ottom of her cage a piece as large as one's hand and wove it into the
wires so as to make a screen against her inquisitive neighbors. My
informant evidently believed this story. It was agreeable to her
fancies and feelings. But see the difficulties in the way. How could
the bird with its beak tear out a broad piece of paper? then, how
could it weave it into the wires of its cage? Furthermore, the family
of birds to which the canary belongs are not weavers; they build
cup-shaped nests, and they have had no use for screens or covers, and
they never have made them. Just what was the truth about the matter I
cannot say, but if we know anything about animal psychology, we know
that was not the truth. It is always risky to attribute to an animal
any act its ancestors could not have performed.

Again, things are reported as facts that are not so much contrary to
reason as contrary to all experience, and with these, too, I have my
difficulties. A recent writer upon our wild life says he has
discovered that the cowbird watches over its young and assists the
foster-parents in providing food for them--an observation so contrary
to all that we know of parasitical birds, both at home and abroad,
that no real observer can credit the statement. Our cowbird has been
under observation for a hundred years or more; every dweller in the
country must see one or more young cowbirds being fed by their
foster-parents every season, yet no competent observer has ever
reported any care of the young bird by its real parent. If this were
true, it would make the cowbird only half parasitical--an unheard-of
phenomenon.

The same writer tells this incident about a grouse that had a nest
near his cabin. One morning he heard a strange cry in the direction of
the nest, and taking the path that led to it, he met the grouse
running toward him with one wing pressed close to her side, and
fighting off two robber crows with the other. Under the closed wing
the grouse was carrying an egg, which she had managed to save from the
ruin of her nest. The bird was coming to the hermit for succor. Now,
am I skeptical about such a story, put down in apparent good faith in
a book of natural history as a real occurrence, because I have never
seen the like? No; I am skeptical because the incident is so contrary
to all that we know about grouse and all other wild birds. Our belief
in nearly all matters takes the line of least resistance, and it is
easier for me to believ