KANGAROOS AND DANCING BIRDS
Australia is a country where every other animal carries its baby in
its breast pocket. It has one hundred and ten different varieties
of marsupials, or animals which have in their bellies pouches in
which they carry their young. Some of these animals are taller than
a man and some are no bigger than your thumb. Some climb trees, some
gallop over the plains, and some spend more than half their time in
the water. During my travels I have seen certain varieties in their
natural surroundings and I have examined and photographed others in
the zoölogical gardens. Every city here has its zoölogical garden, and
every town has its museum, so that there is no trouble seeing the wild
animals of Australia, either stuffed or alive.
What interests me most is the kangaroo. Before I came here I had
an idea that all kangaroos were alike. I now know that there are
forty-nine varieties, ranging in size from the great gray kangaroo, the
male of which measures from nose to tail tip more than seven feet, down
to the kangaroo rabbit and kangaroo rat. The Sydney and Melbourne zoos
have specimens of nearly every kind. In them I saw kangaroos taller
than I am, jumping around in fields inclosed by wire fences. They had
enormous hind legs, which sent them flying through the air as though
they were on steel springs. They can leap thirty feet at a jump, and
gallop over the country faster on two legs than a horse can on four.
But, as they tire quickly, horses can overtake them in the end.
The largest of the kangaroos are the red and the gray varieties, which
are found all over Australia. Horses and dogs are bred for the sport
of hunting them. The dogs are a cross between the greyhound and the
deerhound, fleet of foot and very fierce. When brought to bay, the big
kangaroo is dangerous and will attack a dog or a man. With its back
against a tree it waits for its enemy. A dog that comes too near is
grasped in the kangaroo’s forearms, hugged tightly to its breast, and
disembowelled with a rip of one of its clawed feet. The ivory-like
claws on the kangaroo’s hind feet are three or four inches in length,
and cut like knives. The kangaroo can swim as well as run, and when
chased, it will, if possible, take to the water. If a dog follows, the
kangaroo tries to drown it by holding it under water.
The kangaroos go about in pairs. One usually sees a male and a female
together and the little head of a baby kangaroo is often spied sticking
out of the pouch of the mother. When it first sees the light of day
the baby kangaroo is not more than an inch long. It has no hair and
is almost transparent, like an earthworm. Its mother puts it into her
pouch, and there it lies and sucks until it grows big enough to come
forth and eat grass. Even then it crawls back into the pouch whenever
it is tired or at the least sign of danger, poking its head out now
and then to see if the coast is clear. It leaves the pouch for good
after eight or nine months, when it weighs eight or ten pounds, and has
become too heavy for the mother to carry.
[Illustration: The opossum is the only one of the Australian marsupials
to be found anywhere else in the world. Quantities of the fur are
exported, to be used as trimming on women’s coats.]
[Illustration: Except for the opossum and opossum rat of Patagonia,
marsupials are found only in Australia. We import quantities of
Australian opossum fur as trimming for women’s coats.]
Most kangaroos are plain dwellers and grass eaters. Carl Lumholtz was
the first to discover a variety that lives in trees. He found them
through the blacks of northern Queensland, and with their help was able
to get several specimens. There are some in the museum at Sydney and I
am told that others have been sent to several museums in Europe.
The tree kangaroo is a baby beside its big gray and red cousins. Its
head is like that of a squirrel, and its body is better proportioned
than that of the kangaroo of the plains. It has arms and legs about
eight or ten inches long, and a tail a little bit longer. It spends
most of the time in the trees, sleeping there in the daytime and coming
down only at night for water. It eats tree leaves. This animal is
considered a great delicacy by the blacks, who have trained the dingoes
to tree it. Then the natives climb, not only the tree in which the
kangaroo is lodged, but all the trees near by, in order to catch it if
it jumps from one to another.
The musk kangaroo is so small you can put it in your pocket. There is
a kangaroo that looks like a rabbit, known as the hare kangaroo, and
another called the rat kangaroo. One of the commonest of the small
kangaroos is the wallaby, which is killed for its skin, as are many of
the other kinds. There is a great demand for kangaroo leather for bags,
shoes, and other articles, and quite a lot is exported to the United
States.
Australia has a curious little beast which is a sort of link between
the mammals and the birds. This is the platypus, which has a bill like
that of a duck, and feet so covered with webbing that it can swim. Yet
it nourishes its young with its milk. It tunnels in the earth like a
mole and is usually found along the fresh-water streams of Tasmania and
Victoria. It feeds upon small water insects, shell fish, beetles, and
vegetable particles. It is sometimes speared by the blacks, and white
men occasionally catch it with night lines.
The life of the platypus is interesting. A pair will live in a little
tunnel, one of the openings of which is below the water and the other
in the bank just above it. Their nest is in the tunnel, halfway between
the two doors, the water door and the land door of their house. Here
the female hatches her young, laying one or two eggs for each setting.
As with the American skunk, the odour of the platypus advertises its
presence for miles around.
Platypus fur is most beautiful, although the animal is so scarce that
it is hardly an article of commerce. I have a skin of one about twelve
inches wide by eighteen inches long. The fur is as soft and smooth as
moleskin, but the bill and the legs are as hard as horn. The skin is
sometimes used to make rugs, a good platypus rug being worth at least
one hundred and twenty-five dollars.
Some of the queerest animals of this continent are found along
the coast. Penguins live on the islands of the far south, and the
big-billed pelican is common, especially on the coral reefs off
Queensland. There are also seals, and a sort of sea cow, which excited
great interest some years ago on account of its likeness to the fabled
mermaid. In the first days of Australia one of a party of fishermen
collecting _bêche-de-mer_ on the Queensland coast imagined he saw some
of these wonderful creatures, half-woman, half-fish. He came running
to his companions saying that he had seen some mermaids disporting
themselves in blue sea grass. One of them, he declared, had raised her
head and shoulders out of the water and looked at him. He had been so
terrified that he had fled to the ship as fast as his legs could carry
him. Later on the men discovered that the supposed mermaids were the
Australian dugongs. The mothers constantly hold their young to their
breasts and in this position look not unlike the traditional mermaid.
The dugong is somewhat like a porpoise. It has a smooth round body, a
broad, fat tail, and two anterior flippers, which are short, thick,
and fleshy. Its head has a rounded muzzle and the mouth of the male
has projecting tusks. When fully grown the dugong is from eight to ten
feet in length, but it sometimes attains to as much as twelve feet. The
animals gather in herds of from half a dozen to forty and swim about
together. The females, which are more numerous than the males, cry like
human beings when suckling their babies.
The dugongs are found chiefly in the tropical waters about the north
coast. The natives hunt them under the direction of white men, chasing
them in boats or bark canoes, and spearing the cows with harpoons.
The best place to strike is through the tail, for the animal is quite
powerless once its tail is lifted out of the water.
The natives are fond of dugong flesh. They cook and eat it, boiling
down the fat for the oil, which has a medicinal value like that of cod
liver oil. The hides and the large tusks of the male are marketable.
I wish I could show you some of the odd birds of Australia. The
continent has more than seven hundred varieties, some of which are
found nowhere else. In the Brisbane museum I saw scores of different
kinds of parrots, some as white as snow, others of a delicate pink,
and others as red as blood. The lyre bird, which is one of the most
curious of all, has a tail shaped just like a lyre. The satin-bower
bird builds a playground near the tree where it has its nest. This is
a sort of platform, sometimes three feet in diameter, made of sticks
woven together. Over this the male birds build a bower of woven twigs,
decorating it with all the beautiful things they can find. They weave
gay feathers among the sticks, and put bones and shells here and there.
Some of the bowers found in the vicinity of settlements are ornamented
with pieces of broken china and glass. One variety decorates the bower
with fresh flowers every day. These bowers are not nests nor are they
the homes of the birds. They are supposed to be the rendezvous, or
courting places, where the males dance and strut before their lady
friends.
The young bower birds are bright green, but when full grown the males
are of a deep, shining blue-black closely resembling satin. They have
blue bills, yellow at the tip, and their legs and feet are yellowish
white. The females are green and brown, with bills of a dark horn
colour. The birds are found all along the east coast of Australia and
in many parts of the interior.
You may know the little poem by the small boy who was indignant at
having his pennies put in the Sunday-school box. One verse reads:
I wish I were a cassowary
In the wilds of Timbuctoo.
Wouldn’t I eat a missionary,
Skin and bones and hymn book, too!
Australia is the land of the cassowary. In part of the country there
are thousands of these great birds, which resemble the ostrich and
the emu. The ostriches and the emus live on the open plains. The
cassowaries are found in the forests and brushwoods. They are wary
birds and seldom come out of the jungles. I have seen a number of them
during my stay in Australia. The bird is about four and a half feet
high, with black feathers, brown at the base. It has eyes like an
eagle, and a long, thin neck, with a naked head, and flat but powerful
bill. The cassowary’s legs are very strong and look more like clubs
than bird legs. They end in three large claws like those of an emu.
[Illustration: Sydney is not only the fastest-growing city of Australia
but also the commercial metropolis of the South Seas. About the size of
St. Louis, it handles the bulk of the trade of New South Wales.]
[Illustration: Most of Australia’s wheat still goes overseas in sacks,
loaded in ships by belt conveyors, but the grain elevators being built
in increasing numbers permit the grain to be handled in bulk at less
cost.]
[Illustration: The companies operating the world-famous silver and lead
mines at Broken Hill and the steel works at Newcastle have been large
buyers of American mining machinery and of plant equipment and tools.]
[Illustration: American automobiles dominate the market in Australia.
Here the motor-car is now regarded as a necessity, especially in the
back country where distances are great.]
The emu is the national bird of Australia. It is larger than the
cassowary, and is often five or six feet in height. It is much like the
ostrich, except that its legs are shorter and its body more thickset
and clumsy. Its dull brown plumage spotted with gray looks more like
coarse hair than feathers, and emu skins are sometimes used for rugs.
The cassowaries have no hair on their heads, but the heads of the emus
are completely feathered, or I might say haired. The wings are so short
that they are invisible when held close to the body. The birds are
quite dangerous and can kill a dog or a man with a kick.
Hunting emus is one of the favourite sports of Australia for which dogs
and horses are specially trained. The best time for a hunt is early
in the morning, when the birds go out to feed on grass. The dogs are
taught to catch the emus by the neck, else they may be killed by the
bird, which kicks backward or sidewise like a cow. In some sections the
settlers try to destroy them, to save the grass for the sheep. They
send out men to hunt for the nests and break the eggs. On a back-block
sheep station fifteen hundred eggs were destroyed at one time, while in
one county of New South Wales ten thousand emus were killed in nine
months. In the thickly settled portions of Australia they have been
practically exterminated. The aborigines hunt them for food, eating
the flesh with the skin on it. They are especially fond of the hind
quarters, which taste not unlike beef. Emu eggshells are sometimes
mounted in silver and used as milk jugs or sugar bowls.
Among the kingfishers is the kookooburra, or laughing jackass. Its
hoarse cry is like a laugh and can be heard for miles through the
forests. This bird has a head about as big as its body, but its laugh
is a thousand times bigger than both body and head. It says, “Ha! ha!
ha! hoo! hoo! hoo!” contemptuously laughing again and again, until at
last it puts the nerves of the bush traveller on edge. It eats snakes,
lizards, and other reptiles, and for this reason is protected by law.