I
That many animals, particularly cattle and deer, are very fond of salt
we all know, but it is not often that birds show any taste for it, or,
if so, the circumstance has not generally been noted. In 1881, however,
the present writer was residing on Gazelle Peninsula, the northern
portion of the magnificent island of New Britain in the South Pacific,
and had many opportunities of witnessing both cockatoos and wild
pigeons drinking salt water. I was stationed at a place called Kabaira,
the then “furthest-out” trading station on the whole island, and as I
had but little to do in the way of work, I found plenty of time to
study the bird-life in the vicinity. Parrots of several varieties, and
all of beautiful plumage, were very plentiful, and immense flocks of
white cockatoos frequented the rolling, grassy downs which lay between
my home and the German head-station in Blanche Bay, twenty miles
distant, while the heavy forest of the littoral was the haunt of
thousands of pigeons. These latter, though not so large as the Samoan,
or Eastern Polynesian bird, formed a very agreeable change of diet for
us white traders, and by walking about fifty yards from one’s door,
half a dozen or more could be shot in as many minutes.
My nearest neighbour was a German, and one day when we were walking
along the beach towards his station, we noticed some hundreds of
pigeons fly down from the forest, settle on the margin of the water,
and drink with apparent enjoyment. The harbour at this spot was almost
land-locked, the water as smooth as glass without the faintest ripple,
and the birds were consequently enabled to drink without wetting their
plumage. My companion, who had lived many years in New Britain, told me
that this drinking of sea-water was common alike to both cockatoos and
pigeons, and that on some occasions the beaches would be lined with
them, the former birds not only drinking, but bathing as well, and
apparently enjoying themselves greatly.
During the following six months, especially when the weather was calm
and rainy, I frequently noticed pigeons and cockatoos come to the salt
water to drink. At first I thought that as fresh water in many places
bubbled up through the sand at low tide, the birds were really not
drinking the sea-water, but by watching closely, I frequently saw them
walk across these tiny runnels, and make no attempt to drink. Then
again, the whole of the Gazette Peninsula is out up by countless
streams of water; rain falls throughout the year as a rule, and as I
have said, there is always water percolating or bubbling up through the
sand on the beaches at low tide. What causes this unusual habit of
drinking sea-water?
Another peculiarity of the New Britain and New Ireland pigeon is its
fondness for the Chili pepper-berry. During three months of the year,
when these berries are ripe, the birds’ crops are full of them, and
very often their flesh is so pungent, and smells so strongly of the
Chili, as to be quite uneatable.
On all of the low-lying islands of the Ellice, Kings-mill and Gilbert
Groups, a species of snipe are very plentiful. On the islands which
enclose the noble lagoon of Funafuti in the Ellice Group, they are to
be met with in great numbers, and in dull, rainy weather, an ordinarily
good shot may get thirty or forty in a few hours. One day, accompanied
by a native lad, I set out to collect hermit crabs, to be used as fish
bait. These curious creatures are to be found almost anywhere in the
equatorial islands of the Pacific; their shell houses ranging in size
from a pea to an orange, and if a piece of coco-nut or fish or any
other edible matter is left out overnight, hundreds of hermits will be
found gathered around it in the morning. To extract the crabs from
their shells, which are of all shapes and kinds, is a very simple
matter—the hard casing is broken by placing them upon a large stone and
striking them a sharp blow with one of lesser size. My companion and
myself soon collected a heap of “hermits,” when presently he took one
up in his hand, and holding it close to his mouth, whistled softly. In
a few moments the crab protruded one nipper, then another, then its red
antennae, and allowed the boy to take its head between his finger and
thumb and draw its entire body from its shell casing.
“That is the way the _kili_ (snipe) gets the _uga_ (crab) from its
shell,” he said. “The _kili_ stands over the _uga_ and whistles softly,
and the _uga_ puts out his head to listen. Then the bird seizes it in
his bill, gives it a backward jerk and off flies the shell.”
Now I had often noticed that wherever hermit crabs were plentiful along
the outer beaches of the lagoon, I was sure to find snipe, and
sometimes wondered on what the birds fed. Taking up two or three
“hermits” one by one, I whistled gently, and in each case the creature
protruded the nippers, head and shoulders, and moved its antennæ to and
fro as if pleasurably excited.
On the following day I shot three snipe, and in the stomachs of each I
found some quite fresh and some partly digested hermit crabs. The
thick, hard nippers are broken off by the bird before he swallows the
soft, tender body.
In a recent number of _Chambers’s Journal_ the present writer was much
interested in a short paragraph dealing with the commercial value of
the skin of the shark, and, having had many years’ experience as a
trader and supercargo in the South Seas, desires to add some further
information on a somewhat interesting subject.
In all the equatorial islands of the North and South Pacific, shark
fishing is a very profitable industry to the natives, and every trading
steamer or sailing vessel coming into the ports of Sydney or Auckland
from the islands of the mid-Pacific, always brings some tons of shark
fins and tails and shark skins. The principal market for the former is
Hong Kong, but the Chinese merchants of the Australasian Colonies will
always buy sharks’ fins and tails at from 6d. to 11d. per lb., the fins
bringing the best price on account of the extra amount of glutinous
matter they contain, and the which are highly relished by the richer
classes of Chinese as a delicacy. The tails are also valued as an
article of food in China; and, apart from their edible qualities, have
a further value as a base for clear varnishes, &c.; and I was informed
by a Chinese tea-merchant that the glaze upon the paper coverings of
tea-chests was due to a preparation composed principally of the refuse
of sharks’ fins, tails, and skins.
All the natives of the Gilbert, Kingsmill, and other Pacific equatorial
islands are expert shark fishermen; but the wild people of Ocean Island
(Paanopa) and Pleasant Island (Naura), two isolated spots just under
the equator, surpass them all in the art of catching jackshark. It was
the fortunate experience of the writer to live among these people for
many years, and to be inducted into the native method of
shark-catching. In frail canoes, made of short pieces of wood, sewn
together with coco-nut fibre, the Ocean Islanders will venture out with
rude but ingeniously contrived _wooden_ hooks, and capture sharks of a
girth (_not_ length) that no untrained European would dare to attempt
to kill from a well-appointed boat, with a good crew.
Shark-catching is one of _the_ industries of the Pacific, and a very
paying industry too. Five-and-twenty years ago there were quite a dozen
or more schooners sailing out of Honolulu, in the Hawaiian Islands, to
the isolated atolls of the North Pacific—notably Palmyra and Christmas
Islands—where sharks could be caught by the thousand, and the crews,
who were engaged on a “lay,” like whalemen, made “big money”; many of
them after a six months’ cruise drawing 500 dollars—a large sum for a
native sailor.
The work is certainly hard, but it is exciting, and the writer will
always remember with pleasure a seven months’ shark-fishing cruise he
once had in the North Pacific, the genial comrades—white men and
brown—and the bag of dollars handed over to him by the owners when the
ship was paid off in Honolulu.