----Fort Wayne News, 9-30-1899

Telegraph wires, whether strung on poles or laid along the bottom of the sea are harmless, inoffensive things and by no means attractive in appearance. Yet they have numerous enemies, in the animal world as well as the vegetable world. A newly erected lines which runs through the forests of Aroostook, in northern Maine, has been damaged by black bears, which persist in climbing the poles and breaking off the porcelain cups or insulators that support the wires. What singular fancy have bruins taken for these knobs of earthenware can only be conjectured, as bears do not carry their hearts on their sleeves for savants to publish. It has been supposed that he mistakes the insulators for his favorite crab apples, and there is little doubt that he regards them as something good to eat. Perhaps he thinks them as bees' nests. 

At all events, there is a large woodpecker in Norway which is deluded by the humming of the wires in the wind like an Aeolian harp and fancies that there is a nest of insects inside the pole. To reach them he toils for days and pecks great holes into the wooden posts or even through and through them, only to discover, as men have done before him, that the promise feast of delights was a phantom of his own creation and his labors all in vain.

Submitted by Elton Gish