Swimming hastily to the spot to try to
discover what had happened, I found one of my woodpeckers floating
motionless with outspread wings. All was over. Had I been a minute or
two earlier, I might have saved him. He had glanced on the water I
suppose in pursuit of a moth, was unable to rise from it, and died
struggling, as I nearly did at this same spot. Like me he seemed to
have lost his mind in blind confusion and fear. The water was warm,
and had he kept still with his head a little above the surface, he
would sooner or later have been wafted ashore. The best aimed flights
of birds and man "gang aft agley," but this was the first case I had
witnessed of a bird losing its life by drowning.
Doubtless accidents to animals are far more common than is generally
known. I have seen quails killed by flying against our house when
suddenly startled. Some birds get entangled in hairs of their own
nests and die. Once I found a poor snipe in our meadow that was unable
to fly on account of difficult egg-birth. Pitying the poor mother, I
picked her up out of the grass and helped her as gently as I could,
and as soon as the egg was born she flew gladly away.
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