OCR Text |
Show A day or two ii.'o Polly worked li is feeding dish out of the bars o( hi j cage so thr.t it fell to the ground. to it!' ho said, corking his heud on ono j side. I always avoid going1 near the i cage of thin bird when I am eating fruit, bt'ciiu-.o he is so fond of it and yet can not bo allowed to have any. If I do so ho will make noises like the smacking of lips and will ask, -Is it good? Is it good?' SomrtiinuH the parrot will imitate two ladies talking, one in the same room and another in another apartment. The mimicry of the imaginary conversation is really wonderful. On occasions it will appear ap-pear to bo so convulsed with laughter as hardly to be able to articulate what it is trying to say. Or, after making some remarks which have excited the laughter of others, while Polly has been entirely grave, he will, when a pause follows, indulge in a quiet little ha, ha!' all to himself, just as a person per-son might. ' People deny that birds possess language, lan-guage, refuse to believe that thoir intelligence in-telligence is anything beyond instinct, and finally assert that they have no souls. The fii-st assertion is a proven absurdity, while the second has been long exploded. Instinct, anyhow, is only an ignorant term for inherited experience." THEY AliE SMART IJIRDS.j tND KNOW MORE THAN SOME i WHOLE FAMILIES. I j A 1'rnfeftHor ltelates home ICrmarkalile i Tale About a Very He uiarkahle Tama Vrow and a Moat Itemarkuble l'arrot. Birds are commonly included among tho so-called dumb animals, merely liecause mankind does not understand un-derstand their speech. " said Taxidermist Taxider-mist Wood of the Smithsonian institution institu-tion to a writer for the Washington Star. "As a matter of fact, they have very comprehensive languages of their own, with words to express all their amotion and to convey understanding j to others of their kind. They jossess notes to indicate alarm, notes of love, notes of curiosity, notes of pain, notes of hunger, notes of sorrow, notes of joy. notes of soothing for their young, .notes of calling their fellows together, notes of peevishness vocal sounds, in short, by which they are able to make their feeiings known and to communicate commu-nicate their ideas on every subject. Nor is it true that they can only speak intelligibly to ono another. Their 4'oiiversation is easily understood by any human being who has mndo a sufficient study of bird talk. I myself grew up in tne country among oiras, domesticated and otherwise, and what they say is as plain and clear to me as any utterances of your own. Not only do I comprehend them, but I have no difficulty in making them comprehend me. I can, in a moment, by a little murmur soothe to content a flock of small chicks that are crying for the mother hen. "I assure you that birds have far more intelligence than they are usually given credit for. Science gives much study to their physical structure and classification, but rlono worth mentioning men-tioning to their minds, and so from pure igno: an?e it is imagined that the latter do not amount to much. Just to illustrate the fact that they know something I will tell you of a pt t crow that 1 got. from the nest when I was a boy, win n it seemed pretty much all bead and mouth. He used to go out hunting w ith me, no matter how many milos I traveled with gun on shoulder, and, for his share in sport, ho, thought it a great deal of fun to chase rabbits and cat?. But he was dreadfully persecuted per-secuted by all the wild crows, which appeared to disapprove of him because he was a tame one. On our journey in search of game he would fly nearly out of sight and then come back to perch for a while upon my coat and pull at my ears. "Jim was very jealous of a pair of young pigeons that I kept. Ho would take all their food and hide it, and in this way I have known him to get away at ono time with thirty-two mice. I took him to spend a week's visit with me at the house of an aunt of mine, who took particular pride in a certain patch of most beautiful cabbage. The erw having been driven away by my xt tive from the cabbages, least he take a notion . to eat any, seemed thereupon there-upon to determine upon revenge which he very neatly executed. It wag a favorite amusement of his to tease a big dog that belonged to tho premises, ana no enticed tins aog into the cabbage patch by flying across it with the animal in pursuit. By crossing cross-ing and recrossing the patch, flying low, Jim succeeded in making the dog v gallop through tho cabbages in every direction, so that they were well nigh ruined, much to my aunt's anger and disgust. "When I came home in the afternoons after-noons Jim would fly to meet me as soon as I was in sight. Sometimes he would come to tho school and look in at the window wistfully. A favorite game of his wan to take little kittens by the tail and pull them backward. Also he liked to chew all the buttons off the family wash when it was hung out. Ho would be very affectionate to one of the hens at about laying time. When she was about to lay he would sit down lovingly beside her and ns eoon as the egg was laid he would eat it. One day he disappeared to be subsequently found in a neighbor's hedroom admiring himself in the mirror. mir-ror. At one time I wns away for seven months and when I came back he received me with the most extravagant extrav-agant evidences of joy and affection, dancing around me, flapping his wings and crying out loudly. When confined con-fined to his cage he used to spend hours in coasting down an inclined plank, using a top of a mustard can for a sled. He would carry tho sled up to the top of the plank, step into it and slide to the bottom, repeating tho operation again and again with the greatest glee. "If there are any wiser birds than crows, those birds are parrots. I know a parrot that will put on its overcoat if it sees you doing the same so far as hunching up its shoulders can express the idea. When it sees a big dog it will imitate a big dog's bark, but if the dog is a little one it mill bark like a little dog. Sometimes it has to be whipped for being naughty, and then it always begs for mercy by holding up one foot alongside its head. Now it happens that, although parrots ordinarily are by nature fruit eaters, this one is not allowed fruit, because it makes him sick. The other day we was left at liberty in a room whero a dish of grapes were on a table. Overcome Over-come by the temptation Polly ate all the grapes and when some one came in the first object seen was the parrot in -an attitude of contrition and appeal, holding up one foot in the air. One day on a railway train Polly was shut up in a' basket. A passenger called "Baby!" to a tot that had strayed into the aisle, upon which the bird at once began to cry liko an infant. "The lady to whom this parrot belonged be-longed has a way when she drops anything any-thing by accident of saying, "Go it!1 |