People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 December 1896 — BIRDS OF ILL NATURE. [ARTICLE]

BIRDS OF ILL NATURE.

The Cruelty of Swans as Displayed Toward Other Fowls. Among those birds which stay, at home, especially the most domesticated, there is often an exhibition of nntindness seemingly unaccountable, says a writer in The Oornhill Magazine. The graceful swan, a g., is one of the most ungracious in its way a Not only (in the breeding season) dbes a male bird resent the intrusion of a strange gentleman, but it will spend the day in driving off from its domain any unlucky geese, whioh might be plainly assumed to have no designs upon its domestio arrangements and have, indeed, no desire beyond that for a oomfortable wash and swim. It will also pursue even the most innooent of newborn ducklings while they unwittingly rejoioe in an early taste of their common element. When an only child has passed out of the cygnet stage of life and grown to full physical if not mental maturity, father and mother swans have been known to fall upon and deliberately beat it to death with wing and beak. The gratified parents swam gracefully about the mere in which they lived, while the great white oorpse of their son lay, battered and dead, upon the shore. The following year, after another had been bora to them and in infancy carried upon his mother’s back, they began to treat him so roughly that, not being pinioned like them, he wisely flew away and we saw him no more. Curiously enough, geese which have experienced rudeness from swans in the lusty spring have been known to retaliate in the calmer autumn, when the fierceness of their enemy had become mitigated. I have seen a gander leap upon the book of a once arrogant swan and pound away at it in the full enjoyment of gratified revenge. San Francisco Chronicle.