Grabbed By The Grill

Avoidiing animals, and birds on the road to Califronia is not easy. It is depressing, and usually quite unavoidable on the driver's part. At night my headlights would pick out desert rat or burrowing owl, blinding and paralyzing the creature with wonder or fear. If not too close, and I were quick, I could spare the thing. The little marmots, jack-rabbits, and squirrels were ever under the wheels.

One day, close together, we came upon two badgers in the desert, headlight victims, both of them, probably. After careful watching I concluded that at a speed of twenty-five miles an hour there was never a fatal accident, except at night. That rate always surprised the birds, but they were quick enough of wit and wing to get away. At thirty miles, and faster, however, they were grabbed by the grill as they rose from the road, or they struck the hood, and sometimes the windows as they tried to cross. And in the many cases of near accidents that I witnessed the creatures plainly miscalculated the speed of the car—waiting too long in the road, or dashing into the road to cross at too slow a speed.

Like the cuckoos and the screened porch, the redheaded woodpeckers and the cars in the West appear to get fatally mixed. They seem hopelessly stupid birds, having used their heads for hammers so long as now to be incapable of thinking with them. You will see one ahead of you clinging rather pathetically near the top of a telephone pole, and you will have to slow down, for the solidheaded thing will make up its wings to fly about the time you are abreast, and it will be sure to fly across the road and into the moving car. Jay-flyers, poor things, and just like jaywalkers!

In the round of their regular activities, and where they are naturally concerned, the wild animals are keen observers and amazingly alert. But they too are dulled by routine, and like us, are liable to lose their care and caution when custom hardens into habit. The town of Vermillion, Ohio, has been distinguished for many years as the residence of a pair of bald eagles, our national birds. It appears that the birds settled in Vermillion in 1840 and dwelt there in the same tree until 1863, when they moved into a new nest-tree.

This tree was promptly destroyed in a storm, and the birds moved again, keeping this third house until 1890. The fourth nest was started that year in an old shellbark hickory at a point about 81 feet from the ground. For thirty-six years running this nest was made over every spring and occupied by the eagles—a record probably unmatched in the annals of natural history.