WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Wilderness Babies cover

Wilderness Babies

Chapter 15: CONCLUSION
By Julia Augusta Schwartz
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

Children & Young Adult ReadingNature/Gardening/Animals

About This Book

A series of natural-history sketches presents the early lives of various wild mammals, portraying how each species is born, nurtured, learns to feed, move, and protect itself in its habitat. Each chapter focuses on a different animal—pouch-carrying opossums, sea-cows and whales, hoofed deer, gnawers like beavers and squirrels, burrowing moles, and carnivores such as foxes and wolves—describing nesting, feeding, locomotion, building or digging, seasonal habits like hibernation, and parental care. Simple anecdotes and illustrations emphasize diversity of form and behavior, stages of growth, and the practical skills young animals must acquire to survive in forests, plains, mountains, and waters.

CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION

Countless years have passed since that day, long, long ago, when the first tiny living creature began to grow in the new world of rocks and water. All this time things have been moving and changing. The earth keeps whizzing around the sun, while the sun itself rushes blazing through space. Brooks are rippling; rivers are flowing; seas are rolling their waves against the shores. Now the trees toss their branches in the wind; now the rain sprinkles down from gray clouds, or snow drifts silently over the prairie.

In the spring all the wilderness is green with growing leaves and flowers and grasses. The world is alive with animals. In the water sea creatures are feeding in their places, or floating and swimming here and there. On land there are worms and insects, creeping reptiles and flying birds.

From inland ponds beavers scramble ashore in the dusk to nibble fresh twigs for supper. In southern rivers the manatee crawls over the white sand among the reeds. On island beaches little seals go paddling in safe pools. Out at sea great whales glide through the waves.

On the plains buffalo calves kick up their heels near the grazing herd. Elk, with ears twitching at every strange sound, wander down from upland meadows. In the woods rabbits hop away under the bushes. Little shrews dart from leaf to leaf among the shadows. In wilder spots pointed noses sniff and bright eyes twinkle from the dens of wolves and foxes. Bears shuffle softly through the underbrush, and panthers steal out on tiptoe to their hunting.

In the trees squirrels scamper from branch to branch. Now and then a mother opossum trots by with her pocket full of young ones. Bats fly this way and that in hungry pursuit of insects dancing in the twilight air. Under the ground moles dig busily after worms.

All these mammals and, many others live wild in the United States, and there are many others still, more or less like them, in foreign lands.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.