ducks, geese, and swans in spring and fall pass across the sky above
me. Quail and grouse invade my premises, and of crows I have, at least
in bird-nesting time, too many.

[1] See comment on the story here alluded to on page 244.

But I have a few times climbed over my pasture wall and wandered into
distant fields. Once upon a time I was a traveler in Asia for the
space of two hours--an experience that ought to have yielded me some
startling discoveries, but did not. Indeed, the wider I have traveled
and observed nature, the more I am convinced that the wild creatures
behave just about the same in all parts of the country; that is, under
similar conditions. What one observes truly about bird or beast upon
his farm of ten acres, he will not have to unlearn, travel as wide or
as far as he will. Where the animals are much hunted, they are of
course much wilder and more cunning than where they are not hunted. In
the Yellowstone National Park we found the elk, deer, and mountain
sheep singularly tame; and in the summer, so we were told, the bears
board at the big hotels. The wild geese and ducks, too, were tame; and
the red-tailed hawk built its nest in a large dead oak that stood
quite alone near the side of the road. With us the same hawk hides its
nest in a tree in the dense woods, because the farmers unwisely hunt
and destroy it. But the cougars and coyotes and bobcats were no tamer
in the park than they are in other places where they are hunted.

Indeed, if I had elk and deer and caribou and moose and bears and
wildcats and beavers and otters and porcupines on my farm, I should
expect them to behave just as they do in other parts of the country
under like conditions: they would be tame and docile if I did not
molest them, and wild and fierce if I did. They would do nothing out
of character in either case.

Your natural history knowledge of the East will avail you in the West.
There is no country, says Emerson, in which they do not wash the pans
and spank the babies; and there is no country where a dog is not a
dog, or a fox a fox, or where a hare is ferocious, or a wolf lamblike.
The porcupine behaves in the Rockies just as he does in the
Catskills; the deer and the moose and the black bear and the beaver
of the Pacific slope are almost identical in their habits and traits
with those of the Atlantic slope.

In my observations of the birds of the far West, I went wrong in my
reckoning but once: the Western mead