Learning About Birds Through Stories

11. THREE HUNDRED DRUNKEN GEESE
12. THE BELL-WETHER BUZZARD
13. GOING SNIPE HUNTING
14. "AS CRAZY AS A LOON "
15. THE CRUEL SHRIKE, OR BUTCHER-BIRD

ANIMALS and birds can become drunk as well as men.

A bear up in northern Michigan once lost his life because he ate a good square meal of corn which had previously been soaked in some sweetened whisky, and became dead drunk.

Some elephants were once given some whisky in a bran mash, in order, as their keeper thought, to keep them from taking cold while traveling some distance in Indiana one cold spring day. The whisky went to their heads, and, as they went through a small town, they became unmanageable and cut up queer pranks and capers, such as tearing up board sidewalks and breaking down fences.

Since prohibition went into effect in the United States, and boot-leg whisky and unlawful stills have been confiscated and the whisky thus taken, or the mash from which whisky is made, has been thrown away or emptied into sewers, rivers, or other bodies of water, cows have been made drunk, fish have died, and wild birds have been captured as the result of eating the mash or drinking the water thus poisoned and contaminated.

Nearly all the people living in Newton County, Arkansas, had wild goose for dinner one day late in November, 1924, because a moonshiner, to avoid arrest for manufacturing illicit whisky, poured his mash out on the banks of a lake. Three hundred wild geese, flying south, paused at the lake to rest and to get a drink of water. The geese, too intoxicated to fly, were captured and killed. Like millions of men before them, they lost their lives because they got drunk.

SOME years ago a mischievous young man, living in Gathersburg, Montgomery County, Maryland, played an innocent but rather amusing joke on a buzzard that he found caught in a steel trap one day.

Before letting the buzzard go, he tied a little sleigh-bell around its neck with a wire. For many years afterward this buzzard could be heard flying around over the country with the tinkling bell still attached to him. Captain S. J. Lodge, who narrates the story, says that he heard it for at least fifteen years.

The bell-wether sheep is the sheep that wears the bell. So we have named this buzzard the bell-wether buzzard because it wore the bell.

Boys will be boys, and so long as game lasts and men love to hunt, hunting will have its attractions.

In a new country especially, where game is plentiful, hunting is considered great sport.

The author's grandfather, on his father's side, emigrated from a little hilly, stone-covered farm near Bath, Steuben County, New York, to Illinois, the Prairie State, as it was called, in 1837, the year after the Indians left Illinois and crossed over the Mississippi River into Iowa. It was therefore a new country to the white settlers, who found game there of almost all kinds, some deer even, millions of quails, prairie-chickens, and wild pigeons, and fish in abundance. Hunting and fishing were common and unrestricted in those days.

Occasionally, of course, a youthful and inexperienced hunter would go out hunting and get nothing. While only a boy, an uncle of the author's, named George, was returning home once from a hunt in the woods without having bagged any game. Just before reaching home, however, he chanced to meet an old hunter who had had better success, having shot several birds, among them a large owl.

Upon learning that my uncle had shot nothing, this hunter told him to take his dead owl and set him up against a tree and shoot him, and then take him home and tell his folks that he shot the owl. After he had done so, this, of course, was, in a sense, true; but not in the sense generally understood by such a remark.

The family were of a nature that always enjoyed a good joke, and were quite amused when they learned the real facts in the case. They discovered that George wasn't quite such a good hunter as he at first appeared to be.

Occasionally when boys out on these Western prairies wished to play a good joke on some innocent and unsuspecting comrade or newcomer, they would ask him if he would like to go out "snipe hunting" with them that night. He, of course, would gladly assent.

So, when night came, they would all take a long hike over the prairies, and then stopping at some cow-path running through the tall grass, they would tell this innocent and unsuspecting boy they had taken along with them that they wished him to sit down near this path and hold a bag open while they went around and scared up the snipes and ran them into the bag.

But instead of rounding up the snipes, these mischievous boys would put for home as fast as they could go, leaving the boy with the bag to sit there and wait and wait until he finally discovered their joke, and it dawned on him that he must find his way back home alone as best he could in the dark.

Such were some of the innocent pranks played by these Western boys while the country was new. They had to have their sport.

THE loon of North America, somewhat similar in shape and size to the duck, is the most expert of all divers, disappearing beneath the water at the flash of a gun. It has been called the great North American diver.

The author well remembers, when only a boy, the first loon he ever saw dive. The act was so sudden it made an indelible impression on his mind, which he has never been able to forget.

The loon has a flattened body, a rather long neck, and its legs are placed far back on its body, thus giving it great propelling power in the water.

It swims long distances under water at great speed, and is thus able to emerge far from the place where it dived and made its sudden disappearance. It is therefore a very difficult bird to shoot or capture. It is a feathered submarine.

The expression "crazy as a loon" comes from the strange maniacal laugh of the loon. By it is meant an excited or demented condition of the mind.

AMONG the smaller birds, the shrike, or butcher-bird, as it is otherwise called, is doubtless less the most cruel, rapacious, reckless, quarrelsome, and blood-thirsty by nature of all birds.

It feeds on grasshoppers and other insects, together with lizards, small birds, mice, and such other quadrupeds as it is able to overpower.

Its most noted trait is that of impaling small birds, mice, lizards, and other prey that it has caught, on thorns and sharp twigs before eating them. The remnants it leaves hanging on the impaling thorn or twig.

When insect food becomes scarce, it frequently visits cities, orchards, and gardens, in pursuit of sparrows and other more defenseless and less combative birds. They will often attack cage birds, even in the presence of their owners. One of its favorite pastimes is pulling off the heads of canaries wherever a cage is hung in sight.

The bird is found in the southern hemisphere as well as in the northern.

During a severe drought in Queensland, Australia, one summer some years ago, while the author was living at a place called Toowoomba, a cruel butcher-bird suddenly darted at a beautiful canary which we had hanging in a cage on a rear porch one afternoon, and murdered it by mutilating its head, which it pulled out through the wires of the cage.

The nests of the butcher-bird are usually built in thorn trees, scrubby bushes, or hedges, and often no attempt seems to be made at concealment.

Truly it has been rightly named the "butcherbird." It lives among thorns, it impales its victims on thorns, and it murders our most beautiful, innocent, and charming song-bird, the canary.