Exactly how it came
about would be interesting to know. Our oriole is an insectivorous
bird, but in some localities it is very destructive in the August
vineyards. It does not become a fruit-eater like the robin, but a
juice-sucker; it punctures the grapes for their unfermented wine.
Here, again, we have a case of modified and adaptive instinct. All
animals are more or less adaptive, and avail themselves of new sources
of food supply. When the southern savannas were planted with rice, the
bobolinks soon found that this food suited them. A few years ago we
had a great visitation in the Hudson River Valley of crossbills from
the north. They lingered till the fruit of the peach orchards had set,
when they discovered that here was a new source of food supply, and
they became very destructive to the promised crop by deftly cutting
out the embryo peaches. All such cases show how plastic and adaptive
instinct is, at least in relation to food supplies. Let me again say
that instinct is native, untaught intelligence, directed outward, but
never inward as in man.

VII. THE ROBIN

Probably, with us, no other bird is so closely associated with country
life as the robin; most of the time pleasantly, but for a brief
season, during cherry time, unpleasantly. His life touches or mingles
with ours at many points--in the dooryard, in the garden, in the
orchard, along the road, in the groves, in the woods. He is everywhere
except in the depths of the primitive forests, and he is always very
much at home. He does not hang timidly upon the skirts of our rural
life, like, say, the thrasher or the chewink; he plunges in boldly and
takes his chances, and his share, and often more than his share, of
whatever is going. What vigor, what cheer, how persistent, how
prolific, how adaptive; pugnacious, but cheery, pilfering, but
companionable!

When one first sees his ruddy breast upon the lawn in spring, or his
pert form outlined against a patch of lingering snow in the brown
fields, or hears his simple carol from the top of a leafless tree at
sundown, what a vernal thrill it gives one! What a train of pleasant
associations is quickened into life!

What pictures he makes upon the lawn! What attitudes he strikes! See
him seize a worm and yank it from its burrow!

I recently observed a robin boring for grubs in a country dooryard. It
is a common enough sight to witness one seize an angle-worm and drag
it from its