Читать книгу The Children's Book of Birds - Olive Thorne Miller - Страница 14

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HOW HE CHANGES HIS CLOTHES

It takes a bird weeks to put on a new suit of clothes. He has nothing but his feathers to protect him from cold and wet, and as feathers cannot grow out in a minute, he would be left naked, and suffer, if he lost them all at once. So he changes his dress one or two feathers at a time.

Some day a feather will drop from each wing. If you could look, you would see that new ones had started out in the same place, and pushed the old ones off. When the new ones are pretty well grown another pair will fall out.

If all dropped out at once, besides suffering with cold he would not be able to fly, and he could not get his living, and anybody could catch him. But losing only one from each side at a time, he always has enough to fly with.

It is the same way with his tail feathers. He loses them in pairs, one from each side at the same time.

AMERICAN GOLDFINCH

The soft feathers that cover his body drop out one by one. Thus all the time he is putting on a new suit he still wears part of the old one. In this way he is never left without clothes for a moment.

Most birds put on their new suits just after the young ones are grown up, and before they all start for the South to spend the winter,—that is, with many of our common birds, in August. At that time they are rather shy, and stop singing. If you did not see one now and then, you might think they were all gone.

Sometimes the new fall suit is not at all like the old one. There is the goldfinch, all summer in bright yellow. When he comes out in his new suit in August, it is dull-colored, much like the one his mate wears all the year, and in winter, when goldfinches fly around in little flocks, they look nearly all alike.

In the spring, the male goldfinch comes out again in yellow. He has two suits a year,—a bright yellow one in the spring, and a dull olive-green for the winter. But his new spring dress is not a full suit. The yellow of the body is all fresh, but the black wings are the same the year round.

Some birds have two, different colored dresses in a year; one they get without changing a feather. Suppose they have feathers of black, with gray on the outside edges. All winter the gray shows and the birds seem to have gray coats. But in spring the gray edges wear or fall off, and the black shows, and then they look as if they had come out in new black suits. It is as if you should take off a gray overcoat and show a black coat under it.

There is another interesting thing about birds' dress. Some of them look like their mates, the father and mother birds so nearly alike that it is hard, sometimes impossible, to tell them apart. But when that is the case, you will notice that the color is not very gay. If the father wears a bright-colored suit, the mother does not look like him.

For this reason the little mother is not too easily seen when she is on her nest. If the goldfinch mother were as bright as her mate, everybody who came near would see her on the nest, and some animal might take her, and leave the young birds to starve to death. That is probably why mother birds dress in such dull colors.

When birds live on the ground, or very near it, in most cases both of the pair wear the dull colors, so they will not easily be seen. Wrens and sparrows and many others are so. But birds who make their nests in holes, or under ground, are often as bright as their mates, because they cannot be seen while sitting, and do not need to wear dull colors.

A curious thing about a bird's color is that the same species, or kind of bird, is darker in one place than another. Where there is much dampness or wet weather, the colors are darker. For instance, a bob-white who lives in Florida, or one who lives in Oregon, will be much darker than his cousin living in New England.