One January I unwittingly shut a hen under the door of an outbuilding,
where not a particle of food could be obtained, and where she was
entirely unprotected from the severe cold. When the luckless Dominick
was discovered, about eighteen days afterward, she was brisk and
lively, but fearfully pinched up, and as light as a bunch of feathers.
The slightest wind carried her before it. But by judicious feeding she
was soon restored.
The circumstances of the bluebirds being emboldened by the cold
suggests the fact that the fear of man, which by now seems like an
instinct in the birds, is evidently an acquired trait, and foreign to
them in a state of primitive nature. Every gunner has observed, to his
chagrin, how wild the pigeons become after a few days of firing among
them; and, to his delight, how easy it is to approach near his game in
new or unfrequented woods. Professor Baird [footnote: Then at the head
of the Smithsonian Institution] tells me that a correspondent of
theirs visited a small island in the Pacific Ocean, situated about two
hundred miles off Cape St. Lucas, to procure specimens. The island was
but a few miles in extent, and had probably never been visited half a
dozen times by human beings.
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