CROW 20 



have a sort of language, notice what a different 

 note is sounded to warn the flock of a man with 

 a gun — different from, say, the note that tells 

 of a child aimlessly crossing their feeding- 

 ground. 



Can crows be taught to talk, parrot fashion? 

 As a child, I knew a pet crow whose ingenuity 

 in mischief seemed an uncanny thing. He stole 

 and hoarded numbers of small objects such as 

 pencils and thimbles. I remember the dismay 

 of an old lady whose gold spectacles he carried 

 to the top of a tall tree, and the frantic efforts 

 of the family to coax him down without damage 

 to the lens. He also hid a tiny doll that was one 

 of my own particular treasures, and remodelled 

 it to his liking by biting off the hands and feet. 

 After such a performance it seemed to me only 

 natural that his cleverness should extend to the 

 pronunciation of five or six words. But a wider 

 acquaintance w x ith Crows has since led me to 

 question whether, among so great a variety of 

 noises and squawks and caws, a few do not 

 inevitably happen to sound like words. In any 

 case the splitting of the tongue never helped a 

 Crow or any other creature to "talk"; it is a 

 wholly unnecessary piece of cruelty. 



Whether Crow r s have the parrot faculty of 

 imitating sounds of speech or not, it is certain 

 that they have a greater range of signals and 



