Your Dog
A good dog is the very best companion for a Scout, who need not think himself a really good Scout till he has trained a young dog to do all he wants of him. It requires great patience and kindness, and genuine sympathy with the dog. Dogs are being used frequently for finding lost men and for carrying messages.
A dog is the most human of all animals, and therefore the best companion for a man. He is always courteous, and always ready for a game—full of humour, and very faithful and loving.
Where to Study Animals
Of course a Scout who lives in the country has much better chances of studying animals and birds than in a town.
Still, if you live in a big city there are lots of different kinds of birds in the parks, and there is almost every animal under the sun to be seen alive in zoological gardens.
In s maller towns it is perhaps a little more difficult, but many of them have their Natural History Museum, where a fellow can learn the appearance and names of many animals, and you can do a lot of observing in the parks or by starting a feeding-box for birds at your own window. But, best of all, is to go out into the country whenever you can get a few hours for it, by train, or bicycle, or on your own flat feet, and there stalk animals and birds, and watch what they do, and get to know different kinds and their names, and also what kind of tracks they make on the ground, and, in the case of the birds, their nests and eggs, and so on.
If you are lucky enough to own a camera, you cannot possibly do better than start making a collection of photos of animals and birds. Such a collection is ten times more interesting than the ordinary boy’s collection of stamps, or autographs.
Watching Animals
Every animal is interesting to watch, and it is just as difficult to stalk a weasel as it is to stalk a lion.
We are apt to think that all animals are guided in their conduct by instinct—that is, by a sort of idea that is born in them. For instance, we imagine that a young otter swims naturally, directly he is put into water, or that a young deer runs away from a man from a natural inborn fear of him.
William Long, in his book School of the Woods, shows that animals largely owe their cleverness to their mothers, who teach them while they are young. Thus he has seen an otter carry two of her young upon her back into the water, and after swimming about for a little while, suddenly dive from under them, and leave them struggling in the water. But she rose near them and helped them to swim back to the shore. In this way she gradually taught them to swim.
The mother animal teaches her young. This lioness seems to be telling her cubs how to act if a man should come.
I once saw a lioness in East Africa sitting with her three little cubs all in a row watching me approach her. She looked exactly as though she were teaching her young ones how to act in the case of a man coming.
She was evidently saying to them:
“Now, cubbies, I want you all to notice what a white man is like. Then, one by one, you must jump up and skip away, with a whisk of your tail. The moment you are out of sight in the long grass, you must creep and crawl till you have got to leeward (down-wind) of him. Then follow him, always keeping him to windward, so that you can smell whereabouts he is, and he cannot find you.”
Birds
A man who studies birds is called an ornithologist. Mark Twain, the amusing yet kind-hearted American writer, said:
“There are fellows who write books about birds and love them so much that they’ll go hungry and tired to find a new kind of bird—and kill it.
“They are called ‘ornithologers.’
“I could have been an ‘ornithologer’ myself, because I always loved birds and creatures. And I started out to learn how to be one. I saw a bird sitting on a dead limb of a high tree, singing away with his head tilted back and his mouth open —and before I thought I fired my gun at him. His song stopped all suddenly, and he fell from the branch, limp like a rag, and I ran and picked him up—and he was dead. His body was warm in my hand, and his head rolled about this way and that, like as if his neck was broke, and there was a white skin over his eyes, and one drop of red blood
sparkled on the side of his head —and—laws! I couldn’t see nothing for tears. I haven’t ever murdered no creature
since then that warn’t doing me no harm—and I ain’t agoing to neither.”
The crows seem to be everywhere
with their loud “Caw-caw.”
Watching Birds
A good Scout is generally a good “ornithologer”, as Mark Twain calls him. That is to say, he likes stalking birds and watching all that they do. He discovers, by watching them, where and how they build their nests.
He does not, like the ordinary boy, want to go and rob them of their eggs, but he likes to watch how they hatch out their young and teach them to feed themselves and to fly. He gets to know every species of bird by its call and by its way of flying. He knows which birds remain all the year round and which only come at certain seasons, what kind of food they like best, and how they change their plumage, what sort of nests they build, where they build them, and what the eggs are like.
A good deal of natural history can be studied by watching birds in your neighbourhood, especially if you feed
