and every object in the room except the lioness; he has never touched her, 

 but on two occasions has taken nuts from her pedestal. I thought I would force 

 the issue by putting a very large nut-meat (he is especially weak about large 

 ones) in her jaw and not a fragment anywhere else in the room. That day I 

 was putting a shining new coat of paint on our east enclosed veranda, which we 

 use as a breakfast-room, when I heard the worst clatter — a perfect din — out on 

 the east maple. It has the scolding note of the Robin at his most excited 

 moments, combined with the blatant quality of the Flicker. I saw, to my amaze- 

 ment, that it was Bob, single-throated, and the rating was unmistakably 

 directed at me. At the moment I entirely forgot the lioness incident, and went 

 out in all sincerity to find what was wrong. As I approached he threw off his 

 challenging attitude like a flash, dodging around the bark of the tree, assumed 

 his most businesslike grub-searching expression — "positively not a moment 

 to spend in conversation." Not until I had resumed my paint-and-brush 

 activity did the picture of the nut in the lioness' mouth come to me. So that 

 was the cause of this outburst of unparliamentary speech hurled from the maple, 

 and then it came to me that, sandwiched in between anathemas, I had detected 

 something to this eft'ect: "I'm not going to fly into the jaws of death for you 

 or any other woman! My mother told me at a tender age to recognize that 

 combination of lines as cat, than which bird has no worse enemy." Now if 

 somebody who has studied bird psychology would explain this little quirk of 

 Bobbie's, or at least advance a theory, I would be grateful. 



