How animals talk

This is a chapter on the wing drill of birds, the swarming of bees, the panics and unseasonal migrations of larger or smaller beasts, and other curious phenomena in which the wild creatures of a flock or herd all act in unison, doing the same thing at the same time, as if governed by a single will rather than by individual motives. If it should turn out that the single will were expressed in a voice or cry, or even in a projected impulse, then are we again face to face with our problem of animal communication.

Of the fact of collective action there is no doubt, many naturalists having witnessed it; and there is also a strictly orthodox explanation. Thus, when [112]you see a large flock of crows “drilling” in the spring or autumn, rising or falling or wheeling all together with marvelous precision, the ornithologists resolve the matter by saying that the many crows act as one crow because they follow a “collective impulse”; that is, because the same impulse to rise or fall or wheel seizes upon them all at precisely the same moment. And this they tell you quite simply, as if pointing out an obvious fact of natural history, when in reality they are showing you the rarest chimera that ever looked out of a vacuum.

Now the wonderful wing drill of certain birds has something in it which I cannot quite fathom or understand, not even with a miracle of collective impulse to help me; yet I have observed two characteristics of the ordered flight which may help to dispel the fog of assumption that now envelops it. The first is, that the drill is seen only when an uncommonly large number of birds of the same kind are gathered together, on a sunny day of early spring, as a rule, or in the perfection of autumn weather.

The starlings1 furnish us an excellent example [113]of this peculiarity. For months at a stretch you see them about the house, first in pairs, next in family groups, then in larger companies, made up, I think, of birds raised in the same neighborhood and probably all more or less related; but though you watch these companies attentively from dawn to dusk, you shall never see them going through any unusual wing drill. Then comes an hour when flocks of starlings appear on all sides, heading to a common center. They gather in trees here or there about the edges of a great field or a strip of open beach, all jabbering like the blackbirds, which they imitate in their cries, flitting about in ceaseless commotion, but apparently keeping their family or tribal organization intact. Suddenly, as at a signal, they all launch themselves toward the center of the field; the hundred companies unite in one immense flock, and presto! the drill is on. The birds are no longer individuals, but a single-minded myriad, which wheels or veers with such precision that the ash of their ten-thousand wings when they turn is like the flicker of a signal-glass in the sun.

The same characteristic of uncommon numbers holds true of the crows and, indeed, of all other species of birds, save one, that ever practise the wing drill. Wild geese when in small companies, each a family unit, have a regular and beautiful [114]flight in harrow-shaped formation; but I have never witnessed anything like a wing drill among them save on one occasion, when a thousand or more of the birds were gathered together for a few days of frolic before beginning the southern migration. Nor have I ever seen the drill among thrushes or warblers or sparrows or terns or seagulls, which sometimes gather in uncounted numbers, but which do not, apparently, have the same motive that leads crows or starlings to unite in a kind of rhythmic air-dance on periodic occasions.

A second marked characteristic of the wing drill is that it is invariably a manifestation of play or sport, and that the individual birds, though they keep the order of the play marvelously well, show in their looks and voices a suppressed emotional excitement. The drill is never seen when birds are migrating or feeding or fleeing from danger, though thousands of them may be together at such a time, but only when they assemble in a spirit of fun or exercise, and their bodily needs are satisfied, and the weather or the barometer is just right, and no enemy is near to trouble them. Whatever their motive or impulse, therefore, it is certainly not universal or even widespread among the birds, since most of them do not practise the drill; nor is it in the least like that mysterious impulse which suddenly sets all the squirrels of a region in [115]migration, or calls the lemmings to hurry over plain and forest and mountain till they all drown themselves in the distant sea; for no sooner is the brief drill over than the companies scatter quietly, each to its own place, and the individual birds are again alert, inquisitive, well balanced, precisely as they were before.

The drill is seen at its best among the plover, I think; and, curiously enough, these are the only birds I know that practise it frequently, in small or large numbers and in all weathers. I have often watched a flock come sweeping in to my decoys, gurgling like a thousand fifes with bubbles in them; and never have I met these perfectly drilled birds, which stay with us but a few hours on their rapid journey from the far north to the far south, without renewed wonder at their wildness, their tameness, their incomprehensible ways. That you may visualize our problem before I venture an explanation, here is what you may see if you can forget your gun to observe nature with a deeper interest:

You have risen soon after midnight, called by the storm and the shrilling of passing plover, and long before daylight you are waiting for the birds on the burnt-over plain. Your “stand” is a hole in the earth, hidden by a few berry-bushes; and before you, at right angles with the course of the storm (for plover always wheel to head into the [116]wind when they take the ground), are some scores of rudely painted decoys. As the day breaks you see against the east a motion as of wings, and your call rings out wild and clear, to be echoed on the instant. In response to your whistle the distant motion grows wildly fantastic; it begins to whirl and eddy, as if a wisp of fog were rolling swiftly down-wind; only in some mysterious fashion the fog holds together, and in it are curious flickerings. Those are plover, certainly; no other birds have that perfect unity of movement; and now, since they are looking for the source of the call they have just heard, you throw your cap in the air or wave a handkerchief to attract attention. There is an answering flash of white from the under side of their wings as the plover catch your signal and turn all at once to meet it. Here they come, driving in at terrific speed straight at you!

It is better to stop calling now, because the plover will soon see your decoys; and these birds when on the ground make no sound except a low, pulsating whistle of welcome or recall. This is uttered but seldom, and unless you can imitate it, which is not likely, your whistling will do no good. Besides, it could not possibly be heard. Listen to that musical babel, and let your nerves dance to it! In all nature there is nothing to compare for utter wildness with the fluting of incoming plover. [117]

On they come, hundreds of quivering lines, which are the thin edges of wings, moving as one to a definite goal. Their keen eyes caught the first wave of your handkerchief in the distance; and now they see their own kind on the ground, as they think, and their babel changes as they begin to talk to them. Suddenly, and so instantaneously that it makes you blink, there is a change of some kind in every quivering pair of wings. At first, in the soft light of dawn, you are sure that the plover are still coming, for you did not see them turn; but the lines grow smaller, dimmer, and you know that every bird in the flock has whirled, as if at command, and is now heading straight away. You put your fingers to your lips and send out the eery plover call again and again; but it goes unheeded in that tumult of better whistling. The quivering lines are now all blurred in one; with a final flicker they disappear below a rise of ground; the birds are gone, and you cease your vain calling. Then, when you are thinking you will never see that flock again, a cloud of wings shoot up from the plain against the horizon; they fall, wheel, rise again in marvelous flight, not as a thousand individuals but as a unit, and the lines grow larger, clearer, as the plover come sweeping back to your decoys once more.

Such is the phenomenon as I witnessed it repeatedly [118]on the Nantucket moors, many years ago. The only way I can explain the instantaneous change of flight is by the assumption, no longer strange or untested, that from some alarmed plover on the fringe or at the center of the flock a warning impulse is sent out, and the birds all feel and obey it as one bird. That the warning is a silent one I am convinced, for it seems impossible that any peculiar whistle could be heard or understood in that wild clamor of whistling. Nor is it a satisfactory hypothesis that one bird sees the danger or suspects the quality of the decoys, and all the others copy his swift flight; for in that case there must be succession or delay or straggling in the turning, and the impression left on the eye is not of succession, but of almost perfect unity of movement.

The only other explanation of the plovers’ action is the one commonly found in the bird-books, to which I have already briefly referred, and which we must now examine more narrowly. It assumes that all the birds of a migrating flock are moved not by individual wills, but by a collective impulse or instinct, which affects them all alike at the same instant. In support of this favorite theory we are told to consider the bees, which are said to have no individual motives, and no need for them, since they blindly follow a swarm or hive instinct [119]that makes them all precisely alike in their actions. The same swarm instinct appears often in the birds, but less strongly, because they are more highly developed creatures, with more need and therefore more capacity for individual incentive.

This illustration of the hive is offered so confidently and accepted so readily, as if it were an axiom of natural history, that one hesitates to disturb the ancient idol in its wonted seat. Yet one might argue that any living impulse, whether in bees or birds, must proceed from a living source, and, if that be granted, speculate on the absorbing business of a nature or a heaven that should be perpetually interfering in behalf of every earthly flock or swarm or herd by sending the appropriate impulse at precisely the right moment. And when our speculation is at an end, I submit the fact that, when I have broken open a honey-tree in the woods, one bee falls upon the sweets to gorge himself withal, while another from the same swarm falls angrily upon me and dies fighting; which seems to upset the collective-impulse idol completely.

I must confess here that I know very little about bees. They are still a mystery to me, and I would rather keep silence about them until I find one bee that I fancy I understand, or one man who offers something better than a very hazy or mystical [120]explanation of a bee’s extraordinary action. Yet I have watched long hours at a hive, have handled a swarm without gloves or mask, and have performed a few experiments—enough to convince me that the collective-impulse theory does not always hold true to fact even among our honey-makers. Indeed, I doubt that it ever holds true, or that there is in nature any such mysterious thing as a swarm or flock or herd impulse.

In the first place, the bees of the same swarm do not look alike or act alike except superficially; at least I have not so observed them. Study the heads or the feet of any two bees under a glass, and you shall find as much variety as in the heads or feet of any other two creatures of the same kind, whether brute or human. The lines of difference run smaller, to be sure; but they are always there. In action also the bees are variable; they do marvelously wise things at one moment, or marvelously stupid things at another; but they do not all and always do the same thing under the same circumstances, for when I have experimented with selected bees from the same hive I have noticed very different results; which leads me to suspect that even here I am dealing with individuals rather than with detached fragments of a swarm. It is hard, for example, to make a trap so simple that an imprisoned bee will find his way out of it; [121]but when by great ingenuity you do at last make a trap so very simple that it seems any creature with legs must walk out by the open door, perhaps one bee in five will do the trick; while the other four wait patiently until they die for more simplicity.

Again, while your eye often sees unity of action among the wild creatures, neither your reading nor your own reason will ever reveal a scrap of positive evidence that there is in nature any such convenient thing (humanly convenient, that is, for explanations) as a swarm or flock instinct; though, like the mythical struggle for existence, we are forever hearing about it or building theories upon it. So far as we know anything about instinct, it is neither collective nor incorporeal. It is, to use the definition of Mark Hopkins, which is as good as another and beautifully memorable, “a propensity prior to experience and independent of instruction.” And the only needful addition to this high-sounding definition is, that it is a “propensity” lodged in an individual, every time. It is not and cannot be lodged in a swarm or a hive; you must either put it into each of two bees or else put it between them, leaving them both untouched. In other words, the swarm instinct has logically no abiding-place and no reality; it is a castle in the air with no solid foundation to rest on. [122]

On its practical or pragmatic side also the theory is a failure, since the things bees are said to do in obedience to an incorporeal swarm instinct are more naturally and more reasonably explained by other causes. Bees swarm, apparently, in the lead or under the influence of individuals; and it needs only a pair of eyes to discover that there are plenty of individual laggards and blunderers in the process. They grow angry not all at once, but successively; not because a swarm instinct impels them to anger, but because one irritated bee gives off a pungent odor or raises a militant buzzing, and the others smell the odor or hear the buzzing and are inflamed by it, each through his own senses and by the working of his own motives. On a hot day you will see a few bees fanning air into the hive with their wings, and when these grow weary others take their places; but if it were a swarm instinct that impelled them, you would see all the bees fanning or all sweltering at the same moment. As for the honey-making instinct, on any early-spring day you will find a few bees working in the nearest greenhouse, while the others, which are supposed to be governed by the same collective impulse, are comfortably torpid in the hive or else eating honey faster than these enterprising ones can make it.

I judge, therefore, that the communistic bees [123]have some individual notions, and any show of individuality is so at variance with the common-impulse theory that it seems to illustrate Spencer’s definition of tragedy, which is, “a theory slain by a fact.” In short, bees have our common social instinct highly developed, or overdeveloped, and possibly they have also, like all the higher orders, a stronger or weaker instinct of imitation; but these are very different matters, more natural and more consistent with the facts than is the alleged swarm instinct.

A scientific friend, the most observant ornithologist I have ever met, has just offered an interesting explanation of the flock or herd phenomena we are here considering. He finds little evidence of a swarm instinct, as distinct from our familiar social instinct; but he has often marveled at the wing drill of birds, and has twice witnessed an alarm or warning of danger spread silently among a herd of scattered beasts; and he accounts for the observed facts by the supposition that the minds (or what corresponds to the minds) of the lower orders are often moved not from within, but from without—that is, not by instinct or by sense impressions, not by what they or others of their kind may see or hear, but by some external and unknown influence. My caribou rushed away, he thinks, and my incoming plover turned as one [124]bird from my decoys, because a warning impulse fell upon them at a moment when they were in danger, but knew it not; and they obeyed it, as they obey all their impulses, without conscious thought or knowledge of what they are doing or why they are doing it.

Here is some suggestion of a very modern psychology which is inclined to regard the mind as a thought-receiving rather than as a thought-producing instrument, and with that I have some sympathy; but here is also a rejuvenation of the incorporeal swarm instinct and other fantastic or romantic notions of animals which preclude observation. If the anima of a bird or beast is so constituted that it can receive impulses from a mysterious and unknown source, what is to prevent it from receiving such silent impulses from another anima like itself? And why seek an unseen agent for the warning to my caribou or my plover when one of the creatures saw the danger and was enough moved by it to sound a mental tocsin?

The trouble with my friend’s explanation, and with all others I have thus far heard or read, is twofold. First, like the swarm-impulse theory, it really explains nothing, but avoids one mystery or difficulty by taking refuge in another. There was a Hindu philosopher who used to teach, after the manner of his school, that the earth stood [125]fast because it rested on the back of a great elephant; which was satisfactory till a thoughtful child asked, “But the elephant, what does he stand on?” So when I see intelligent caribou or plover fleeing from an unsensed danger, and am told that they have received an impulse from without, I am bound to ask, “Where did that impulse come from, and who sent it?” For emotional impulses do not drop like rain from the clouds, or fall like apples from unseen trees; they must have their source in a living, intelligent being of some kind, who must feel the impulse before sending it to others. No other explanation is humanly comprehensible.

This leads to the second objection to the theory of external impulse, and to every other notion of a collective or incorporeal swarm instinct—namely, that it contradicts all the previous experience of the wild creature, or at least all educative experience, which lies plain and clear to our observation. To each bird and animal are given individual senses, individual wit and a personal anima; and each begins his mortal experience not in a great flock or herd, but always in solitary fashion, under the care and guidance of a mother animal that has a saving knowledge of a world in which the little one is a stranger. Thus, I watch the innocent fawn when it begins to follow [126]the wary old doe, or the fledgling snipe as it leaves the nest under expert guidance, or the wonder-eyed cub coming forth from its den at the call of the gaunt old she-wolf. In each case I see a mother intelligently caring for her young, leading them to food, warding them from danger, calling them now to assemble or now to scatter; and before my eyes these ignorant youngsters quickly learn to adapt themselves to the mother’s ways and to obey her every signal. Sometimes I see them plainly when some manner of silent communication passes among them (something perhaps akin to that which passes when you catch a friend’s eye and send your thought or order to him across a crowded room), and it has even seemed to me, as recorded elsewhere in our observation of wolf and fox dens, that the young understand this silent communication more readily than they learn the meaning of audible cries expressive of food or danger.

Such is the wild creature’s earliest experience, his training to accommodate himself to the world, and to ways that wiser creatures of his own kind have found good in the world. When his first winter draws near he is led by his mother to join the herd or pack or migrating flock; and he is then ready not for some mysterious new herd or flock instinct, but for the same old signals that have served well to guide or warn him ever since [127]he was born. I conclude, therefore, naturally and reasonably, that my caribou broke away and my incoming plover changed their flight because one of their number detected danger and sent forth a warning impulse, which the others obeyed promptly because they were accustomed to just such communications. There was nothing unnatural or mysterious or even new in the experience. So far as I can see or judge, there is no place or need for a collective herd or flock impulse, and the birds and beasts have no training or experience by which to interpret such an impulse if it fell upon them out of heaven.

Our human experience, moreover, especially that which befalls on the borderland of the subconscious world where the wild creatures mostly live, may give point and meaning to our natural philosophy. There are emotions, desires, impulses which may be conveyed by shouting; and there are others which may well be told without shouting, or even without words. A cheerful man radiates cheerfulness; a strong man, strength; a brave man, courage (we do not know to what extent or with what limitations); and a woman may be more irritated by a man who says nothing than by a man who says too much. These common daily trials may be as side-lights on the tremendous fact that love, fear, hate,—every intense emotion is a [128]force in itself, a force to be reckoned with, apart from the cry or the look by which it is expressed; that all such emotions project themselves outward; and that possibly, or very probably, there is some definite medium to convey them, as an unknown medium which we call “ether” conveys the waves of light.

It is true that we habitually receive such emotional impulses from others by means of our eyes or ears; but sometimes we apparently imbibe them through our skin, as Anthony Trollope said he learned Latin, and once in a way we receive them from another without knowing or thinking of the process at all. It is noteworthy that the most companionable people in the world are silent people, especially a silent friend, and that the silence of any man is invariably more eloquent than his speech. The silence of one man rests you like a melody; the silence of another bores you to yawning, perhaps because it is a “dead” silence; the quietude of a third excites your curiosity to such an extent that, for once in your life, you behave like a perfectly natural animal; that is, you go round the silent one, as it were, view him mentally from all sides, sniff at his opinions from leeward, whir your wings in his face like a sparrow, or stamp your foot at him like a rabbit—all this to stir him up and to uncover what interesting [129]thing lies behind his silence. And why? Simply because every living man is silently, unconsciously projecting his real thought or feeling, and you are unconsciously understanding it or else making a vain conscious effort in that direction.

Such experiences are commonly confined to a room, to the circle of an open fire; but they are not limited by necessity to any narrow reach, since there is nothing in a wall to hinder a man’s love or hate from passing through, or in the air to check its far-going, or in the nature of another man to prevent its reception. The influence of one person’s unvoiced will or purpose or warning or summons upon another person at a distance, should it turn out more common than we now believe possible because of our habit of speech, would be nothing unnatural or mysterious, but rather a true working of the subconscious or animal mind, which had its own way of communication before ever speech was invented.

Whitman, who sometimes got hold of the tail end of philosophy (and who was wont to believe he could drag it out, like a trapped woodchuck, and whirl it around his head with barbaric whoops), was often seen at the burrow of this thought-transference doctrine:

Again, our familiar human experience may throw some clearer light than ever comes from the laboratory of animal psychologists upon the action of gregarious brutes in their so-called blind panics, when they are said to be governed by some extraneous or non-individual herd impulse. How such a theory originated is a puzzle to one who has closely observed animals in the open, since their panics are never “blind,” and their “extraneous” impulse may often be traced to an alarmed animal of their own kind, or even to an excited human being, whose emotions are animal-like both in their manifestation and in their irritating effect. A dog is more easily roused by human than by canine excitement. A frightened rider sends his fear or irresolution in exaggerated form into the horse beneath him. The herd of swine that ran down a steep place into the sea were [131]possessed, I should say, not by exorcised demons, but by the hysteria received directly from some man or woman of the excited crowd in the immediate neighborhood. Panic is more infectious than any fever, and knows no barriers between brute and human. Indeed, in a frightened crowd in the Subway, in a theater where smoke appears, or in any other scene of emotional excitement, you may in a few minutes observe actions more panicky, more suggestive of a herd impulse (if there be such a fantastic thing in orderly nature), than can be seen in a whole lifetime of watching wild animals.

In my head at this moment is the vivid impression of a night when I was caught and carried away by a crowd of Italian socialists, twenty thousand frenzied men and a few ferocious women, that first eddied like a storm-tide about the great square under the cathedral at Milan, howling, shrieking, imprecating, and then poured tumultuously through choked streets to hurl paving-blocks at the innocent roof of the railroad station, as at a symbol of government. The roof was of glass, and the clattering smash of it seemed to get on the nerves of men, like the cry of sick-em! to an excited dog, rousing them to a senseless fury of destruction. Clear and thrilling above the tumult a bugle sang, like a note from heaven, and into [132]the seething mass of humanity charged a squadron of cavalry, striking left or right with the flats of their sabers, raising a new hubbub of shrieks and imprecations as the weaker were trampled down. Fear? That crowd knew no more of fear just then than an upturned hive of bees. They met the charge with a roar, a hoarse, solid shout that seemed to sweep the cavalry away like smoke in the wind. Unarmed men swarmed at the horses like enraged baboons, hurling stones or curses as they went. The rush ended in a triumphant yell, and riderless horses, their eyes and nostrils aflame, went plunging, kicking, squealing through the pandemonium.

There must have been something tremendously animal in the scene, after all; for when I recall it now I see, as if Memory had carved her statue of the event, an upreared horse with a crumpled rider toppling from the saddle; and I hear not the shouts or curses of men, but the horrible scream of a maddened brute.

It was the night, many years ago, when news of disaster to the Italian army at Adowa broke loose, after being long suppressed, and I learned then for the first time what emotional excitement means when the gates are all down. One had to hold himself against it, as against a flood or a mighty wind. To yield, to lose self-control even for an instant, was to find oneself howling, reaching [133]for paving-blocks, seeking an enemy, lifting a bare fist against charging horse or swinging steel, like the other lunatics. I caught a man by the shoulders, held him, and bade him in his own language tell me what the row was about; but he only stared at me wildly, his mouth open. I caught another, and he struck at my face; a third, and he shrieked like a trapped beast. Only one gave me a half-coherent answer, a man whom I dragged from under a saber and pushed into a side-street. His dear Ambrogio had been conscripted by the government, he howled (I suppose they had sent his son or brother with a disaffected Milanese regiment on the African adventure), and they were all robbers, oppressors, murderers—he finished by jerking loose from my grasp and hurling himself, yelling, into the mob again.

Had I been a visiting caribou, watching that amazing scene and knowing nothing of its motive, I might easily have concluded that some mysterious herd impulse was driving all these creatures to they knew not what; but, being human, I knew perfectly well that even this unmanageable crowd had taken its cue from some leader; that the senseless emotion which inflamed them had originated with individuals, who had some ground for their passion; and that from the individual the excitement spread in pestilential fashion until the whole [134]mob caught it and bent to it, as a field of grass bends to the storm.

Therefore (and I hope you keep the thread of logic through a long digression), when I go as a man among caribou or wolves or plover or crows, and see the whole herd or pack or flock acting as one, as if swayed by a single will, I see no reason why I should evoke an incorporeal swarm impulse, or “call a spirit from the vasty deep” of the unknown to explain their similarity of action, since there are natural causes which may account for the matter perfectly—familiar causes, too, which still influence men and women as they influence the remote wood folk.

No, this is not a new animal psychology; it is rather an attempt to banish the delusion that there is any such thing as a distinct animal psychology. Science has many forms, and still plenty of delusions, but there is a basic principle to which she holds steadily—namely, that Nature is of one piece because her laws are constant. It follows that, if you know anything of a surety about your own mind, you may confidently apply the knowledge to any other mind in the universe, whether in the heavens above or the earth beneath or the waters under the earth. The only question is, How far may the term “mind” be properly applied to the brute? [135]

That unanswered question does not immediately concern us, for in speaking of mind we commonly mean the conscious or reasoning human article, and we are dealing here with the subconscious mind, which seems to work after the same fashion whether it appears on two legs or four. A dog does not know why he becomes excited in a commotion that does not personally concern him, or why he feels impelled to hasten to an outcry from an unknown source, or why he looks up, contrary to all his habits, when everybody else is looking up; and neither does a man know why he does just such things. Man and brute both act in obedience to something deeper, more primal and more dependable than reason, and in this subconscious field they are akin; otherwise it would be impossible for a man ever to train or to understand a brute, and our companionable dogs would be as distant as the seraphim.

When, therefore, the same unreasoning actions that are attributed to a mysterious collective impulse among birds or animals are found among men to depend on a succession of individual impulses, it is good psychology as well as good natural history to dismiss the whole herd instinct as another thoughtless myth. The familiar social and imitative instincts, the contagion of excitement, the outward projection of emotional impulses, [136]the sensitive bodily nature of an animal which enables him to respond to such impulses even when they are unaccompanied by a voice or cry,—these are comparatively simple and “sensible” matters which explain all the phenomena of flock or herd life more naturally and more reasonably.

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