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also much more brilliant than ours. Our gallinaceous birds are all dull neutral-tinted, but look at this family of birds in the Orient, brilliant beyond words to paint! In Africa the sand grouse is brilliantly marked. There are also snow-white herons in Africa, and black and white ibises. On the Aru Islands in the Malay Archipelago is a flycatcher that is brilliant black and bright orange.

In our hemisphere the swans are white, the pigeons are blue, and the parrots are green. In Australia the swans are black, and there is a black pigeon and a black parrot. In the desert of Sahara most of the birds are desert-colored, but there are some that are blue, and others that are black or brown and white. It is said that the Arctic fox, which is snow-white in most other places, remains blue all winter in Iceland. No doubt there are reasons for all these variations, but whatever these reasons are, they do not seem to favor the theory of protective coloration.

The more local an animal is, the more its color assimilates with its surroundings; or perhaps I should say, the more uniform its habitat, the more assimilative its coloring. The valley quail of California frequents trees and roosts in trees, hence its coloring is not copied from the ground. It is darker and bluer than our Bob White.

Nature dislikes incongruities, and permits them under protest. The fleet rabbit with eyes ever open

is as protectively colored as the toad or the tortoise. The porcupine with his armor of quills is as hidden from the eye as the coon, or the woodchuck, or the prairie-dog. Climbing things are as well hidden as creeping things, the mole in the ground as well as the mouse on the surface, the squirrel that flies as well as the squirrel that runs, creatures of the night as well as creatures of the day, the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, as well as the smaller animals that are preyed upon. If birds are colored to conceal them from hawks, why are the wild boar, the deer, the hare, similarly colored? They are not hiding from hawks; their enemies go by scent. The hippopotamus in the Nile is as protectively colored as the camel on the sands, and yet in neither case can protection be the end sought. In Africa there is a white rhinoceros. Behold our mountain goat nearly as white as snow against the dark background of the rocks and mountain-slopes where he lives, and yet he appears to thrive as well as the protectively colored deer. Does not the lion without stripes fare just as well as the tiger with? Does not our vermilion flycatcher fare just as well as its cousins of duller plumes? Does not the golden pheasant fare as well as the protectively colored grouse? Everywhere the creative energy seems to have its plain, modest moods and its gaudy, bizarre moods, both in the vegetable and the animal worlds. Why are some flowers so gaudy and others

so plain, some so conspicuous and others so hidden, some insects so brilliant and others so dull, some fruits so highly colored and others so neutral ? This law of endless variation is no doubt at the bottom of all these things. The bird has varied in color from its parent, and as the variation has not told against it, it has gone on and intensified. So with the flowers. I don't believe cherries are red or black to attract the birds, or plums blue. Poisonous berries are as brilliant as harmless ones. No doubt there is a reason for all these high colors, and for the plain ones, if we could only find it. Of course, food, environment, climate, have much to do with it all.

Probably, if we could compare the food which our grouse eats with that which the brilliant pheasants of the East eat, or the food of our wild turkey with that of the Central American bird, or of our pigeons with those of the Malay Archipelago, we might hit upon some clue to their difference of coloration. The strange and bizarre colors and forms of the birds of Africa compared with those of North America or of Europe may be a matter of food. Why our flicker is brighter colored than our other woodpeckers may be on account of the ants he eats.

Mr. Wallace in one of his essays points out the effect of locality on color, many species of unrelated genera both among insects and among birds being marked similarly, with white or yellow or black,

as if from the effect of some fashion that has spread among them. In the Philippine Islands metallic hues are the fashion; in some other islands very light tints are in vogue; in still other localities unrelated species favor crimson or blue. Mr. Wallace says that among the various butterflies of different countries this preference for certain colors is as marked as it would be if the hares, marmots, and squirrels of Europe were all red with black feet, while the corresponding species of Central Asia were all yellow with black heads, or as it would be if our smaller mammals, the coon, the possum, the squirrels, all copied the black and white of the skunk. The reason for all this is not apparent, though Wallace thinks that some quality of the soil which affects the food may be the cause. It is like the caprice of fashion. In fact, the exaggerated plumes, fantastic colors, and monstrous beaks of many birds in both hemispheres have as little apparent utility, and seem to be quite as much the result of caprice, as are any of the extreme fashions in dress among human beings.

Our red-shouldered starlings flock in the fall, and they are not protectively colored, but the bobolinks, which also flock at the same time, do then assume neutral tints. Why the change in the one case and not in the other, since both species feed in the brown marshes? Most of our own ground birds are more or less ground-colored; but here on the ground, amid

the bushes, with the brown oven-bird and the brown thrasher, is the chewink with conspicuous markings of white and black and red. Here are some of the soft gray and brown tinted warblers nesting on the ground, and here is the more conspicuous striped black and white creeping warbler nesting by their side. Behold the rather dull-colored great crested flycatcher concealing its nest in a hollow limb, and its congener the brighter-feathered kingbird building its nest openly on the branch above.

Hence, whatever truth there may be in this theory of protective coloration, one has only to look about him to discover that it is a matter which Nature does not have very much at heart. She plays fast and loose with it on every hand. Now she seems to set great store by it, the next moment she discards it entirely.

If dull colors are protective, then bright colors are non-protective or dangerous, and one wonders why all birds of gay feather have not been cut off and the species exterminated: or why, in cases where the males are bright-colored and the females of neutral tints, as with our scarlet tanager and indigo-bird, the females are not greatly in excess of the males, which does not seem to be the case.

II

We arrive at the idea that neutral tints are protective from the point of view of the human eye.

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