Bird lore - Project Puffin

die Hubuiion Societies;
SCHOOL DEPARTMENT
Edited by ALICE HALL -WALTER
Address all communications relative to the work of this department
to the Editor, 67 Oriole Avenue, Providence, R. I.
"What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forest.
Except the burnt lands, the narrow intervals on the rivers, the bare tops of the high
mountains, and the lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted. It is even more grim
and wild than you had anticipated, a damp and intricate wilderness. . . . The lakes
are something you are unprepared for, they lie so exposed to the light, and the forest is
diminished to a fine fringe on their edge. These are not the artificial forests of an English
King. Here prevail no forest laws but those of nature. . . .
"it is a country full of evergreen trees, of silvery birches and watery maples, the
ground dotted with insipid small, red berries, and strewn with moss-grown rocks—
country diversified with innumerable lakes and rapid streams, peopled with trout, salmon,
shad, pickerel, and other fishes; the forest resounding at rare intervals with the note of
the chickadee, the blue jay, and the woodpecker, the scream of the fish hawk and
the eagle, the laugh of the loon, and the whistle of ducks along the solitary streams;
at night, with the hooting of owls and howling of wolves; in summer, swarming with
myriads of black flies and mosquitos more formidable than wolves to the white man.
Such is the home of the moose, the bear, the caribou, the wolf, the beaver, and the
Indian. —Excerpt from Thoreau's "Camping in the Maine Woods."
BIRD-STUDY IN SHAKESPEARE'S TIME
[Note: This article may be used by teachers in correlation with English, History
and Literature.]
DURING
this year of the three hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's
death, it may be of interest to bird students to recall some of Shakes-
peare's allusions to birds which were known to him, and also to inquire
into the knowledge of birds current in his time. The half-century when
he lived, 15 64-161 6, was notable, it will be remembered, for exploration as
well as for poetry and drama, and references to birds of many climes abound
in the literature of that time. Many different species of native birds were also
known then. In fact, owing to the great fens and marshes, undrained or only
partially reclaimed, water fowl and wading birds, now rare or entirely absent,
were abundant.
Perhaps the first thing to notice with regard to the knowledge of birds
current in Shakespeare's day is the credulity and superstition that character-
ized it. The persevering student finds throughout the references to land as
well as water birds mentioned in the hterature of that period an astonishing
number of fanciful conceptions regarding the nature, habits and uses of birds.
One author stated that certain species of birds migrated to the moon, others
described birds of 'ill omen,' while not a few writers most grotesquely mis-
interpreted the life-history of fairly common species.
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