The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal ObservationsHornaday, William T. (William Temple)
Science
The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations
Hornaday, William T. (William Temple)
Animal behavior
On the first night, no guns went off. The next morning it was
found that the bear had crossed the stream and climbed straight up
toward the bait until he reached the first fish-line; where he
stopped. Without pressing the string sufficiently to set off its
gun, he followed it to the barrier of trees. Being balked there,
he turned about, retraced his steps carefully and followed the
string to the barrier of rocks. Being blocked there, he back-
tracked down the slide and across the stream, over the way he
came. Then he widely circled the whole theatre, and came down
toward the bait from the little meadow at its top of the slide.
Presently he reached the upper fish-line, twelve feet away from
the first one. First he followed this out to the log barrier, then
back to the rock ledge that was supposed to be unclimbable. There
he scrambled up the "impossible" rocks, negotiated the ledge foot
by foot, and successfully got around the end of line No. 2.
Getting between the two lines he sailed out across the slope to
the elk carcasses, feasted sumptuously, and then meandered out
the way he came, without having disturbed a soul.
All this was done at night, and in darkness; and presumably that
bear is there to this day, alive and well. No wonder Mr. Wright
has a high opinion of the grizzly bear as a thinking animal.
In hiding their homes and young, either in burrows or in nests on
the ground, wild rabbits and hares are wonderfully skilful, even
under new conditions. Being quite unable to fight, or even to dig
deeply, they are wholly dependent upon their wits in keeping their
young alive by hiding them. Thanks to their keenness in
concealment, the gray rabbit is plentiful throughout the eastern
United States in spite of its millions of enemies. Is it not
wonderful? The number killed by hunters last year in Pennsylvania
was about 3,500,000!
The most amazing risk that I ever saw taken by a rabbit was made
by a gray rabbit that nested in a shallow hole in the middle of a
lawn-mower lawn east of the old National Museum building in
Washington. The hollow was like that of a small wash-basin, and
when at rest in it with her young ones the neutral gray back of
the mother came just level with the top of the ground. At the
last, when her young were almost large enough to get out and go
under their own steam, a lawn-mower artist chanced to look down
at the wrong moment and saw the family. Evidently that mother
believed that the boldest ventures are those most likely to win.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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