188 BOMBAY DUCKS 
show that birds during the nesting season are mere 
automata, creatures of impulse, driven by some inborn 
force to do many actions of which they understand not 
the meaning. The more one studies nature, the more 
does one become convinced of this. 
“TI once found,” writes the American naturalist, Bur- 
roughs, “the nest of a black and white creeping warbler 
in a mossy bank in the woods, beneath which was an 
egg of the bird. The warbler had excavated the site 
for her nest, dropped her egg into the hollow and then 
gone on with her building.” This conversion of birds 
into mere automata at the nesting season is perhaps the 
most wonderful phenomenon in nature. 
It is obvious that if birds did not, at certain seasons, 
throw intelligence to the winds and become mere auto- 
mata they would neither build nests nor sit on the eggs 
they laid. A bird which has never seen a nest, one, for 
example, which was hatched out in an incubator, will at 
the appointed time build a nest of the usual pattern, 
yet such a bird has had no experience to guide her. 
When, therefore, a bird sets itself for the first time to 
collect materials and to weave them into a nest, it is not 
consciously making a nursery for its chicks, it cannot 
know why it is collecting sticks. It probably never puts 
this question to itself. It is content to obey blindly an 
impulse planted in it by Him who watches over the 
little birds, and teaches them how to hold their own in 
the struggle for existence. 
