hen the squirrel issued from between his
enemy's hind legs and made three jumps towards the woods before he was
discovered. Our sides ached with laughter, cruel as it may seem.

It was evident the squirrel would win. The dog seemed to redouble his
efforts. He would overshoot the game, or shoot by it to the right or
left. The squirrel was the smaller craft, and could out-tack him
easily. One more leap and the squirrel was up a tree, and the dog was
overwhelmed with confusion and disgust. He could not believe his senses.
"Not catch a squirrel in such a field as that? Go to, I will have him
yet!" and he bounded up the tree as high as one's head, and then bit the
bark of it in his anger and chagrin.

The boy says his dog has never bragged since about catching red
squirrels "if only the trees were out of reach!"

When any of the winged creatures are engaged in a life and death race in
that way, or in any other race, the tactics of the squirrel do not work;
the pursuer never overshoots nor shoots by his mark. The flight of the
two is timed as if they were parts of one whole. A hawk will pursue a
sparrow or a robin through a zigzag course and not lose a stroke or half
a stroke of the wing by reason of any darting to the right or left. The
clue is held with fatal precision. No matter how quickly nor how often
the sparrow or the finch changes its course, its enemy changes,
simultaneously, as if every move was known to it from the first.

The same thing may be noticed among the birds in their love chasings;
the pursuer seems to know perfectly the mind of the pursued. This
concert of action among birds is very curious. When they are on the
alert, a flock of sparrows, or pigeons, or cedar-birds, or snow
buntings, or blackbirds, will all take flight as if there were but one
bird, instead of a hundred. The same impulse seizes every individual
bird at the same instant, as if they were sprung by electricity.

Or when a flock of birds is in flight, it is still one body, one will;
it will rise, or circle, or swoop with a unity that is truly
astonishing.

A flock of snow buntings will perform their aerial evolutions with a
precision that the best-trained soldiery cannot equal. Have the birds an
extra sense which we have not? A brood of young partridges in the woods
will start up like an explosion, every brown particle and fragment
hurled into the air at the same instant. Without word or signal, how is
it done?

INDEX