344 Next to the Ground 



on pecking grass it will be short — if they 

 run to cover and sing disconsolately there, 

 look out for a rainy day. 



A hen begins clucking at the first touch 

 of broodiness, and keeps on clucking until 

 she weans her young family. The clucks 

 are individual, loud or low, soft and muffled, 

 or spitefully sharp. They have need to be, 

 since it is through them the broods difFerenti- 

 ate their mothers. How the hens know their 

 own chicks from all other chicks, even those 

 of the same age, size, and markings, is among 

 nature's mysteries — but know them they do. 

 Hence often pitiful tragedies — little tender 

 downy bodies cruelly pecked to death, little soft 

 heads crushed and bloody, and all because of 

 a quite pardonable mistake. Scent has, it is 

 likely, much to do with it, since if a strange 

 chick can be smuggled under the, spitefullest 

 of hens while she sleeps, she will be apt to 

 mother it in the morning. But there are cases 

 in which hens will kill even a chick of their 

 own hatching, if by chance it falls under ban. 

 One hen, a speckled top-knot, whose own 

 proper eggs nearly always hatched out pert 

 brown-striped little fellows, tolerated the 

 brown-striped chicks, would steal every 

 white one she could entice from another 

 brood, and kill instantly a black chick, either 

 in her own brood, or which tried to follow her. 



