132 Bird -Lore 



From being originally a keeper of cats, — I will not say a lover of them, 

 because one cannot really love anything of such inherent treachery of temper- 

 ament, — I have come, through a long experience, to consider them the chief 

 menace to bird life of the day. What warden can protect game-birds, eggs or 

 young from this velvet-pawed prowler, who blends its sinuous color-protected 

 shape in the shadows of the two twilights, the time of its principal hunting? 



Fight and kill them as I may within my own garden, each year has its 

 tragedies. Only this morning, four little Robins have been taken from the nest 

 that gave us a bit of comedy at breakfast. There was rain early in the night, 

 and on the piazza the unmistakable footprints in mud of a cat led along to 

 the hand-rail, then along the rail to the honeysuckle vine, where the nest, 

 half pulled from its support and empty, told the rest. The cat's last victim 

 was one of a much-treasured pair of beautiful gray squirrels. Neither is this 

 a wild, half-starved cat, with any plausible sort of excuse or need, but belongs 

 to a neighbor, who calmly affirms that it never hunts and seldom leaves the 

 house. We call this animal the domestic cat. There is no such thing in nature. 

 The cat is a hunter, pure and simple, who is at times distorted into a kind of 

 tameness, from which it quickly relapses. Food is not necessarily the aim of 

 the hunting, as the well-fed animal proves by stalking the prey for the pure 

 sport of it. 



Reproaching myself for allowing the corner support of a roof-gutter to 

 fall into decay, I was looking at it by the aid of a field-glass, to make sure of 

 the extent of the necessary repairs, when from the hole, so round that I imagined 

 a red squirrel had made a winter home inside, a sleek, black and slate head 

 peered, then came out, and began pulling some sort of food from between the 

 nearby shingles, where there was evidently a storehouse, and dived into the 

 hole once more. It was a White-breasted Nuthatch, with a family snugly 

 ensconced inside, while several weeks later, at the other end of the same space, 

 a pair of Chickadees made their home. 



By the same token, how will the modern tree surgery affect what may be 

 called the tree-hole birds? Last season, I had some necessary trimming of 

 dangerous dead wood done by experts, who tried to convince me that a 

 glorious old, gnarled swamp maple and a picturesque, if derelict, willow 

 should be deprived of the hollows natural to age, scraped, chiseled out, ce- 

 mented, tarred and trimmed, in order to give it a few years of totally objec- 

 tionable existence, and also evict a score of tenants who return each sum- 

 mer; the list having, at different seasons, included a Barred Owl, Screech 

 Owls, Flicker, Hairy and Downy Woodpeckers, Starlings and Bluebirds. 



It seems to me that the true spirit of forestry is to plant new trees in time 

 to take the places of those that die a natural death, and sink back to Mother 

 Earth wrapped in the gracious drapery of vines and to the singing of birds, — 

 not to shave and whittle the poor old things out of every bit of identity, smooth- 

 ing off bases lest water lodges, spoiling all natural branch articulation and leav' 



