Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/806

786 and courage, too, lie is a better defender of the nest against midnight marauders. At nine in the morning, with unfailing punctuality, the hen comes to relieve him and take up her position for the day. At the end of the six weeks of sitting, both birds, faithfully as the task has been shared between them, are in a very enfeebled state, and miserably poor and thin." There was one hen which refused to sit, and compelled her mate to do all the work; but at the next nesting the cock gave her a sound drubbing and brought her to terms. Of another couple, the hen suffered an accident and had to be killed. Her mate mourned her long and refused to accept any other spouse; and when the period of mourning was over, and he took another mate, he allowed her to tyrannize over him and keep him in abject fear. The hen ostrich lays every other day; and if, for each egg laid, one is taken from the nest, she will continue laying till she has produced twenty or thirty. If no eggs are taken away, she leaves off laying as soon as she has from fifteen to twenty. Every morning and evening the nest, or shallow indentation in. the ground, is left uncovered for a quarter of an hour, to allow the eggs to cool. The sight of nests thus apparently deserted has probably given rise to the erroneous idea that the ostrich leaves her eggs to hatch in the sun. But, "stupid though she is, she has more sense than to believe in the possibility of the sun hatching her eggs; she is indeed quite aware of the fact that if allowed to blaze down on them with untempered heat, even during the short time she is off the nest, it would be injurious to them; and, therefore, on a hot morning, she does not leave them without first placing on the top of each a good pinch of sand." The charge made against the ostrich's intelligence that, hiding its head in the sand, it imagines itself to be invisible, is declared to be false; but it does other things as foolish, and is well described in Job's words, "Because God hath deprived her of wisdom, neither hath he imparted to her understanding." Ostriches are long-lived creatures, and, however old they may become, they never show any signs of decrepitude, nor do their feathers deteriorate. Their career is usually ended by some accident; "and in about ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the disaster is, in one way or another, the result of the bird's stupidity. There surely does not exist a creature—past early infancy—more utterly incapable of taking care of itself than an ostrich; yet he is full of conceit, and resents the idea of being looked after by his human friends; and when, in spite of all their precautions for his safety, he has succeeded in coming to grief, he quietly opposes every attempt to cure his injuries, and at once makes up his mind to die." The worst and most frequent accidents by which they suffer are broken legs; and their legs are exceedingly brittle. This necessitates the crippled bird being killed, for it admits of no remedy.