Part 5

The mounting of birds and the small animals of the field and forest is an art which is possessed by few people, yet which is not difficult and which especially appeals to the lover of nature. It is an art which it is well worth while popularizing, for it can be made the vehicle for the expression of a great deal of beauty, while preserving and making use, in the interests of scientific study, of materials which otherwise would be irretrievably lost. There has been need for some time of an authoritative work on the subject, something which would enable the amateur to mount birds and animals and which would be full and complete as to the information it conveyed. This want has been met by Mr. John Rowley, the chief of the Department of Taxidermy in the American Museum of Natural History, who has written a convenient volume of something over two hundred pages on "The Art of Taxidermy," which has just been published by the Appletons. In the foreword with which the author introduces the book he says that the name "taxidermy" was formerly applied to the trade of most inartistically upholstering a skin, but that of late years it has made wonderful strides.

BIRDS IN TOWN.

ELLA F. MOSBY.

Wrens are friendly to man. The little house wren in summer, and the Carolina wren in winter, give us a merry roundelay for all sorts of weather. Bewick's wren, Mr. Torrey says, "greatly prefers the town to woods and meadows," and even the winter wrenkin, dear little saucy brownie that he is, vouchsafes us a glimpse of himself now and then in the city. As for the bigger kinsfolk, the mocking-bird and catbird, they love the shrubbery of our lawns, and gardens, and sing close at hand. Nor are the thrushes, shy as they are in the breeding season, hard to discover during the migrations. A Swainson's thrush will sit for an hour or so, almost within touch, his big liquid eyes regarding his human neighbors placidly.

Strange to say, I have seen but few swallows or sparrows in town, except the chipping or "door-step" sparrow and the purple martin which belongs to the swallow tribe, though the misnamed chimney swallow does _not_. The song of the martin, "like musical laughter rippling through the throat," and the "giggling twitter" of the chimney dweller, often seem to drop to us out of the air as they dart overhead. Even pewees and cuckoos visit us after their broods are reared, the wistful cry of the first and the rattling call of the latter, sounding oddly from some tall tree close by the crowded street. At this time too, the grackles perch upon the roofs, and nighthawks and whippoor-wills are heard overhead in the dusky twilights.

One would not naturally expect to find game birds or birds of prey in a city, yet the Virginia quail frequently sends forth his ringing "bob white!" from any low roof or fence in the spring or early fall; and more than once long-billed water-birds have been caught by the street lamps at night. The eerie, tremulous cry of the little screech-owl sounds from the apple tree, and in winter he flies with a soft thud against the window pane, attracted by the light shining through the snow. Some owls choose a belfry tower as their favorite shelter, and live there year after year.

Our most glorious bird-day is when the orioles appear in flashing black and gold with ringing whistle, or their orchard cousins in ruddy chestnut tints, alternately singing and scolding, _chack! chack!_ and little later, come the scarlet and summer tanagers to the parks and public gardens, lighting up the tall trees with their splendid color, and making the neighborhood ring with their _chip-chur_ and _chicky-tuck!_ as if in call and answer. One day I saw these, and not far away, the crested cardinal, glowing like a tropical flower, and the red-headed woodpeckers close by, and some redstarts glittering and flitting from bough to bough, truly a study in red!

As for the smaller birds, humming birds, kinglets, vireos, and warblers, the trees of any city yard will be a frequented hostelry for all during their wonderful journeys, and for many as a summer home. Those that love the tree tops are seen all the better by human inhabitants of upper stories, and some of our most charming bird-books give us the experiences of a busy woman in a New York flat, or of another in a Chicago back yard, and of more than one invalid, watching these free, joyous lives with unenvious delight. A good glass, either opera-glass or field-glass, will open many a pretty bit of house-weaving, and brood-rearing to an observer shut in by walls and pavements, and bring many a pleasant acquaintance. At this very moment, a slender grey catbird glides through the boughs close by my upper window, with a low _chuck, chuck!_ as I glance at him. He knows I am a friend, but would fain enjoin silence, for a black cat prowls below.

THE OVENBIRD--GOLDEN-CROWNED THRUSH.

NELLY HART WOODWORTH.

A marvelous choral is the rare ecstasy song of the ovenbird (see Vol. III, 126-7). It was first recorded, at a comparatively recent date, by that versatile writer--poet, essayist, naturalist--Mr. John Burroughs. After speaking of the bird's easy, gliding walk, it being one of the few birds that are _walkers_, not _hoppers_, he says its other lark trait, namely, singing in the air, seems not to have been observed by any naturalist. Yet it is a well-established characteristic, and may be verified by any person who will spend a half-hour in the woods where this bird abounds on some June afternoon or evening. I hear it frequently after sundown when the ecstatic singer can hardly be distinguished against the sky. Mounting by easy flights to the top of the tallest tree, he launches into the air, with a sort of suspended, hovering flight, and bursts into a perfect ecstasy of song--clear, ringing, copious, rivaling the goldfinch's in vivacity and the linnet's in melody. Its descent after the song is finished is rapid, and precisely like that of the titlark when it sweeps down from its course to alight on the ground.

The same writer speaks of waking up in the night, just in time to hear a golden-crowned thrush, the ovenbird, sing in a tree near by. It sang as loud and cheerily as at midday. My first acquaintance with this rare overture was at the close of a hot day in July, as I was walking with a naturalist. A splendor floated in the air like a musical cloud as strange notes of gladness rang through the twilight with the clearness of a silver bugle. It came again, a clear, sweet, outpouring song, which I recklessly attributed to several goldfinches singing, as they often do, in concert. The trained ear of the naturalist was not so easily deceived, and when my attention was called to the more gushing character of the melody I wondered that it could have escaped notice. It was a very irrigation of song, the bursting of some cloud overhead that scattered melodious fragments all about, a mating-choral unheard, probably, after the nesting season is over.

Entering the woods in early summer this bird is sure to shake out its ordinary, rattling chorus--"Teacher, _Teacher_, TEACHER," the notes delivered with tremendous force and distinctness and the emphasis increasing--a vibrant, crescendo chant as unlike the brilliant ecstasy song as can be imagined.

The ovenbird is also called the golden-crowned thrush, for no conceivable reason unless it is that the bird is _not_ a thrush, but classed with the warblers. Or is it that its white breast, thickly spotted with dusky, resembles the thrush's? There is a peculiar delicacy in the texture of its olive-green robes, as fine as if woven in kings' houses, while, set deep in hues of the raven's wing, it wears that regal appurtenance--a crown of gold.

While watching from a rocky height a pair of hermit thrushes that were housekeeping in a hemlock beneath, an ovenbird flew from a maple bough to a high clump of ferns near by. In its beak was a quantity of dry grass, bulky material that interfered sadly with both walking and flight. The small burden-bearer managed, however, to progress slowly, moving its head from side to side to disentangle the grasses and lifting its little feet in the daintiest manner, until it disappeared where the ferns were thickest. Pretty soon it came in sight again, sauntered about with diverting nonchalance, and was off, alighting upon the same bough to drop down into the same corner of the thicket. This behavior was not without an inference; it was an advertisement of future hopes too plainly written to escape notice; I might have been stone blind and seen straight into the future! The nest must have been within a circle of a few feet, but with rank greenery above and underfoot the accumulated leafage of the ages, soft and penetrative as if placed layer by layer for the bird's special accommodation, any square foot might have held the treasure and kept the secret of possession.

Soon after a farmer told me of a strange nest, a curiously covered house with a low door, within which the sitting bird could be seen. The bird's flight as it left the nest first attracted his attention, just in time to prevent his foot from crushing through the roof. He had never heard of ovenbirds or of roofed-over nests, and was so interested in this new page of natural history that "once a day when he went for the cows he went round that way to see how things were getting on there."

"Every time I went," he said, "I expected to find that the cattle had spoiled it!"

After describing his interesting tenants he offered to share the pleasure of their acquaintance, saying most kindly, "I wouldn't mind leaving the hay field any time to take you there! I've done my share of haying, I guess; the boys don't want me to work so hard; come up to-morrow and I'll go with you!"

I was there with to-morrow and was, if possible, more amazed at the adaptation of the "oven" to its surroundings than with the structure itself.

The bird was sitting and not at all disposed to leave on our account; she merely drew in her pretty head, cuddled closer to the ground, and waited. Both house and tenant were so thoroughly blended in color with the environing leafage that, when pointed out, it was difficult for the eye to locate them. Possibly the brave little housekeeper divined the situation; or did she presume upon a previous acquaintance with the friendly farmer? The proprietor of the establishment, a little man-milliner with a bow of orange ribbon in his bonnet, sang through the fragrant morning as if glad of an opportunity of speaking to a gracious audience, interlarding his song with rushing over to his family--_vault_, I was going to say, for being sunken a bit in the ground and dark within, it suggested a mausoleum. A tiny ledge of slate, tilted vertically, made a strong wall upon one side of the small estate; young beeches, kept down by browsing cattle, grew where the rear-gates should have been, and a maple twig partially screened the entrance. Evergreen ferns crowded between the "oven" and the wall, their leaves interlaced, above the roof, with others opposite, the tips of two being caught down and interwoven with the roofing. The nest was made of dry leaves, lapped and overlapped, padded and felted in one compact arch--a veritable arch of triumph! Upon July 15th six creamy-white eggs, dotted with brown and lilac, lay safe within, these being duly replaced by a round half-dozen "little ovens," whose mouths were always open. Indeed, more food was shoved into those open-mouthed storehouses than would have supplied a village bakeshop, and still there was room for more. Warm rains soon gave the nest an unyielding texture; so matted and felted that the full weight of the hand left no impression, and I questioned whether the foot, set plumply down, would have crushed it out of shape entirely.

When the young birds had flown I brought home the nest as a unique souvenir of summer. Removed from the picturesque setting it was no longer interesting; its charm was that of environment; its beauty the marvel of adaptation.

So surely does Nature equip each bird with an individuality that distinguishes it from all others! Not only have they common rules followed in obedience to the law of instinct, but each species has special gifts developed according to the law of its nature, a law of harmony so delicately enforced that the law itself is not perceptible.

INSECT LIFE UNDERGROUND.

L. O. HOWARD, PH. D.,

Entomologist U. S. Department of Agriculture, and Curator Department of Insects, U. S. National Museum.

There is an old German child's story of a little girl who being told that if she could find a place to hide her first silver piece where no eye could see her, and then dance round it three times, she would have her wish. She sought everywhere for such a place, but always some bird or squirrel or mouse or insect was near by, and even when she dug beneath the ground, there too were little crawling creatures watching her.

It may be said that this story was meant to show that animal life is found almost everywhere, and certainly beneath the surface of the ground there are hundreds of kinds of insects working steadily away at their different occupations; for whatever disagreeable things you may find to say about insects, you can never justly call them lazy. The scriptures recognized this fact in the well-known command to the sluggard, and the old nursery rhyme about the "busy bee" emphasizes the same characteristic.

The truest underground insects are those which pass their entire lives beneath the surface of the earth; which are born there, live and grow and die without seeing the light of day. Such, for example, are the true cave insects, a number of forms of which are found in the great caverns in different parts of the world. Some of these insects feed upon the vegetable molds and low forms of plant life found in caves; others feed on dead animal matter and still others upon living insects. Nearly all are of pale colors and are blind or nearly so, for they have no use for eyes in the darkness. All are supposed to be descendants of above-ground forms, which through many generations of life in the darkness have lost their color and their power of sight. The genealogy of these true cave forms may be guessed at with some certainty, for we know insects which are only partly transformed in structure from above-ground forms to true cave species. Such are certain beetles which live in the catacombs of Paris, and certain other insects which have been found in the old and deep burrows of the land tortoise in Florida.

But we do not have to go to caves to find many other true underground insects. Rich, loose soil abounds in such creatures which live upon the decaying vegetation (soil humus or vegetable mold) or upon one another. The most abundant in numbers of individuals are the little spring-tails or bristle-tails, minute creatures seldom more than a sixteenth of an inch in length and which frequently swarm in the ground in such numbers that the earth seems fairly alive. These little creatures are by no means confined to the surface soil, but have been found in great armies at a depth of six feet or more in stiff clay, which they have penetrated by following the deeper rootlets of trees. Certain of these little insects have also become so accustomed to this lightless life that they have lost their eyes.

Other true underground insects are found in the nests of ants, where they fill many different functions. They may be grouped, however as follows: 1. Species which are fed by the ants and from which the ants derive a benefit by eating a certain secretion of the insect. 2. Species which are treated with indifference by the ants and which feed upon the bodies of dead ants and other animal and vegetable debris to be found in ants' nests. The ants are certainly not hostile to these insects and evidently gain some unknown benefit from their presence. 3. Species which live among the ants for the purpose of killing and feeding upon them. The first true ants' nest insect was only discovered and studied at the beginning of this century, but since that time hundreds of other species have been found, and a mere catalogue of their names fills a book of over 200 pages.

Such insects are called "myrmecophilous species" or "ant lovers." The man who has done the most in the study of these interesting creatures is Dr. Wasmann, a Jesuit priest, who lives in Holland, and who has devoted many years to this work, and a difficult task it has been! If one digs into an anthill the inhabitants are at once alarmed and the greatest confusion results, so that it is necessary to study them in artificial nests in glass jars, or in some other way.

Although the most of these "ant-loving" insects are strictly subterranean species, living their whole lives underground, the ants, among which they live, do most of their foraging above ground, and thus may be taken as typical of a second group of underground insects--those which have their homes below ground for protection or concealment, but which themselves live, at least part of the time, above ground. Volumes have been written about the wonderful habits of ants, of their community life, of the division of labor among them, of their slave-making customs, of their courage, patriotism, and indefatigable industry, of their highly developed instinct, which, in fact, becomes real intelligence; so that almost everyone knows the main facts about these wonderful little insects, and we can spend our time to better advantage on those underground creatures about which there is less general information. It will suffice to say that most ants have their nests, consisting of tunnels and chambers, underground; that there their queen lays her eggs and the young are carefully tended by workers until they have reached the adult stage, and there the food is stored for use in the winter months. There is a curious kind of ant in the southwestern states and Mexico called the honey ant. Certain individuals in a colony of these honey ants have enormously distended stomachs and are fed by the other ants with a kind of grape sugar, or honey, during the summer, as they hang suspended by their legs from the roof of an underground chamber. When winter comes the other ants are fed by these honey-bearers, which give put the stored-up honey from their mouths drop by drop.

There is an interesting class of underground insects which, in their early stages, hide in especially dug pits and lie in wait for their prey, but which, when full grown, live above ground. Such are the ant-lions and the tiger-beetles. The young ant-lion is a heavy-bodied, clumsy-looking creature, with very long and sharp jaws, which digs for itself a funnel-shaped pit in loose, dry sand, using its flat head and jaws as a spade in digging. Then it hides itself at the bottom of the pit, its body completely covered with the sand, and waits until some unlucky little insect comes along and stumbles over the edge of the hollow. The side of the hole is made at such an angle that the sand slips down with the weight of even an ant and carries it towards the open jaws of the ant-lion. Every struggle which the poor creature makes to escape causes the sand to slide down faster, and the ant-lion at the bottom jerks up a shower of sand with its head, which hastens the miniature avalanche until the poor victim is within reach of the powerful jaws and is devoured. The adult ant-lion is a beautiful, gauzy-winged creature, not at all like its blood-thirsty larva.

The young tiger-beetle, or "doodle bug," as it is called in the South, digs a straight burrow in hard soil, such a hole as would be made by pushing a small lead pencil into the ground. This creature, like the young ant-lion, has a clumsy body and powerful jaws, and on its back are two projections armed with hooks which help it to climb up and down in its burrow. It waits for its prey at the mouth of its hole, which it closes with its head, thus making a sort of trap-door. The little insect which steps upon this trap-door doesn't have time to say its prayers before it is devoured by the voracious "doodle." Should a large, strong insect walk over the burrow, the tiger-beetle larva retreats precipitately to the bottom of its hole, which is sometimes eighteen inches below the surface of the ground.

There are many other insects which, when young, live below ground, and become above-ground flying creatures, when full grown, which have not the carnivorous tastes of the forms we have just mentioned. Many of these species live on the roots of plants and others upon the vegetable mold of rich soils. The large white grubs so often found in the soil of grass lands belong to both of these classes. They are the larvæ, or young, of several kinds of the clumsy beetles known as scarabs. The larvæ of the common brown May-beetles, for example, are root-feeders, living mainly on grass-roots, and they are sometimes so abundant and destructive as to destroy valuable lawns. The roots are sometimes so uniformly eaten off by these white grubs that the sod may be rolled up like a roll of carpet. The white grubs of the beautiful large green beetles, known as June-beetles, or fig-eaters, in the South (they do not occur in the more northern states), although they look almost precisely like the May-beetle larvæ, are not injurious and feed only upon the vegetable mold of the soil. The wire-worms, which are the young of the click-beetles, or "snapping-bugs," feed upon the roots of plants; there are plant lice which live underground and suck the sap from plant roots, like the famous grape-vine phylloxera; there are caterpillars which live almost entirely underground and feed upon living roots; there are maggots which have the same habit; and there are even bark lice or scale insects which live attached to rootlets in the same way that the other species live above ground on the limbs and twigs of trees.

Other insects living above ground all their lives hide their eggs underground. Most grasshoppers, for example, do this, and many of the closely related crickets not only hide their eggs in this way, but live underground themselves in the day time, and come forth at night to feed, or to collect grass leaves, which they carry into their burrows and eat at leisure. Other insects also hide below ground during the day and feed only at night. The full grown May-beetles do this, and the cut-worms also. The cut-worms are soft-bodied caterpillars and are greedily eaten by birds and carnivorous insects, so it is essential to their safety that they conceal themselves as much as possible. There is an interesting cut-worm which occasionally becomes so numerous that it has to migrate in great armies in search of food, and these great masses of caterpillars hurry on, driven by hunger, by day as well as by night, followed by flocks of birds and other enemies until the majority of them are destroyed. This cut-worm is generally called the "army worm."

Other caterpillars, while living above ground and feeding on the leaves of plants, instead of spinning cocoons for their protection when they transform to the helpless chrysalis or pupal condition, burrow beneath the surface of the ground and there transform without a cocoon. Hundreds of species do this and sometimes these brown pupæ are so abundant that they are turned up in numbers with every spadeful of earth.