The adjutant bird (_Leptoptilus dubius_) is one of Nature’s little jokes.
It is a caricature of a bird, a mixture of gravity and clownishness.
Everything about it is calculated to excite mirth—its weird figure, its
great beak, its long, thin legs, its conspicuous pouch, its bald head,
and every attitude it strikes. The adjutant bird is a stork which has
acquired the habits of the vulture. Forsaking to a large extent frogs and
such-like delicacies, which constitute the normal diet of its kind, it
lives chiefly upon offal. Now, most, if not all, birds which feed on
carrion have the head and neck devoid of feathers. This arrangement, if
not ornamental, is very useful. The bare head and neck are, as “Eha”
remarks, “the sleeves tucked up for earnest work.” The adjutant forms no
exception to the rule, it wears the badge of its profession. But let me
here give a full description of this truly comic bird. It stands five
feet in its stockings. Its bill is over a foot in length and
correspondingly massive. As we have seen, the whole head and neck are
bare, except for a few feathers scattered over it like the hairs on an
elephant’s head. The bare skin is not lacking in colour. On the forehead
it is blackish; it becomes saffron-yellow on the upper neck, while lower
down it turns to brick-red. There is a ruff of white feathers round the
base of the neck. This ruff, of course, appears entirely out of place and
adds to the general grotesqueness of the bird. The back and wings are
ashy black, becoming slaty grey at the breeding season. The lower parts
are white.
As if the creature, thus arrayed, were not sufficiently comic, Nature has
given it a great pouch which dangles from the neck. This is over a foot
in length and hangs down like a bag when inflated. It is red in colour,
spotted with black. Its situation naturally leads one to believe that it
is connected with the gullet, that it is a receptacle into which the bird
can hastily pass the garbage it swallows pending more complete disposal.
But it is nothing of the sort. It does not communicate directly with the
œsophagus. Knowing this, one is able to appreciate to the full the
splendid mendacity of the writer to _Chambers’s Journal_ in 1861, who
declares that he witnessed an adjutant swallow a crow which he watched
“pass into the sienna-toned pouch of the gaunt avenger. He who writes saw
it done.”
Note the last sentence. The scribe was evidently of opinion that people
would not believe him, so thought to clinch matters by bluffing! But, to
do him justice, it is quite possible that he did see an adjutant swallow
a crow, for other observers have witnessed this, but the remainder of the
story rests upon the sandy foundation of the imagination. If the truth
must be told, we do not know for certain what the use of this pouch is.
Blyth suggested that it is analogous to the air cell attached to one lung
only of the python or the boa-constrictor, and, as in that case, no doubt
supplies oxygen to the lungs during protracted meals. The bird can thus
“guzzle” to its heart’s content without having to stop every now and then
to take a “breather.”
But we must return to the appearance of the bird, for the account of this
is not yet complete, since no mention has been made of the eye. This is
white and very small, and so gives the bird a wicked, knowing expression,
like that of an elephant. Colonel Cunningham speaks of “the malignantly
sneaking expression of the pallid eyes.” This is perhaps a little severe
on the adjutant, but it is, I fear, quite useless to deny the fact that
he has “a canister look in his heye.”
A mere description of the shape and colouring of the adjutant does not
give any idea of his comicality. It is his acts rather than his
appearance that make him so ludicrous. Except when floating high above
the earth on his great pinions the bird always looks grotesque. To say
that he, as he walks along, recalls a hunchbacked old man who is
deliberately “clowning” is to give a hopelessly inadequate idea of the
absurdity of his movements. Lockwood Kipling is nearer the mark when he
says: “For grotesque devilry of dancing the Indian adjutant beats
creation. Don Quixote or Malvolio were not half so solemn or mincing, and
yet there is an abandonment and lightness of step, a wild lift in each
solemn prance, which are almost demoniacal. If it were possible for the
most angular, tall, and demure of elderly maiden ladies to take a great
deal too much champagne and then to give a lesson in ballet dancing, with
occasional pauses of acute sobriety, perhaps some faint idea might be
conveyed of the peculiar quality of the adjutant’s movements.”
Sometimes the bird struts along solemnly with bent back and forwardly
pointed bill, at others it will jump or skip along with outstretched
wings and clap its beak. It cannot even stand still without striking
ludicrous attitudes. Seen from behind, it looks like a little
hunch-backed old man with very thin legs, dressed in a grey swallow-tail
coat. Adjutants sometimes vary the monotony of existence by standing on
one leg; occasionally they sit down, stretching their long legs out in
front, and looking “as though they were kneeling wrong side foremost.”
Colonel Cunningham gives a most entertaining account of the habits of
these birds, many of which used, until quite recently, to be seen about
Calcutta. My observations are chiefly confined to birds in captivity;
this perhaps accounts for the fact that they do not agree in all respects
with those of the Colonel. According to him, adjutants “are singularly
ill-tempered birds, constantly squabbling with one another, even in the
absence of any cause of competition, such as favourite roosts or
specially savoury stores of offal. Even whilst several of them are
standing quietly about, sunning themselves and apparently buried in deep
thought, a quarrel will suddenly arise for no apparent reason; and then
you may see two monstrous fowls begin to pace around, cautiously stalking
one another, and watching for a favourable opportunity of striking and
buffeting with beak and wings. The expression of slow malignity with
which such duellists regard one another is gruesome, and the injuries
resulting from the fray are often ghastly; blinded eyes and bloody
cockscombs being matters of everyday occurrence.”
Captive adjutants seem to be most placid birds. There are three of them
in the “Zoo” at Lahore, kept in a large park-like enclosure, and I have
never seen these fighting. They appear to be always, if not on the best
of terms, at any rate, indifferent to one another. The three will stand
for many minutes at a time in a row, motionless as statues. Sometimes a
male and a female will huddle up to one another and remain thus, with
their heads almost touching, looking like caricatures of Darby and Joan.
The table manners of adjutants, like those of most other carrion feeders,
are not polite. I will therefore not attempt to describe them. In the
good old days, feeding adjutants used to be a favourite pastime of Mr.
Thomas Atkins at Calcutta. I regret to have to say that his motives were
not always purely philanthropic. To connect two pieces of meat by a long
string and then throw them among a crowd of adjutants savours of
practical joking. One bird, of course, swallows one piece of meat, while
a second adjutant secures the other morsel. All goes well until each of
the birds tries to go its own way—then a tug-of-war results, fraught with
gastronomical disturbance to the combatants.
Adjutants are nowhere very abundant; they are nevertheless spread over
the whole of Northern India, but do not appear to be found so far south
as Madras. Another species, however—the smaller adjutant (_L.
javanicus_)—has been observed on the Malabar coast.
Some natives make adjutant-catching their profession. The birds are
captured on account of their down-like feathers, which are of
considerable commercial value.
The catcher fits the skin of an adjutant over his head and shoulders, and
in this attire creeps up to a company of the birds as they stand
half-asleep, knee-deep in water. Great is the surprise of the
unsuspecting birds when one of them is unceremoniously seized by the wolf
in the adjutant’s skin.
[Illustration: THE INDIAN ADJUTANT. (LEPTOPTILUS DUBIUS)]