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| Leopold Shows That
Pine Warbler Exists
Most Elusive of Its Family Is Found and Tamed by Murder Suspect. Source: The Chicago Daily News, 2 June 1924 It is a sort of extra sense that protects the wild creatures on the fringe of a menacing civilization-- an instinct unerring, unexplainable. Experts of the Audubon society recalled this to-day as they displayed portions of one of the most remarkable moving pictures of bird life ever filmed. To one unacquainted with such things the reel, which was released from the files of the Michigan state department of natural history, is merely a picture of a student feeding little birds which hop about on his hands and fly fearlessly about his head. But the plot of this film has a dramatic development, an almost uncanny atmostphere and a real climax. The crank turns. The little bird in the picture is the rarest of the American warblers, the Kirtland or pine warbler, a mite of a thing which has constantly refused to become reconciled to man. The habitat of the pine warbler is waste and of the type upon which the works of man are constantly encroaching and of recent years the bird has become so fugitive a creature, so shy even in its maturity, that its very existence has been questioned. Thought It Exterminated. Many ornithologists until a year ago inclined to the theory that the bird had joined those other creatures of American wilds exterminated or at best in a desperate last stand against our merciless civilization. And then came a student to the scrub pine districts of Michigan to set aside the myths of the pine warbler and to accomplish what science had believed impossible. This student was more than an ornithologist, as his accomplishments speedily proved. Alone among the dunes of the pack-pine wastes of Montmorency county he wandered by day and camped by night listening for the seldom-heard song of this most secretive of American birds. Ten momths ago, he located a nest. The birds, which, according to theory, should have disappeared at the approach of man, flew out and looked at the interloper inquisitively. He fed them, examined their home and looked at their young. Goes for Camerman. The next day he went back to a camp of the Michigan natural history department and brought back cameramen and a moving picture outfit. He stood by convincing the skeptical birds that no harm was intended by the intrusion on their privacy, keeping their confidence even while the camera clicked out 1,000 feet of film. During the making of the picture the parent birds ate out of the student's hand or sat on his shoulder loooking perkily at the camerman. The ornithologists with the party stood amazed at the performance despite the old and tired theory that instinct protects the wild creatures and that a sense sharper than that of humans apprises birds of a kind and sympathetic nature. So much for the picture. The student who won the confidence of the pine warblers, who stood the test of their uncanny penetration, was Nathan Leopold, facing the hangman's noose for the murder of a little boy. |
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Page authored: 25 June
1997 -
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