Wild Life Near Home

In August, along the Kennebec, I found the skunks attacking the sugar corn. They strip the ears that hang close to the ground, and gnaw the milky grain. But they do most damage...

The quail's broken wings and rushes of blood to the head during nesting-time have lost their lure even for the small boy; yet they somehow still work on me. I involuntarily give...

As the black creature grew small in the distance and vanished among the trees, I felt a pang of pity for him. I knew by his flight that he was hungry and weary and cold. Every l...

Uncle Jethro, with Uncle Remus, gives Br'er Rabbit the wreath for craft; but in truth the laurel belongs to Br'er Possum. He is an eternal surprise. Either he is the most stupid...

In any large museum you may see the fossil skeletons, or the casts of the skeletons, of those mammoth saurians of the Mesozoic Age. But you can go into the pine barrens any brig...

"G'way fum yhere! What I take yo' possumin' des dozen winters fo', en yo' dunno how to sight a gun in de moon yit? I's gwine mus'rattin' by de moon to-night, en I won't take yo'...

Neither of these birds ever showed alarm at the people of the house. In fact, I never saw a redstart who seemed to know that we humans ought to be dreaded. These birds are now a...

Perhaps there is no more useless fruit or timber grown than that of the swamp-gums (_Nyssa uniflora_) of the Jersey bottoms. But if we value trees according to their capacity fo...

The cat was scared, and before he got himself together, Molly, with a mighty bound, was in the air again, and, as she flashed over him, she fetched him a stunning whack on the h...

But such nights of watching, when every fallen leaf is a sentinel and every moonbeam a spy, will let us into some secrets about the ponds and fields that the sun, old and all-se...

Not because there was more food at the pump, nor for the joy of gossip, did the toads meet here. The one thing necessary to their existence is water, and doubtless many of these...

I wish to thank the editors of "Lippincott's Magazine," "Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly," "Zion's Herald," and the "Youth's Companion" for allowing me to reprint here the chapte...

This movement of the fish is mysterious; no more so than the migration of the birds, perhaps, but it seems more wonderful to me. Bobolink's yearly round trip from Cuba to Canada...