How animals talk

I. A Little Dog-Comedy 3 II. Cries of the Day and Night 10 III. Chumfo, the Super-sense 34 IV. Natural Telepathy 74 V. The Swarm Spirit 111 VI. Where Silence Is Eloquent 137 VII...

Many of the ducks, the black or dusky mallards especially, like to come ashore every day in a secluded spot under the lee of a bank, there to rest or preen or take a quiet nap i...

Those who make an ornithology of mere feathers, or who imagine they know an animal because they know what the scientists have said about him, see in this instant responsiveness...

From such experiences I judge that the feeling of unsensed danger, or the more subtle feel of a living thing, is as variable in the animals as are their instincts or their socia...

To illustrate the matter by a personal experience: For many years after I first left home my mother would become “uneasy in her mind,” as she expressed it, whenever a slight acc...

The cunning of these animals would be uncanny if it were merely cunning; but it is naturally explained, I think, on the assumption that wolves, more than most other brutes, rece...

The starlings [3] furnish us an excellent example of this peculiarity. For months at a stretch you see them about the house, first in pairs, next in family groups, then in large...

Again, our familiar human experience may throw some clearer light than ever comes from the laboratory of animal psychologists upon the action of gregarious brutes in their so-ca...

But Matty only laughed. When we are alone in the woods he has a fine sense of humor, though grim enough at other times. “Oh, woodpecker know me; he look down at me,” he said; an...

Such reasoning is purely speculative, but there are certain facts which we must keep in mind if we are to explain the matter. The first, a general fact which is open to observat...

The camera reminds me of another way of approaching deer, a way often followed by summer campers; namely, by chasing the swimming animal in a canoe. I have but one word to say o...

“But there is something; I saw it,” insisted the little buck, nudging his mother by swinging his head against her side. That was the first and only time, in that quick swing, wh...

I recall one night, cloudy and very still, when I slept under my canoe on a strip of sand beside a wilderness lake. The movement of an animal near at hand awoke me. In the black...

This impression of melody is often real, not illusory, and may be explained by the impact of air-currents on resonant shells of wood, hundreds of which fall to humming with the...

At such a time my little pond seemed to awaken, to shed its silence like a garment, to put on its most animated expression, as at a happy festival or family reunion. The air was...

When I first saw that tree I changed the trail so as to pass beneath it; and thereafter it was like a living presence, benign and friendly, beside the way. To lay a hand on its...