THE CONDOR 
A Bi-Monthly Magazine of 
Western Ornithology | 
eatine XXII March-April, 1921 Memes 2 
[Issued March 31, 1921] 
THE BIOGRAPHY OF NIP AND TUCK 
_ A STUDY OF INSTINCTS IN BIRDS 
By LOYE MILLER 
MEASURE of unwelcome clouded the arrival at iny office of Nip and 
Tuck, a cloud, to be sure, not realized by those unheaveniy twins, yet 
none the less distinctly a cloud. Nor did they realize anything within 
or without beyond the supreme crisis of their unlimited hunger. For that mat- 
ter, how much farther does the appreciation of any three day infant extend? 
Naked, blind, and helpless little linnets they were, thrown upon the care of a 
human foster parent by some agency that had destroyed their natural habita- 
tion and its builders. A paper carton from the delicatessen counter, a mat- 
tress and a coverlet of cotton batting, a pair of dissecting forceps, a medicine 
dropper, and a willing but not over sanguine human male constituted the equip- 
ment.to which they fell heir. It was not a fair substitute for the natural abode 
and the tireless parents which had been theirs for the three days of their ex- 
istence outside the shell. Nor was it a fair chance that they had for survival, 
yet it was a fighting chance and the brief story of that fight with some of the 
things they taught their foster parent (we learn much from our children) is 
offered you for what it may be worth. 
The foster parent whom necessity forced upon these naked ‘‘cell aggre- 
gates’’ (that’s all they were) happened to be a biologist and an educator with, 
very naturally, the conviction that education is the supreme refinement of biol- 
ogy—a treatment of the highest function of the highest animal. Somewhere 
during his biological communings he had gotten the impression that linnets are 
strictly vegetarian in diet and that the young are fed by regurgitation of par- 
tially digested food from the parent crop. Something had to be done rather 
promptly to simulate the natural food of the starving waifs if their lives were 
to continue. Where should one more naturally turn than to the department 
of Domestic Science? That department was in charge of a mother, so the 
appeal of helpless infancy met with an instant and a hearty response. Whole 
wheat bread constituted the initial step in the building up of the artificial sehe- 
dule of dietetics. Why? Because the cooking had brought about therein a 
series of chemical changes comparable, in a measure, to those fer- 
mentative changes worked upon weed seeds within the parent’s crop. 
Whai next? The lining of the crop in some birds secretes a chemically perfect 
milk containing butter fat, cheese, and milk sugar. Probably young linnets 
receive some such product mixed with their fare of cracked and partially di- 
