READING THE BOOK OF NATURE 



fell off its perch ; then when its parent flew away, 

 it followed. 



I think it highly probable that the sense or fac- 

 ulty by which animals find their way home over 

 long stretches of country, and which keeps them 

 from ever being lost as man so often is, is a faculty 

 entirely unlike anything man now possesses. The 

 same may be said of the faculty that guides the 

 birds back a thousand miles or more to their old 

 breeding-haunts. In caged or housed animals I 

 fancy this faculty soon becomes blunted. President 

 Roosevelt tells in his "Ranch Life" of a horse he 

 owned that ran away two hundred miles across the 

 plains, swimming rivers on the way to its old home. 

 It is very certain, I think, that this homing feat is 

 not accomplished by the aid of either sight or scent, 

 for usually the returning animal seems to follow 

 a comparatively straight line. It is, or seems to 

 be, a consciousness of direction that is as tinerring 

 as the magnetic needle. Reason, calculation, and 

 judgment err, but these primary instincts of the 

 animal seem almost infallible. 



In Bronx Park in New York a grebe and a loon 

 lived together in an inclosure in which was a large 

 pool of water. The two birds became much at- 

 tached to each other and were never long separated. 

 One winter day on which the pool was frozen over, 

 except a small opening in one end of it, the grebe 

 dived under the ice and made its way to the far 

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