The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

The Scarlet Tanager summers in the northeastern quarter of the United States and winters in Colombia, Equador and northern Peru, a limit to limit flight of 3,880 miles. The Golden Plover (Charadrius dominicus).--"In fall it flies over the ocean from Nova Scotia to South America, 2,400 miles--the longest known flight of any bird. In spring it returns by way of the Mississippi Valley. Thus the migration routes form an enormous ellipse, with a minor axis of 2,000 miles and a major axis stretching 8,000 miles from arctic America to Argentina." (Cooke.) The Arctic Tern (Sterna paradisaea), is "the champion long-distance migrant of the world. It breeds as far north as it can find land on which to build its nest, and winters as far south as there is open water to furnish it food. The extreme summer and winter homes are 11,000 miles apart, or a yearly round trip of 22,000 miles." (Cooke.) By what do migrating birds guide their courses high in air on a pitch-dark night,--their busy time for flying? Do they, too, know about the mariner's Southern Cross, and steer by it on starlit nights? Equally strange things have happened. The regular semi-annual migrations of birds may fairly be regarded as the high-water mark of instinct so profound and far-reaching that it deserves to rank as high as reason. To me it is one of the most marvelous things in Nature's Book of Wonders. I never see a humming-bird poised over a floral tube of a trumpet creeper without pausing, in wonder that is perpetual, and asking the eternal question: "Frail and delicate feathered sprite, that any storm-gust might dash to earth and destroy, and that any enemy might crush, how do you make your long and perilous journeys unstarved and unkilled? Is it because you bear a charmed life? What is the unsolved mystery of your tiny existence in this rough and cruel world?"