Neltje Blanchan

": CROWS AND JAYS The crows are large black birds, walkers, with stout feet adapted for the purpose. Fond of shifting their residence at different seasons rather than strictly migratory, for, except at the northern limit of range, they remain resident all the year. Gregarious. Sexes alike. Omnivorous feeders, being partly carnivorous as are also the . Both crows and jays inhabit wooded country. Their voices are boisterous and bold, particularly the jays. Devoted mates; unpleasant neighbors."

"The wind is a wasteful, uncertain distributor. Insects transfer it more economically, especially the more highly organized and industrious ones. In a few instances humming birds, as well, unwittingly do the flowers bidding while they feast now here, now there. In spite of s most patient and scientific research, that shed great light on the theory of natural selection a half century before Darwin advanced it, he never knew that flowers are nearly always sterile to pollen of another species when carried to them on the bodies of insect visitors, or that cross-pollenized blossoms defeat the self-pollinated ones in the struggle for survival. These facts Darwin proved in endless experiments. ... bees ... are the most diligent of all visitors ... It is estimated that, should they perish, more than half the flowers in the world would be exterminated with them!"

"High up in the air, sometime a mile or more above the earth, if the weather be clear, travel flocks of migrants where they can obtain a birds-eye view of the country to be traversed. Geese have been detected four miles high. Rivers running like silver threads across the map, s, s, and the seacoast line, must be far more familiar to the birds that follow them systematically than to Macaulays schoolboy."