The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-08-22

understood duck language is this: That if a hawk or a crow flew near she would give one harsh quack and every one of the chicks would seud into the weeds, and after the danger was past she would give five or six gentle quacks and out they would come, without the least appearance of fear.
 But the greatest performance was the way she impressed it on their minds that it was time that they learned to swim. One foggy, cold morning early in the spring. when they were about a week old. I heard her using some of the worst duck language that l ever heard and the chicks were yelling all kinds of bloody murder. I ran out to learn what was the trouble, and there she was at the edge of the water, grab bing the chicks in her mouth and throwing them in the river, and they were scrambling out so fast that she never had more than half of the brood in the water at one time. l knew that the water and the weather were so cold that she would have them so chilled in a short time that they would all die. so II shut up in the coop and kept her
 there for several days.
 When I again let her out she took the chickens to the water and gave them another lesson in swimming, and she repeated this several times a day, and in three or four days she had them educated so that when she would go
 into the water and call to them to come along they did so without any hesita- tion. She apparently had sense enough not to keep them in the water long at time, and that I call reasoning, for it certainly was not instinct.
 One of the talking crows that l have
 known was owned by a man by the name of Lew Labady, who kept hotel in Petoskey, Mich, and his wifi one day in a fit of anger for some mis- demeanor that the crow had cut up,
 grabbed him and took him out in the yard and chopped his head off, the crow shouting "Oh, don't" as she carried
 him to the block.
 I suppose I should not write this last part, neither do I know as you will publish it, but I was angry at her
 for killing the crow, for had taught him to talk several years before, and
 the offense was small He had un- dertaken to fly off with small bottle | of something, ink probably, and had dropped it, and the bottle broke and made a stain on the carpet Her hus- band would have been willing to re- carpet the room rather than to lose the
 crow, and he was as angry about 1t as was.
 I don't know that all crows could be l taught to talk for it seems reasonable to me that some of them might be
 much more intelligent than others. I
 have known three talking crows, and they all spoke in higher key than
 people commonly do, but not more so than few persons that I have known; but their talk Is very much plainer
 than that of any parrot, and crow
 does not use lot of meaningless words,
 and he knows what he is talking about One of these crows was owned by a
 man that lived in Cena, upper Michi- gan. I don't know as he or the crow,
 either. is living now r not, for it has been a long time since was there, but
 that crowd had a knowledge and com
 mand of wit and repartee that would
 beat the best criminal lawyer that ever tried to tangle witness in his evil dence. I cant recall the mans name | that owned him. The other crowd was shot by mistake for a wild crow, and
 the mans name that owned him was
 Tom Cutler, and he lived in Traverse
 City. Mich. Some of his sons are liv- ing there now.-Forest and Stream.