190 



AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 



May, 1907 



Testing the Courage of a Bobolink 



By Ned Dearborn 



,HE most fundamental instinct in the entire 

 animal kingdom is parental devotion. It is 

 not surprising, therefore, that nothing kin- 

 dles our admiration more quickly or excites 

 our sympathies more profoundly than the 

 cares and distresses incident to the rearing 

 of young. Nevertheless, a private interest sometimes induces 

 one to turn this inherent trait to his own advantage. Many 

 an animal has faced and met death while protecting its 

 progeny. Hunters make the capture of their quarry certain 

 when they discover its young. The deplorable slaughter of 

 white herons, which has almost exterminated those beautiful 

 birds in our country, is an example of this sort of hunting. 

 How the heronies were invaded, how the birds were shot 

 down by untold thousands at these breeding places, how the 

 young egrets starved in consequence — the whole brutal story 

 has been so widely rehearsed by friends of birds that Amer- 

 ican women have renounced the beautiful aigrette out of 

 sheer horror and indignation. 



The plume hunters have turned their energies into other 

 channels and left the haunts of birds to those who study 

 them, and confessedly bother them, but who by gentle meas- 

 ures allay their fears, gain their confidence and learn their 

 secrets. After an observer has watcheci them at arm's length 

 and seen with what patience, thoroughness and fidelity they 

 attend to their natural duties, he finds his conceptions of bird- 

 life vastly broadened. He witnesses many things he never 

 dreamed of. He gets at their instincts and their nervous 

 qualities in a new light, which delights and fascinates and 

 Instructs him. He sees exemplified so many of his own best 

 traits, and it is not surprising that his imagination sometimes 



outruns nature and gives to the birds of popular literature 

 human qualities which those of the field do not possess. 



The accompanying illustrations depict as real a hero as was 

 ever embodied. He endured what appeared to be a very 

 grave peril that his children might not suffer from hunger. 

 Parental instinct Impelled him to feed those young birds on 

 the day they hatched from the shell, but if on that day or the 

 next, a tent had been pitched within twenty Inches of the nest, 

 it Is altogether probable that fear of it would have caused 

 both of the parents to desert their home and leave their young 

 to die. But as their nestlings grew, so Increased their affec- 

 tion, yet not equally as to the sexes, for even at the climax 

 of parental devotion, which occurs when the young birds are 

 ready to fly, the timid mother, in the hour of trial, lacked 

 courage to come and feed them. But not so with her mate. 

 The making of these pictures was incidental to a study of the 

 food habits of bobolinks — one of many similar studies with 

 different kinds of birds, all of which depended for their suc- 

 cess on the power of parental solicitude to overcome an ordi- 

 narily prevailing fear. 



The usual course of events in these investigations consists 

 in pitching a small tent so close to a bird's nest that every act 

 within it can be distinctly seen by the observer stationed 

 within. In this instance the nest was deserted by the young 

 bobolinks a few hours before operations began, so the prob- 

 lem was somewhat out of the common run. As the prover- 

 bial recipe for rabblt-stew begins with catching the rabbit, 

 so here the capture of the little birds was first in order. The 

 tent was erected near the deserted nest — an intrusion which 

 worried both of the old bobolinks very much. As soon as 

 the author of their anxiety disappeared inside his tent, they 



The Male Bobolink Brought Soft-bodied Grasshoppers and Katydids 



Appetite Was a Good Instructor 



