its way to the railway station on the opposite bank of the river. Half
of the jungle across the Berbice was dark, dark green, almost black,
with a fragment of rainbow hung obliquely above it, tangled in
blue-black clouds. A little way up-river the level sun's rays struck
fairly, and the rounded, cloud-like billows of foliage were of palest
sage-green. Our shore was all one blatant glare, flooded already with
the violent light of a tropical day. Against the black Berbice cloud a
hundred fork-tailed flycatchers flashed and vanished alternately as
they swerved and careened. Steadily across its threatening face was
drawn a single line of scarlet--a score of ibises glowing like the
essence of rubies.
VI
HOATZINS AT HOME
The flight of the hoatzin resembles that of an over-fed hen. The
hoatzin's voice is no more melodious than the cry of a peacock, and less
sonorous than an alligator's roar. The bird's grace is batrachian rather
than avian, while the odor of its body resembles that of no bird
untouched by dissolution. Still, zooelogically considered, the hoatzin is
probably the most remarkable and interesting bird living on the earth
today.
It has successfully defied time and space. For it, the dial of the ages
has moved more slowly than for the rest of organic life, and although
living and breathing with us today, yet its world is an affair of two
dimensions--a line of thorny saplings threaded along the muddy banks of
a few tropical waters.
A bird in a cage cannot escape, and may be found month after month
wherever the cage is placed. A stuffed bird in a case may resist
disintegration for a century. But when we go to look for the bluebirds
which nest in the orchard, they may have flown a half mile away in their
search for food. The plover which scurries before us today on the beach
may tonight be far away on the first lap of his seven thousand mile
flight to the southward.
The hoatzin's status lies rather with the caged bird. In November in New
York City an Englishman from British Guiana said to me, "Go to the
Berbice River, and at the north end of the town of New Amsterdam, in
front of Mr. Beckett's house, you will find hoatzins." Six months later
as I drove along a tropical river road I saw three hoatzins perched on a
low thorn bush at the river's edge in front of a house. And the river
was the Berbice, and the house that of Mr. Beckett.
Thus are the hoatzins independent of space, as all other flying birds
know it, and in their classic reptilian affinities,--voice, actions,
arms, fingers, habits,--they bring close the dim epochs of past time,
and renew for our inspection the youth of bird-life on the earth. It is
discouraging ever to attempt to translate habits fraught with so
profound a significance into words, or to make them realistic even with
the aid of photographs.
We took a boat opposite Mr. Beckett's house, and paddled slowly with the
nearly-flood tide up the Berbice River. It was two o'clock, the hottest
time of the day. For three miles we drifted past the chosen haunts of
the hoatzins. All were perched in the shade, quiet in the intense heat,
squatting prostrate or sleepily preening their plumage. Now and then we
saw a bird on her nest, always over the water. If she was sitting on
eggs she sat close. If young birds were in the nest she half-crouched,
or perched on the rim, so that her body cast a shadow over the young.
The vegetation was not varied. Muckamucka was here and there in the
foreground, with an almost solid line of bunduri pimpler or thorn tree.
This was the real home of the birds, and this plant forms the background
whenever the hoatzin comes to mind. It is a growth which loves the
water, and crowds down so that the rising of the tide, whether fresh or
brackish, covers the mud in which it stands, so that it appears to be
quite as aquatic as the mangrove which, here and there, creeps out
alongside it.
The pimpler bears thorns of the first magnitude, often double, recurved
and at such diabolically unexpected places, that like barbed wire, it is
impossible to grasp anywhere without drawing blood. Such a
chevaux-de-frise would defend a trench against the most courageous
regiment. The stems were light gray, greening toward the younger shoots,
and the foliage was pleasantly divided into double lines of locust-like
leaflets.
The plants were in full flower,--dainty, upright panicles of
wisteria-like pea-blooms, pale violet and white with tiny buds of
magenta. A faint, subdued perfume drifted from them through the tangle
of branches. The fruit was ripening on many plants, in clusters of
green, semi-circular, flat, kidney pods. The low branches stretched
gracefully waterwards in long sweeping curves. On these at a fork or at
the crossing of two distinct branches, the hoatzins placed their nests,
and with the soft-tissued leaflets they packed their capacious crops and
fed their young.
Besides these two plants, which alone may be considered as forming the
principal environment, two blooms were conspicuous at this season; a
deep-calyxed, round blossom of rich yellow,--an hibiscus, which the
Indians called makoe, and from the bark of which they made most
excellent rope. The other flower was a vine which crept commonly up over
the pimpler trees, regardless of water and thorns, and hung out twin
blossoms in profusion, pink and pinkish-white, trumpet-shaped, with
flaring lips.
The mid-day life about this haunt of hoatzins was full of interest.
Tody-flycatchers of two species, yellow-breasted and streaked, were the
commonest birds, and their little homes, like bits of tide-hung drift,
swayed from the tips of the pimpler branches. They dashed to and fro
regardless of the heat, and whenever we stopped they came within a foot
or two, curiously watching our every motion. Kiskadees hopped along the
water's edge in the shade, snatching insects and occasionally splashing
into the water after small fish. Awkward Guinea green herons, not long
out of the nest, crept like shadow silhouettes of birds close to the
dark water. High overhead, like flecks of jet against the blue sky, the
vultures soared. Green dragonflies whirled here and there, and great
blue-black bees fumbled in and out of the hibiscus, yellowed with pollen
and too busy to stop a second in their day-long labor.
This little area held very strange creatures as well, some of which we
saw even in our few hours' search. Four-eyed fish skittered over the
water, pale as the ghosts of fish, and when quiet, showing only as a
pair of bubbly eyes. Still more weird hairy caterpillars wriggled their
way through the muddy, brackish current--aquatic larvae of a small moth
which I had not seen since I found them in the trenches of Para.
The only sound at this time of day was a drowsy but penetrating
_tr-r-r-r-r-p!_ made by a green-bodied, green-legged grasshopper of good
size, whose joy in life seemed to be to lie lengthwise upon a pimpler
branch, and skreek violently at frequent intervals, giving his wings a
frantic flutter at each utterance, and slowly encircling the stem.
In such environment the hoatzin lives and thrives, and, thanks to its
strong body odor, has existed from time immemorial in the face of
terrific handicaps. The odor is a strong musky one, not particularly
disagreeable. I searched my memory at every whiff for something of which
it vividly reminded me, and at last the recollection came to me--the
smell, delectable and fearfully exciting in former years--of elephants
at a circus, and not altogether elephants either, but a compound of
one-sixth sawdust, another part peanuts, another of strange animals and
three-sixths swaying elephant. That, to my mind, exactly describes the
odor of hoatzins as I sensed it among these alien surroundings.
As I have mentioned, the nest of the hoatzin was invariably built over
the water, and we shall later discover the reason for this. The nests
were sometimes only four feet above high water, or equally rarely, at a
height of forty to fifty feet. From six to fifteen feet included the
zone of four-fifths of the nests of these birds. They varied much in
solidity, some being frail and loosely put together, the dry, dead
sticks which composed them dropping apart almost at a touch. Usually
they were as well knitted as a heron's, and in about half the cases
consisted of a recent nest built upon the foundations of an old one.
There was hardly any cavity at the top, and the coarse network of
sticks looked like a precarious resting place for eggs and an
exceedingly uncomfortable one for young birds.
When we approached a nest, the occupant paid no attention until we
actually came close to a branch, or shook it. She then rose, protesting
hoarsely, and lifting wings and tail as she croaked. At the last moment,
often when only a yard away, she flew off and away to a distance of
fifty feet or more. Watching closely, when she realized that we really
had intentions on her nest, she returned and perched fifteen or twenty
feet away, croaking continually, her mate a little farther off, and all
the hoatzins within sight or hearing joining in sympathetic disharmony,
all with synchronous lifting of tail and wings at each utterance.
The voice of the female is appreciably deeper than that of the male,
having more of a gurgling character, like one of the notes of a
curassow. The usual note of both sexes is an unwritable, hoarse,
creaking sound, quite cicada or frog-like.
Their tameness was astounding, and they would often sit unmoved, while
we were walking noisily about, or focusing the camera within two yards.
If several were sitting on a branch and one was shot, the others would
often show no symptoms of concern or alarm, either at the noise of the
gun or the fall of their companion. A hoatzin which may have been
crouched close to the slain bird would continue to preen its plumage
without a glance downward. When the young had attained their first full
plumage it was almost impossible to distinguish them from the older
members of the flock except by their generally smaller size.
But the heart of our interest in the hoatzins centered in the nestlings.
Some kind Providence directed the time of our visit, which I chose
against the advice of some of the very inhabitants of New Amsterdam. It
turned out that we were on the scene exactly at the right time. A week
either way would have yielded much poorer results. The nestlings, in
seven occupied nests, observed as we drifted along shore, or landed and
climbed among the thorns, were in an almost identical stage of
development. In fact, the greatest difference in size occurred between
two nestlings of the same brood. Their down was a thin, scanty, fuzzy
covering, and the flight feathers were less than a half-inch in length.
No age would have showed to better advantage every movement of wings or
head.
When a mother hoatzin took reluctant flight from her nest, the young
bird at once stood upright and looked curiously in every direction. No
slacker he, crouching flat or awaiting his mother's directing cries.
From the moment he was left alone he began to depend upon the warnings
and signs which his great beady eyes and skinny ears conveyed to him.
Hawks and vultures had swept low over his nest and mother unheeded.
Coolies in their boats had paddled underneath with no more than a glance
upward. Throughout his week of life, as through his parents' and their
parents' parents' lives, no danger had disturbed their peaceful
existence. Only for a sudden windstorm such as that which the week
before had upset nests and blown out eggs, it might be said that for the
little hoatzin chicks life held nothing but siestas and munchings of
pimpler leaves.
But one little hoatzin, if he had any thoughts such as these, failed to
count on the invariable exceptions to every rule, for this day the
totally unexpected happened. Fate, in the shape of enthusiastic
scientists, descended upon him. He was not for a second nonplussed. If
we had concentrated upon him a thousand strong, by boats and by land, he
would have fought the good fight for freedom and life as calmly as he
waged it against us. And we found him no mean antagonist, and far from
reptilian in his ability to meet new and unforeseen conditions.
His mother, who a moment before had been packing his capacious little
crop with predigested pimpler leaves, had now flown off to an adjoining
group of mangroves, where she and his father croaked to him hoarse
encouragement. His flight feathers hardly reached beyond his
finger-tips, and his body was covered with a sparse coating of sooty
black down. So there could be no resort to flight. He must defend
himself, bound to earth like his assailants.
Hardly had his mother left when his comical head, with thick, blunt beak
and large intelligent eyes, appeared over the rim of the nest. His alert
expression was increased by the suspicion of a crest on his crown where
the down was slightly longer. Higher and higher rose his head, supported
on a neck of extraordinary length and thinness. No more than this was
needed to mark his absurd resemblance to some strange, extinct reptile.
A young dinosaur must have looked much like this, while for all that my
glance revealed, I might have been looking at a diminutive Galapagos
tortoise. Indeed this simile came to mind often when I became more
intimate with nestling hoatzins.
Sam, my black tree-climber, kicked off his shoes and began creeping
along the horizontal limbs of the pimplers. At every step he felt
carefully with a calloused sole in order to avoid the longer of the
cruel thorns, and punctuated every yard with some gasp of pain or
muttered personal prayer, "Pleas' doan' stick me, Thorns!"
At last his hand touched the branch, and it shook slightly. The young
bird stretched his mittened hands high above his head and waved them a
moment. With similar intent a boxer or wrestler flexes his muscles and
bends his body. One or two uncertain, forward steps brought the bird to
the edge of the nest at the base of a small branch. There he stood, and
raising one wing leaned heavily against the stern, bracing himself. My
man climbed higher and the nest swayed violently.
Now the brave little hoatzin reached up to some tiny side twigs and
aided by the projecting ends of dead sticks from the nest, he climbed
with facility, his thumbs and forefingers apparently being of more aid
than his feet. It was fascinating to see him ascend, stopping now and
then to crane his head and neck far out, turtlewise. He met every
difficulty with some new contortion of body or limbs, often with so
quick or so subtle a shifting as to escape my scrutiny. The branch ended
in a tiny crotch and here perforce, ended his attempt at escape by
climbing. He stood on the swaying twig, one wing clutched tight, and
braced himself with both feet.
Nearer and nearer crept Sam. Not a quiver on the part of the little
hoatzin. We did not know it, but inside that ridiculous head there was
definite decision as to a deadline. He watched the approach of this
great, strange creature--this Danger, this thing so wholly new and
foreign to his experience, and doubtless to all the generations of his
forbears. A black hand grasped the thorny branch six feet from his
perch, and like a flash he played his next trick--the only remaining one
he knew, one that set him apart from all modern land birds, as the frog
is set apart from the swallow.
The young hoatzin stood erect for an instant, and then both wings of the
little bird were stretched straight back, not folded, bird-wise, but
dangling loosely and reaching well beyond the body. For a considerable
fraction of time he leaned forward. Then without effort, without
apparent leap or jump he dived straight downward, as beautifully as a
seal, direct as a plummet and very swiftly. There was a
scarcely-noticeable splash, and as I gazed with real awe, I watched the
widening ripples which undulated over the muddy water--the only trace of
the whereabouts of the young bird.
It seemed as if no one, whether ornithologist, evolutionist, poet or
philosopher could fail to be profoundly impressed at the sight we had
seen. Here I was in a very real, a very modern boat, with the honk of
motor horns sounding from the river road a few yards away through the
bushes, in the shade of this tropical vegetation in the year nineteen
hundred and sixteen; and yet the curtain of the past had been lifted and
I had been permitted a glimpse of what must have been common in the
millions of years ago. It was a tremendous thing, a wonderful thing to
have seen, and it seemed to dwarf all the strange sights which had come
to me in all other parts of the earth's wilderness. I had read of these
habits and had expected them, but like one's first sight of a volcano in
eruption, no reading or description prepares one for the actual
phenomenon.
I sat silently watching for the re-appearance of the young bird. We
tallied five pairs of eyes and yet many minutes passed before I saw the
same little head and emaciated neck sticking out of the water alongside
a bit of drift rubbish. The only visible thing was the protruding spikes
of the bedraggled tail feathers. I worked the boat in toward the bird,
half-heartedly, for I had made up my mind that this particular brave
little bit of atavism deserved his freedom, so splendidly had he fought
for it among the pimplers. Soon he ducked forward, dived out of sight
and came up twenty feet away among an inextricable tangle of vines. I
sent a little cheer of well wishing after him and we salvaged Sam.
Then we shoved out the boat and watched from a distance. Five or six
minutes passed and a skinny, crooked, two-fingered mitten of an arm
reared upward out of the muddy flood and the nestling, black and
glistening, hauled itself out of water.
Thus must the first amphibian have climbed into the thin air. But the
young hoatzin neither gasped nor shivered, and seemed as self-possessed
as if this was a common occurrence in its life. There was not the
slightest doubt however, that this was its first introduction to water.
Yet it had dived from a height of fifteen feet, about fifty times its
own length, as cleanly as a seal leaps from a berg. It was as if a human
child should dive _two hundred feet_!
In fifteen minutes more it had climbed high above the water, and with
unerring accuracy directly toward its natal bundle of sticks overhead.
The mother now came close, and with hoarse rasping notes and frantic
heaves of tail and wings lent encouragement. Just before we paddled from
sight, when the little fellow had reached his last rung, he partly
opened his beak and gave a little falsetto cry,--a clear, high tone,
tailing off into a guttural rasp. His splendid courage had broken at
last; he had nearly reached the nest and he was aching to put aside all
this terrible responsibility, this pitting of his tiny might against
such fearful odds. He wanted to be a helpless nestling again, to crouch
on the springy bed of twigs with a feather comforter over him and be
stuffed at will with delectable pimpler pap. Such is the normal right
destiny of a hoatzin chick, and the _whee-og!_ wrung from him by the
reaction of safety seemed to voice all this.
VII
A WILDERNESS LABORATORY
Robinson Crusoe had a wreck well stored with supplies, and we inherited
only four walls and a roof. Still, we had a boy Friday--Sam, an ebony
Demeraran, exactly half of whose teeth had been lost in the only
automobile ride he had ever taken. Sam was sent by some personal
Providence--perhaps the god of intelligence bureaus--as the first of our
faithful following in Guiana. Sam had formerly been a warden in the
Georgetown jail, and rumor had it that he left because he saw "jumbies"
in the court where one hundred and nine men had been hung. And surely
that was where jumbies would be found if anywhere. Even Crusoe's man
must have admitted that. How wardenship could be of aid to us in our
scientific work was a puzzle.
Only once before did a servant's previous experience surpass this in
utter uselessness. That was when a Russian chauffeur whom I had taken
on trial found a cowboy saddle in my attic and seriously and proudly
showed me in great detail, with the saddle strapped to the banisters,
how with his long Cossack training he could stand on his neck when going
at full speed! But Sam, like many another servant of the past, was to
prove a treasure.
We had come from New York with a very distinct idea of what we wanted to
do, but no idea at all of just how or where we should begin. On kindly
but conflicting advice and suggestion, we had searched hither and
thither over the coastlands of British Guiana. Everywhere we found
drawbacks. We wanted to be near primeval jungle, we wished to be free of
mosquitoes and other disturbers of long-continued observation. We
desired the seemingly impossible combination of isolation and facility
of communication with the outside world.
In a driving, tropical rainstorm I ascended the Essequibo to Bartica,
and from the hills, as the sun broke through gray clouds, my friend the
rubber planter pointed over two jungle-clad ranges to a great house, a
house with many pillars, a house with roof of pale pink like a giant
_mora_ in full bloom. Then, like the good fairy prince in a
well-regulated tale, he waved his wand toward it, and said, "That is
Kalacoon; take it and use it if you want it." Only his wand was a stout
walking-stick, and for the nonce the fairy prince had taken the form of
a tall, bronzed, very good-looking Englishman, who had carved a rubber
plantation out of the very edge of the jungle, and with wife and small
daughter lived in the midst of his clean-barked trees.
And now we had had a gift of a great house in the heart of the Guiana
wilderness, a house built many years before by one who was Protector of
the Indians. This we were to turn into a home and a laboratory to study
the wild things about us--birds, animals, and insects; not to collect
them primarily, but to photograph, sketch, and watch them day after day,
learning of those characters and habits which cannot be transported to a
museum. And exactly this had not been done before; hence it took on new
fascination.
I had never given serious thought to the details of housekeeping, and I
suddenly realized how much for granted one takes things in civilization.
In New York I had possessed beds and baths and tables, dishes and cooks
and towels, in a spirit of subconsciousness which made one think of them
only if they were not there. Now I had suddenly to think about all these
and other things particularly hard. If it had been the usual camping
duffle of hammock, net, tarpaulin, and frying-pan, that would have been
simple. But when the sugar-bowl is empty, one becomes at once acutely
conscious of it; if it is not, while the hand unbidden manipulates the
tongs, the brain distils or listens to thoughts of opera, science, or
war. Optical eclipse, impelled by familiarity, is often total. However,
we found the Georgetown stores well stocked, and whenever we purchased a
useless thing we found that it could be used for something else. And
sooner or later, everything we possessed was used for something else,
thereby moving one of us to suggest a society for reducing household
articles by half.
But while it was well enough to make a lark of such things when one had
to, we begrudged every minute taken from the new field outspread before
us in every direction. For Kalacoon was on a hilltop and looked out on
the northern third of the horizon over the expanse of three mighty
rivers--the Essequibo, the Mazaruni, and the Cuyuni. And around us was
high second growth, losing itself to the southward in a gigantic, abrupt
wall of the real jungle--the jungle that I knew by experience was more
wonderful than any of the forests of the Far East, of Burma or Ceylon or
Malaysia.
We sat down on some packing-boxes after our first day of indoor labor,
and watched the sun settle slowly beyond the silvered Mazaruni. And a
song, not of the tropics, but bubbling and clear and jubilant as that of
our northern singers, rang out from the single tall palm standing in our
front compound. Clinging to the topmost frond was an oriole, jet as
night, with the gold of sunshine on crown and shoulders and back. He was
singing. While he sang, a second oriole swooped upward between two vanes
of a frond to a small ball of fibers knotted close to the midrib. The
event had come and it developed swiftly.