Chapter C: C. M

This favorite singer and cage bird is a native of the Canary Islands, Madeiras, Azores and other small islands near the western coast of Africa. The islands are in the latitude of Florida and the climate may be said to be of a tropical character, though varied by lofty mountains. The canary in its native habitat is chiefly found in the mountainous districts, often several thousand feet above the level of the sea. The wild birds mate about the latter part of March. The nest is built in the tall trees of the evergreen species, frequently in the tops of these trees, and never less than eight or ten feet from the ground. We have seen it stated that they build on the ground, but this has been found to be an error.

The first canaries known to Europeans were brought from there by a merchant ship trading with the Canary Islands as a part of her cargo, several thousand of these birds having been trapped in the hope that they could be sold for a good price as song-birds. The ship was wrecked near the coast of Italy, but by the thoughtfulness of a sailor the cage containing the birds was opened and the birds liberated. They flew at once to the nearest point of land, which happened to be the island of Elba. The climate was so propitious that the canaries multiplied rapidly. In a very short time their superiority as songsters attracted attention and their domestication followed. The shipwreck referred to occurred early in the sixteenth century. The Italians were the first to breed these birds, and they were by them shipped to Russia, Germany, Belgium, and England. They were first described in an English book on natural history in 1610. The rage for breeding the canary with home birds became curiously popular and resulted in a curious intermixture of colors. In Italy they were bred with the citril and serin; in Germany with the linnet, green finch, and siskin. Mr. C. N. Page says, in his "Feathered Pets," a very valuable book for bird fanciers, that in an English book published in 1709 there are twenty-eight varieties of canaries mentioned, comprising nearly all those known at the present time and some which have become extinct. The climate has also had much to do with the change of color in these birds. The canary, which in its native home at Teneriffe is almost brown, becomes yellow and sometimes nearly white after being bred a few years in France, and it has been observed by naturalists that the winter fur of animals and feathers of birds become thicker and lighter in color in proportion to the coldness of the climate which they inhabit.

In England and Germany canary societies have existed for upwards of a century, and annual shows or exhibitions are held with prizes offered for the best birds.

Of the many varieties of canaries the most popular in the United States is the German. It is smaller than the English canary and is a much finer singer, being bred and trained for song and not for size. They are called Hartz Mountain canaries, and experts consider them the most satisfactory bird for the people. They are bred by the peasants in ordinary living-rooms high up among the Hartz Mountains of Germany. These birds are even more hardy than the American-bred canaries. They are brilliant singers. We had one for five years, and while its voice was wonderfully clear, full, and musical, it was too loud and was not admired by our neighbors. The shrill and piercing note of some of this species renders them somewhat objectionable as house pets. The birds are happy in the cage, require very little care, and if properly attended to are said to be free from diseases. Most of the Hartz Mountain canaries are somewhat mottled with dark, greenish-brown, though many of the birds are clear yellow, and few have crests. In the canary-breeding section of Germany, almost every family keeps a few cages of these birds, or has a room devoted to their breeding. The German people are very fond of birds and there are many of them in the United States who have many cages of rare specimens.

Milwaukee supplies the United States with the bulk of the Hartz Mountain canaries, and there is no great crime in the deception, for the Milwaukee bird is really an improvement on the imported article, having just as fine a voice and being much hardier.

Experience has shown that the imported singer loses the power of transmitting his voice to the young after passing through an American winter. This is the case also, it is said, with Tyrolean singers who come to this country, their voices losing the peculiar yodling quality when they have been here a year. The native canary is hardier than the imported one, and, with proper training, is every bit as good a singer.

Before they are mated the hen birds are kept in separate cages in the music room, carefully fed and made to listen to the music of the singers and the machine used in training their voices. In this way the hen is enabled to transmit the best musical quality to her offspring. The music-room is a large one, with a south exposure, and is kept with the same scrupulous neatness as the breeding-room. In the corner of this room is the bird organ, and with it the little birds are given their vocal training.

When the machine is started the notes emitted are wonderfully like the song of the untutored canary. These notes are known to bird-trainers by the term _pfeiffen_. Gradually the whistle strikes onto a different line. It is an improvement over the _pfeiffen_, and is called the _klingel rolle_. A higher step still is called the _klingel_, and a still higher step _hohl klingel_. Lastly comes what is called _hol rollen_, and a bird whose voice has been developed up to that point is worth $50 in the market any day.

In this country there are only three importers of canaries. Each of these firms employs "bird-pickers" who travel over the mountains in Germany and gather together a supply of birds which are selected from the stocks of the small breeders.

There are several varieties of English canaries. The Norwich is a general favorite. It takes its name from the city of Norwich, where for generations it has been bred and cultivated. It has a brilliant, deep, reddish-yellow plumage. It is regarded as the most beautiful of all the canaries. Its color is frequently so dark that it is called the red canary. This color is produced artificially by feeding them during the moulting season a large amount of cayenne pepper mixed with hard boiled egg and cracker crumbs.

Canaries have many pretty ways and can be taught many pretty tricks. One that belonged to the writer had been deprived of its feet. Its wing feathers never grew out, hence it could not fly or perch and was obliged to stump about on the floor like an old veteran on his crutch. But it was healthy and vigorous, and so pugnacious that on our return, after the day's absence, it would fly at us, or try to, poor thing, and peck our outstretched fingers, even while taking offered hemp seed greedily. The bird watched and waited for our coming and we became so much attached to it that its death was a real loss.

The little birds can fill our hearts
As full as larger creatures' arts.

The nest of the canary is a pretty, neatly formed structure of any soft material it can find. Five bluish eggs are usually laid, and three or four broods are raised between February and September, though the female will sometimes persist in building until much later.

THE PAROQUET.

"I am so sorry," wrote a little girl from Tarrytown, N. Y., to the editor of BIRDS AND ALL NATURE, "not to find in your magazine any more the bird-talks to the little folks. I used to read them with so much interest. Are there to be no more of them?"

Other little folks have written to the editor in much the same strain, so that this month the paroquet will speak for himself.

"From my photograph," he says; "you will notice that I am fond of gay dress, green, blue, yellow, orange-chrome, and red being my favorite colors. From my brilliant coat you would judge me to be a tropical bird, but I'm not. I was born and raised in the United States, as was my family, therefore I am an American citizen.

"In appearance I greatly resemble my cousin, the glib-tongued parrot, but for some reason, though my tongue is thick and short like his, and my bill as charmingly curved, I cannot talk--that is, not to be understood by the human family, I mean, for among ourselves we keep up a very lively conversation, in very loud tones--a mark we think, as do some other folk, of good breeding. On the other hand there are people unreasonable enough not to like it, and they say we 'scream' and that our notes are 'ear-splitting' and that, though we are beautiful to look upon and extremely docile, our voices render us undesirable as cage birds or pets. The idea! As though we do not consider that very fortunate!--for a cage is a prison, no matter if the bars are gilded. For my part I prefer to be free even if I do have to hustle for a living and, between you and me, I think that a bird that can screech and doesn't screech when shut up in a little cage doesn't deserve to live. He ought to be killed and stuffed and set up in a museum for people to gape at. Don't you think so, too?

"It is a great pity, but we paroquets are fast being exterminated. In some regions, where less than twenty-five years ago we were very plentiful, not a paroquet is now to be seen. We were once quite common in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and other parts of the United States. We are now to be found, in diminished numbers, in remote localities only of the lower Mississippi Valley and the Gulf States and in some regions of Florida. To escape from our enemy, the plume-hunter, we make our homes in practically uninhabitable regions. That is a long word for you little folks, but spell it out slowly, as I did, and you will understand what it means.

"Our nesting-time is during February and March. Then colonies of us paroquets, sometimes numbering a thousand, flock to a cypress swamp and build our flimsy nests in forks of trees, near the end of a slender, horizontal branch. Often there are fifty nests in one small tree, each containing from four to five pretty, greenish-white eggs. It is a good thing we build our nests in wild and unsettled places, for they are so flimsy that the eggs are plainly visible from beneath. What a temptation to the bad boy they would be, and to the bad man, also! Some paroquets, however, choose a hollow tree in which to deposit their eggs.

"Well, I have told you about all I know of myself and family, so will close by reciting in my very loudest and prettiest screech, so that all the neighborhood may hear, a few lines about a Mr. Macaw who was silly enough, after escaping from a cage, to return to it. He is a cousin of mine, a _distant_ cousin, for he was born in South America; but he wears the same colored coat and vest as I do, his tongue is just as thick, and his bill curves like a parrot's, also:

MR. MACAW'S LESSON.

'Mr. Macaw was tired of his cage--
Too much of a prison for home;
Mr. Macaw was in a great rage,
And so he _settled_ to roam.

The cage-door was open, the window too
(Strange chance, both open together!),
So he took his chance and away he flew;
But, alas! it was wintry weather.

Wind from the north, ground covered with rime,
A frost that made your limbs shiver;
Poor Mr. Macaw! this was not like the clime
On the banks of the Amazon River.

So Mr. Macaw grew wise, as do men,
When taught by experience bitter;
He flew back to his cage, and determined then
He would never again be a flitter.'"

THE CAROLINA PAROQUET.

(_Conurus carolinensis._)

BY LYNDS JONES.

Few birds indeed can lay claim to such beautiful and varied dress as our native paroquet. But for this dress and for certain habits which will be spoken of more particularly a little later, he has had to pay a most severe penalty. Once an abundant bird over the whole southeastern portion of the country, ranging commonly as far north as southern Ohio and Illinois, and sometimes even as far north as southern Michigan and New York, and as far west as eastern Colorado, his numbers and range have been reduced to a few individuals in the wilds of the Indian Territory and the adjacent parts of Texas, and the fastnesses of the Florida swamps. The region over which he ranged so numerously in advance of civilization, suffers a distinct loss in his extermination.

It is hardly fair to lay the blame for the disappearance of this bird solely at the door of the plume-hunters and collectors, for it must be admitted that the paroquet was a real menace to the fruit-grower and farmer when he was abundant. Even his extreme fondness for the fruit of the cockle-bur, thistle, and a few other noxious plants, could hardly atone for the complete ruin of the apple crop, or his serious inroads upon the wheat or corn field. One could not stand tamely by while a flock of these birds, with all their beauty, stripped his orchard of every blossom and bud.

The food of the paroquet was entirely vegetable, consisting of the seed of the cockle-bur, as already stated, sycamore and cypress seed, pecan and beech nuts, the fruit of the pawpaw, mulberries, wild grapes and various other wild fruits as well as cultivated fruits, the seeds of pine cones and the burgrass. Grains of various kinds were eaten while in the milk, and Mr. Frank M. Chapman found them eating the seeds of thistles. So varied a diet enabled these birds to pass the winter in the northern parts of their range as well as farther south. It has been stated that paroquets have been found hibernating in hollow trees in the coldest winters. If they were actually found in such places they were undoubtedly simply taking refuge from some severe storm, to issue forth again when it had passed.

The paroquet's strong, hooked beak was probably so formed for the cutting of stems and husks of plants and the crushing of seeds and nuts, but he also finds it useful in climbing about trees as an aid to his yoked feet, and as a partial support while he sleeps in some hollow tree, the bill being hooked over a projection or into a convenient crevice.

Major Charles E. Bendire describes the flight as undulating, like that of the woodpeckers, but very swift, accompanied by a continuous chattering while on the wing. The birds remain together in flocks of from six to twenty individuals (before they became so scarce, by hundreds), and are very devoted to each other. The cries of a wounded companion will always recall the whole flock to his aid, thus enabling the hunter to kill every bird in the flock. It is this characteristic, no doubt, which has very largely caused the rapid disappearance of the birds before advancing civilization.

The nesting-habits of the paroquet are in some doubt, but the evidence seems to indicate that the birds may rear their brood either in a cavity in a tree or build a slight nest after the fashion of the mourning-dove. Such nests seem to be largely confined to the cypress swamps of Florida. The eggs, several of which have been secured from birds in confinement, are pure glossy white, smooth, and rather ovate in shape, somewhat larger than those of the mourning-dove, and averaging 1.39 × 1.07 of an inch.

These birds seem to nest in colonies, a fact which led Major Bendire to suggest that when the colonies were very large the birds were forced to build open nests from a lack of suitable nesting-places in cavities.

The cry is described as "shrill and disagreeable, a kind of grating, metallic shriek." One call resembles the shrill cry of a goose. They sometimes give utterance to low conversational notes while perched.

It seems almost incredible that scarcely more than half a century has witnessed the passing of a once abundant species of our native bird. Like the bison, the paroquet has been swept away by the rushing tide of progress, leaving only fading memories where once they were characteristic features of the landscape. We may congratulate ourselves that there are few of our birds and mammals that find it so impossible to survive the advance of civilization.

WHAT THE WOOD FIRE SAID TO A LITTLE BOY.

What said the wood in the fire
To the little boy that night,
The little boy of the golden hair,
As he rocked himself in his little arm-chair,
When the blaze was burning bright?

The wood said: "See
What they've done to me!
I stood in the forest, a beautiful tree!
And waved my branches from east to west;
And many a sweet bird built its nest
In my leaves of green,
That loved to lean
In springtime over the daisy's breast.

"From the blossomy dells,
Where the violet dwells,
The cattle came with their clanging bells,
And rested under my shadows sweet;
And the winds that went over the clover and wheat,
Told me all that they knew
Of the flowers that grew
In the beautiful meadows that dreamed at my feet!

"And the wild wind's caresses
Oft rumpled my tresses;
But, sometimes, as soft as a mother's lip presses
On the brow of the child of her bosom, it laid
Its lips on my leaves, and I was not afraid,
And I listened and heard
The small heart of each bird,
As it beat in the nests that their mothers had made.

"And in springtime sweet faces,
Of myriad graces,
Came beaming and gleaming from flowery places.
And under my grateful and joy-giving shade,
With cheeks like primroses, the little ones played;
And the sunshine in showers,
Through all the bright hours,
Bound their flowery ringlets with silvery braid.

"And the lightning
Came brightening,
From storm skies, and frightening
The wandering birds that were tossed by the breeze,
And tilted like ships on black, billowy seas;
But they flew to my breast,
And I rocked them to rest,
While the trembling vines clustered and clung to my knees.

"But how soon," said the wood,
"Fades the memory of good!
For the forester came, with his axe gleaming bright,
And I fell like a giant all shorn of his might.
Yet still there must be
Some sweet mission for me,
For have I not warmed you and cheered you to-night?"

So said the wood in the fire
To the little boy that night,
The little boy of the golden hair,
As he rocked himself in his little arm-chair,
When the blaze was burning bright.
--_Atlanta Constitution._

THE MISSISSIPPI.

W. E. WATT.

Americans like to boast of the things of this country that are larger, longer, more valuable, or more wonderful than anything of the kind in the world. They have recited in school such a number of statements about the Mississippi river that the great stream has become one of the essential points of our nation's honor.

You may be able to make the average man believe that Washington was not always as truthful in his youth as Weems in the cherry-tree story tried to make him; that Captain John Smith drew somewhat on his imagination when some sixteen years after the expedition into the woods he told the story of his rescue by Pocahontas; that perhaps, after all, we did not whip the entire British nation twice in open warfare--but it will be hard to make any native-born American admit that the Mississippi river is not the longest in the world.

He may listen to your argument in favor of the Nile or the Amazon, but he will tell you that he still thinks that if the Mississippi had been measured correctly at first, taking the source of the Missouri as the source of the Mississippi, we would have been the possessors of the longest river on earth.

And if that should seem a trifle weak he will at once tell you that the great river is more wonderful than all others because its source is several hundred feet nearer the center of the earth than its mouth. In other words, the river flows up hill. The curvature of the earth is not the true arc of a circle from the equator to the poles, for the axis of the earth is shorter than its diameter at the equator by about twenty-six miles. It is thirteen miles less from the north pole to the center of the earth than from any point on the equator to the center. So the river flows towards the equator with an apparent fall as estimated from the sea-level, but with an actual rising away from the earth's center just as the sea rises round this shoulder of the earth.

So the Mississippi is a source of joy and boastful conversation to every citizen of the United States.

The Acadian settlers of Nova Scotia whose praises have been sung by Longfellow in his "Evangeline", were the earliest to reclaim land from the sea in America. Being weaker than those who used the ax to fell the giants of the forest primeval, they were more skillful with the spade. They took advantage of the extremely high tides of the Bay of Fundy and its branches, and when the water was low threw up embankments which prevented the sea from covering part of the rich red mud flats before the village of Grand Pre.

At the time of their painful dispersion they had secured all the land between the original shore and the island which stood out in the basin of Minas.

Though they could not take these rich lands with them in their exile, many of them carried the knowledge of dike-building down to the lower courses of the Mississippi, and taught the rest of the Americans there how to get the fat lands of the river bottoms by means of levees.

When General Pakenham gave up his life and lost a fine British army to General Jackson after the treaty of peace had been signed in the War of 1812, his right rested on the bank of the Mississippi where there was a levee a little over five feet high.

This levee cut off the waters from spreading when the freshet was on. It was sufficient at that time. Extensions of levee work cut off more and more of the bottom-lands from the spread of the high waters till now nearly four-fifths of the area over which the waters of the June freshet used to spread are protected by these structures.

The levees are not now the low banks of earth which once kept the waters back. The great mass of water that comes from the melting of snows in the Alleghenies and the Rockies must either spread out or pile up. Confining within less than a mile of width a surplus of water that formerly spread itself for a hundred miles makes it necessary for the water to rise and rush forward with greater violence.

Year by year the levees have crept up the sides of the great river, choking it into narrow walls. Year after year it has risen in its wrath and burst its bounds to destroy the cities and plantations which have been fattening in the mud of its alluvial flats. Every year the levees are put up higher, and as the works extend to the northward and more effectually close up the southern places of spreading out there is an average increase in the stage of high water and in velocity of the current. When it was allowed to wander over great stretches of country the water seemed in no hurry to get to the gulf, but now it goes tearing madly through its narrowed banks, and it has become a question with Congress which will take much deliberation and experiment as well as great financial outlay to solve.

It has been proposed that great reservoirs be constructed in the mountain districts to hold back the waters that are wasted in their rush to the sea. If there could be made in the Bad Lands in northern Wyoming a reservoir that would hold all the waters accumulating there during the months of spring, that reservoir would "skim off" the top of the Mississippi river two thousand miles away and save the people there from the perils that threaten them whenever the water mounts toward the danger-point.

It would require a vast artificial lake to hold these waters, but there are mountain ranges that could be utilized to form the barriers and the land taken from profitable grazing could be paid for with much less expense than the cost of one inundation of Mississippi bottom lands when a levee breaks.

Instead of one vast reservoir it will probably be found expedient to lay out a great number of works for retaining the western waters, as well as others in the eastern mountains and some in the beds of other tributary rivers whose sources are in the great basin between.

If these stores of water could be utilized for irrigation it is probable that the works would eventually pay for themselves in the increase in value of cultivated lands. The water at present is largely wasted because it rushes past the lands that need it before their distress of drouth comes, and its bulk is fairly spent when they need most the water that has passed. Adequate systems of reservoirs would also prevent largely the wearing away of banks and the changing of the course of the channel and even of the river itself which now sometimes tears away the foundations of cities, obliterates landmarks, and carries off bodily many well-tilled farms. Navigation could be much improved if the stages of high water could be moderated.

The Kansas farmer complained that the Missouri river is too thick to drink and too thin to plow. Control of surplus water near the sources would make this river so moderate that commerce would move along its surface. Varying moods and shifting sands now prevent navigation on that great river almost completely.

The Chinese have a problem similar to ours. Their government esteems their board of public works as one of the highest in their country. This board has charge of the canals and embankments along the great rivers. But it is a Chinese board.

The Hoang Ho resembles our great water course in that it rises in mountains and flows for hundreds of miles through comparatively level country in its lower courses. It deposits mud along its way through the great plain so that the people are continually obliged to construct levees higher and higher until nature no longer will put up with such treatment and the great yellow river breaks its bonds and travels across the country to find a new outlet at the seacoast.

In 2500 years it has altered its general course nine times with terrible destruction of life and property. Its last great breach occurred in 1887, when it tore through the empire a new channel that caused its waters to reach the sea through the mouth of the Yangtse-kiang five hundred miles away from its present mouth. More than a million lives were lost and the devastation of the country has never been approximately estimated. The gap torn in its embankment was two-thirds of a mile in width. Efforts to close it were ineffective except in low water, and when it was at last almost accomplished the celestials had a narrow but constantly deepening breach to mend, its depth during the last days of the work being so great that a torrent sixty feet deep fought with gigantic might against the endeavors of the men. At times the bed of this river has actually stood above the level of the surrounding country, its walls having risen with the rise of the bed due to the deposit of mud till it seemed as if the great river had risen to take a look over the surrounding plain to see where it could wreak the direst vengeance on those who prevented it from running unvexed to the sea.

We may learn from the wide experience of the Chinese that there is no safety for us in merely building higher the walls to restrain the Mississippi. The nation must take hold of the matter with a strong hand. Possibly forty or fifty millions will be necessary to construct the works which will moderate the flow and distribute its waters to those who need it in their irrigating ditches. Even though it cost thrice the sum paid to Spain in settlement of the Philippine question, the people would more gladly give it.

Nothing short of a great ship canal along the bed of the Mississippi will satisfy Americans. There is but one objection to the work, and that is its great expense. But we have recently seen that the cost of one great inundation along the Brazos was far more than the figures here named, and no account need be made of the loss of life and the suffering that followed that great disaster.

Our great river must be controlled. Not in the Chinese fashion, which we know to be merely the storing of wrath against the day of wrath, but it must be done intelligently and with patience, with faith in ourselves and a determination to prevent the great loss of life which will be imminent every time there happens to be the coming of a flood from the eastern mountains and another from the western at the same time.

Our great water way, when properly controlled and protected by permanent revetments and masonry, will furnish the farmers of the great plains a natural outlet to the sea for all their produce. This will be monopolized by no railway trust; no combination of steam-boat men will put the farmer into the hands of corporations seeking to rob him of the best part of his crop on the way to market, for there will be docks along every man's water front, and the rudest flatboat will always rely upon the favoring current to bear its cargo to the sides of independent vessels plying the seas to the uttermost parts of the earth.

INDIAN SUMMER.

Withal there comes a time when summers wane,
When from the sunshine something seems withdrawn,
And pensive shadows lengthen on the lawn;
White bindweed wanders lonely in the lane,
The one sweet thing that now unwithered doth remain.

But there is beauty in autumnal bough
No less than in dear April's dewy leaves,
When with its store of golden-girdled sheaves
Piled stands the wain where one time passed the plow,
And ripened labor reaps fulfillment of its vow.

Then, though no more the oblivious cuckoo calls
From land to land, nor longer on the spray
Of yellowing elm the throstle vaunts his lay,
The ringdove's mate, as fades the leaf and falls,
Reiterates its note of love that never palls.

Though fluttereth still the soul-like lark aloft,
There is a quiet in the woodland ways,
The retrospective hush of vanished days,
And around garden close and orchard croft
A something in the air celestially soft.

From hamlet roofs blue spires of smoke once more,
As dies the day in mist along the dale,
And widowed evening weeps behind her veil,
From log-replenished ingle heavenward soar,
And lamps are early lit, and early latched the door.
--_Alfred Austin._

THE CHIPMUNK.

(_Tamias lysteri._)