. How to attract the birds : and other talks about bird neighbors . A precocial grouse chick are enslaved by family cares as if they were afflictedwith the New England conscience. But, generallyspeaking, there are only two classes: the lower orprecocial birds, including those which, fully clothedand wide awake when hatched, are able to run orswim at once and pick up their own living like ourdomestic fowls, ducks, Bob Whites, grouse, ploverand snipe ; and the altricial birds—those which comeinto the world blind, naked and helpless, or nearly 78 Home Life so, like the heron, kingfisher, woodpeck
. How to attract the birds : and other talks about bird neighbors . A precocial grouse chick are enslaved by family cares as if they were afflictedwith the New England conscience. But, generallyspeaking, there are only two classes: the lower orprecocial birds, including those which, fully clothedand wide awake when hatched, are able to run orswim at once and pick up their own living like ourdomestic fowls, ducks, Bob Whites, grouse, ploverand snipe ; and the altricial birds—those which comeinto the world blind, naked and helpless, or nearly 78 Home Life so, like the heron, kingfisher, woodpecker, robin,and all our song birds. The precocial ruffed grousedevelops from an egg that is large in proportion tothe size of the mothers body, the heavy yolknourishing the young bird during eighteen days of. Blind, naked and helpless altricials. Young blue-birds incubation and even after, whereas the altricial vireolays a very small egg that hatches in one week. Buteven precocial and altricial birds of the same sizein maturity may have come out of shells that differas greatly as a silver dollar differs from a the length of the period of incubation is innearly, if not exact, ratio to the size of the largest birds egg we know, the ostrichs, re- 79 How to Attract the Birds quires forty days, sometimes a fiili six weeks, to in all arbitrary divisions, it is not always possibleto draw a sharp dividing line. Between precocialand altricial birds, innumerable gradations occur. Among the lower bird forms, polygamy beingcommon, there can be no home life, and it is for-tunate these chicks are independent little creaturesfrom the first. Indeed, it was John Fiske whocontributed to science the fact that the advancementot all creatures—not of the human race alone—hasbeen
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectbirds, bookyear1903
