Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 137, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 June 1910 — BIRD CHAT. [ARTICLE]

BIRD CHAT.

Birds shun pestilent places and all places infected with plagues. The hens of America lay 850>000,000 eggs annually. The swiftest animal is the ostrich, which can do a mile a minute. The Australian mound bird builds the biggest nest in the world. A pigeon has been known to fly a thousand miles in two days, six hours and seventeen minutes. Game cocks and ducks sometimes take to catching mice, which they devour greedily. The voice of the naked-throated bellbird can be heard at a distance of three miles. In the interior of Peru eggs are used as currency. Who knows what kind of eggs they are? In proportion to its owner’s weight, a bird s wing is twenty times as strong as a man’s arm. Every eight months ostriches are plucked, and each plucking yields about a pound of feathers. Stale eggs once had a commercial value, as blackening was originally made of them and soot. The kick of an ostrich is terrible; it will knock 6ut a man quicker than one of Jim Jeffries’ solar plexus blows. The turkey’s real name was oocoocoo, by whieh it was known to the Cherokee Indians, and so called from its call. "T A single crow has been known to destroy “700,000 insects a year.” A sweeping assertion! Who counted .them? The organ of in the turkey buzzard is so delicate that it can scent food at a distance of forty miles. But such food! A bird dealer in Paris is trying to raise canaries of an orange red tint by feeding the parent birds on cayenne pepper. In China athletes train on duck brains, which they regard as the most strengthening of food. Ostriches are now hatched in incubators. It requires forty-one days with the maintenance of 110 degrees of heat before the chicks begin to appear. ——