question. Doubtless the parents, under normal conditions, visited the nest every few minutes, and the frequency with which the yellow-lined mouths had been opened during the preceding hour and a half intimated an approaching famine. Still, under the stimulus of conditions which must have strongly suggested food, not one of the blind, naked little creatures gave evidence of life. It was an impressive exhibition of instinctive obedience to some, unheard by me, parental command. In her absence, however, although without the incentive of her form above them, they showed no hesitation in making their wants known. Hence we may conclude either that the parents could not communicate with the young from a distance, or that the presence of one of the adults was necessary to insure obedience.

Believing that the jays would not resume their family cares, I determined to experiment with them, and taking a mounted blue jay, I wired it to a limb below the nest. Blue jays are pugnacious, and doubtless their anger at the intrusion of this stranger would outweigh their fear of the bower, when I should witness the manner in which jays evict an unwelcome guest.

It was well that my reputation as a birdstudent was not staked on the result. Scarcely had I returned to the bower when one of the jays reached the nest, and, to my complete astonishment, apparently paid no attention to the mounted bird, but at once carefully fed her young, whose eagerness now added to my wonder at their previous self-restraint. One visit, during which several, and perhaps all, of the young were fed, strangely enough satisfied their hunger, when the parent, with complete composure, perched beside her nest and slightly opened her bill, as birds sometimes do when at rest, forming as beautiful a picture of bird life as artist or naturalist could well desire. Here in truth the camera might record a scene from the home life of jays.

So completely had the mental attitude of the bird altered that my movements in the bower were wholly ignored, and it was actually necessary to walk up to the nest-tree before she could be induced to leave her perch.

What had occasioned so complete a change in the bird's actions? Possibly it was not the same parent that had visited the nest so hurriedly; but if the other one of the pair was

so much the tamer, why had it not come to the nest during the hour and a half after I had entered the bower? Could the dummy bird below have been mistaken for its mate by the bird that perched so composedly above? It is true that the second one of the pair did not appear; but as neither of them went far from the nest, it is more than probable that the absent mate was within sight and sound during the whole proceeding.

Observation, then, is here at fault. It is true we may resort to theories more or less plausible. One cannot prove that the dummy jay did not closely resemble a relative or dear friend of the nest-owners, though, if this were a fact, I should infer that their associates were by no means a reputable lot. However, be the explanation what it may, there can be no doubt that the presence of that frowzy, stuffed jay was wholly satisfactory and reassuring to the bird at the nest.

If these birds received one of their own kind so graciously, how would they treat a screech owl, a bird which, as far as human mind can discern, is the common enemy of all jays? The dummy jay was therefore removed, and a mounted screech owl was securely fastened about two feet from the

nest. The jays were not visible, but that they were watching my movements from the neighboring wood was shown by the tense note of alarm they uttered almost as soon as the owl was posed-a high, shrill call, differing from any I had previously heard.

A moment later a jay came to the nest tree, screaming in alarm at the unconscious, yellow-eyed bunch of feathers so dangerously near its offspring. Soon it was joined by its mate, and with uncontrolled fear and excitement they flew from limb to limb, but, much to my surprise, made no attempt to attack or even to threaten the owl, and after a minute or two of wild flitting and calling they returned to the woods. Surely this was enough to destroy one's confidence in our supposed knowledge of the jay's character; but the birds soon further illustrated the danger of theorizing.

While this supposition credits them with a power of reasoning I am not prepared to say they possessed, their subsequent actions seemed strongly to indicate that they had mentally grappled with this wholly unexpected problem which had so suddenly con

fronted them, and, after due consultation, had reached certain conclusions upon which they acted. In any event, the incident serves well to illustrate the ease with which one uses the human parallel in describing the conduct of animals from the point of view of the sympathetic observer, eager to recognize human traits in the bird and beast-indeed, to claim kinship with them.

In this particular instance the jays had already thoroughly aroused my interest, and it needed little imagination to put myself in their place and conjecture my own actions if, without a moment's warning, I should see the ogre of my tribe, a creature whose power experience had taught me to fear, standing at my threshold. That I should for a time lose my self-possession and perhaps call aloud in alarm would seem wholly natural, and, in view of the superior strength and armament of the enemy, it would also be expected that I should consult the partner of my joys and sorrows, and now companion in arms, as to the most expedient method of conquering this intruder without undue risk. Be this as it may, after flying about the

nest-tree for several minutes in the most wild and excited manner, the birds deserted the place and retired to the woods. Then I heard them uttering for the first time the low, conversational eck, eck, eck note of their kind. It is a note which I have never heard from a solitary jay, and is therefore probably used for purposes of intercommunication. One frequently hears it from a party of jays when they are gathering chestnuts or acorns. For ten seconds or more the discussion, if discussion it was, continued, and at the end of this time a plan of battle had evidently been decided upon, which they lost no time in translating into action. They returned to the nest-tree, not now a screaming pair of excited, frenzied birds who in the control of an unheard-of experience had completely lost their heads, but two deter

mined, silent creatures, with seemingly wellfixed purpose. The difference in their actions when the two visits to the nest were compared was in truth sufficiently impressive to warrant a belief in the birds' ability to grasp the situation intelligently.

Without a moment's hesitation one of the pair now selected a perch above the owl, paused only long enough to take aim, and then, with a flash of wings, sprang at its supposed enemy. What followed, the camera, although set for a hundredth part of a second, failed definitely to record. The heart of the little pine seemed rent by the explosion of a blue jay. It was no feint, but a good honest blow delivered with all the bird's force of body and pinion, and the poor little owl was completely vanquished, upset, at the first onslaught. The jay had given a most

stead of flying away to some dark nook to nurse its wounds, it persisted in remaining on the field, retaining its grasp of the limb, not upright, however, but hanging upside down, as no owl was ever seen to do before, and, indeed, as only wired owls could. Such unheard-of behavior excited the jays even more than the owl's first appearance, and from near-by limbs they shrieked notes of defiance until, in mercy to their throats and my ears, I removed the cause of their alarm, bent the branches back to conceal their nest, and left them to discuss their remarkable experiences at their leisure.

Ten days later, when I parted the pine

the ground below. Disregarding the protests of their parents, I gathered them together, placed them in a row on the limb of a neighboring pine, and then addressed them in what I esteemed to be the tongue of their tribe.

Perchance in this narrative both the speech and the actions of jays have been misinterpreted, but in this concluding scene of our relations the most skeptical could not doubt that I was not only intelligible, but eloquently expressive, to the five birds on the limb, which, in quick response to my ques-. tion, "Are you not very hungry?" lifted up their heads in a mute but unanimous and unmistakable, "Yes, we are."