Smithsonian Institution, “is about as sociable as any bird could
possibly be. It is always found in flocks, feeds in flocks, and breeds
in the large, many-apartmented compound nests. With this extreme
socialibility and sedentary habit of life the territorial relations
of the species have been modified in a way that is quite remarkable,
perhaps unique, among birds. Instead of each pair having its own
breeding territory, each flock seems to have a definite territory whose
boundaries are seldom crossed by individuals of other flocks.
“In an area of approximately 1,000 square miles I found only 26 nests.
The flocks ordinarily do not live in very close juxtaposition to each
other. The nests are so large, so conspicuous at great distances, and
the trees so relatively few in number that I am quite certain I found
practically every nest in the area.”
In spite of the highly developed communal life, Dr. Friedmann notes,
there appears to have been no break-down of the family. Whether each
male has one or several mates, however, is unknown. In the construction
of the apartments there is some evidence that each family builds its
own individual nest, while the whole flock cooperates in constructing
a roof over the whole. The structures often become so heavy eventually
that they crash to the ground and all the work must be done over.
Woodpeckers that carve “apartment houses” out of hardwood tree trunks
have been observed by Dr. Alexander Wetmore in the dark, rain-drenched
forests of the La Hotte mountains in Haiti. On one occasion he was
astonished to find a dozen pairs going in and out of nests in a single
dead tree trunk standing in an open space, the holes being from three
to ten meters from the ground and in some cases less than a meter
apart. There was no question that the woodpeckers were colonizing,
as the trunk was a veritable apartment house with the birds climbing
actively over its surface and flying back and forth to the nearby
woodland.
In the same mountains Dr. Wetmore found another apartment builder, the
palm chit-chat. It is a gregarious species that lives in small bands,
each being made up of several pairs having a communal nest as the
center of its activities. The largest bands frequenting a single nest
do not appear to contain more than 20 birds.
The nests are constructed of twigs about the size of a pencil and from
ten to 17 inches in length. The bird itself is only seven or eight
inches long. Yet it is able to carry these heavy “timbers” 30 or 40
feet from the ground. One of the nests examined was about the size of
a bushel basket and evidently was occupied by only a few pairs. There
was a roughly defined central tunnel four to five inches in diameter
leading through the mass of sticks and opening to the outside at either
end. Near each end was a slight accumulation of bark that made a little
platform.
The “apartments” opened from the tunnel on each side. There was a
central chamber, supposedly a community room, about five inches in
diameter, its floor carpeted with fine shreds of bark. Each nest was a
separate unit, with its own door to the outside. There were, however,
roughly defined passages running through the interlacing twigs at the
top of the nests that permitted the birds to creep about under cover.
One of the most intricate of all bird nests is that of the South
African penuline titmouse, distantly related to the American
chickadees. It is made of a wool-like plant fiber, very intricately
and delicately woven. The form is that of a small bag hanging from a
thorn bush. It has one visible opening, a false one which leads nowhere
and apparently is intended entirely as camouflage. The real entrance
is skillfully hidden, its location known only to the builder. When the
mother bird enters the nest she lifts a concealed flap, slips through,
and closes it behind her. She again closes it just as carefully when
she leaves the nest. There is not the slightest indication on the
surface of the finely woven fiber of the existence of the flap.
The Ceylon tailor bird, orthotomus sutorius, makes its nest by actually
sewing large leaves together in the shape of a horn, using its bill
as a needle. As described by the British naturalist A. G. Pinto: “The
first thing she did was to make with her sharp little beak a number of
punctures along each edge of the leaf. Having thus prepared the leaf,
she disappeared for a little and returned with a strand of cobweb. One
end of this she wound around the narrow part of the leaf that separated
one of the punctures from the edge. Having done this she carried the
loose end of the strand across the under surface of the leaf to a
puncture on the opposite side where she attached it to the leaf, and
thus drew the two edges a little way together. She then proceeded to
connect most of the other punctures with those opposite them, so that
the leaf took the form of a tunnel converging to a point. The under
surface of the leaf formed the roof and sides of the tunnel. There was
no floor to this, since the edges of the leaf did not meet below, the
gap between them being bridged by strands of cobweb.
“When lining the nest the bird made a number of punctures in the
body of the leaf, through which she poked the lining with her beak,
the object being to keep it in situ. All this time the margins of
the leaf that formed the nest had been held together by the thinnest
strands of cobweb, and it is a mystery how they could have stood the
strain. However, before the lining was completed the bird proceeded to
strengthen them by connecting the punctures on opposite edges of the
leaf with threads of cotton. She would push one end of a thread through
a puncture. The cotton used is soft and frays easily so that the part
of it forced through a tiny aperture issues as a fluffy knob, which
looks like a knot and usually is taken as such. As a matter of fact,
the bird makes no knots. She merely forces a portion of the cotton
strand through a puncture and the silicon in the leaf catches the
strands and prevents them from slipping. Sometimes the cotton threads
are long enough to admit of their being passed to and fro, in which
case the bird uses the full length.”
The leaves are not killed by the tailoring process and remain green.
Hence the nest is almost impossible to detect.
_The Ferocious Leech Worms_
Armies of billions of ferocious worms defended and preserved a fabulous
1,000-year-old Arabian Nights kingdom for three centuries. This kingdom
was templed Kandy in the center of Ceylon, encircled by low, densely
forested mountains. It was the site of one of the most picturesque
ancient civilizations of the Orient which had degenerated into a brutal
despotism when the first European invaders, the Portuguese, came to the
island early in the sixteenth century.
Armed with arquebuses, the white man established missions and trading
posts on the coast with little difficulty, but the forested mountains
proved impassable. The Portuguese soldiers were hard put to pitch their
camps in deep jungle bush and in bug-filled marshes. Grass and bushes
swarmed with little green worms—extremely nimble creatures about an
inch long which subsisted on the blood of warm-blooded animals. They
seemed to prefer human blood. They attacked the soldiers night and day.
Clothes were no protection. The worms dropped in streams of blood from
eyelids and ears. They swarmed on all sides in ever-increasing numbers
as the invading forces penetrated further into the jungle. With no
defense against this unanticipated enemy, the Europeans were forced to
retreat long before the temples of Kandy were in sight. They made no
further effort to conquer the ancient kingdom.
The Dutchmen who followed the Portuguese were content to remain in
their barricaded coastal trading posts. A century later came the
British East India Company with a small army of Sepoys commanded
by British officers. The ruler of Kandy, quite secure within his
green-worm defenses, was Raja Sinha, one of the cruelest of Oriental
despots. He spurned all overtures at negotiation with officers of the
trading company.
Once again his kingdom was invaded. During the march into the mountains
the Sepoy soldiers suffered so badly from the attacks of the worms that
some died and many others deserted. The force was so badly depleted
that further advance became impossible. Only when British regulars
took over the invasion years later was an armed force of white men
able to reach Kandy. Previously only individuals, chiefly Portuguese
Franciscans, had been able to cross the terrible green-worm barrier.
Sir Emerson Tennent, British historian of Ceylon, describes these worms
as normally about an inch long, slender as needles, and able to stretch
their bodies to double the ordinary length. Ceylonese natives had been
able to protect themselves to some extent by smearing their bodies with
lemon juice and tobacco ashes.
“On descrying the prey,” says Tennent, “they advance rapidly by
semi-circular strides, fixing one end firmly and arching the other
forward until by successive advances they can lay hold of the
traveller’s foot, when they disengage from the ground and ascend his
dress in search of an aperture. The wound they make is so skillfully
punctured that the first intimation is the trickling of blood or the
chill feeling of the worm as it begins to land heavily on the skin.”
These worms, hirudinae or leeches, are remotely related to earthworms
with a quite similar internal structure, but highly specialized for
an exclusive diet of warm blood which they take from any mammal that
comes within reach. The blood-sucking species—not all species are this
type—have triangular mouths with extremely sharp chitinous [of the
same material as the shells of insects] teeth. The bite, so rapidly
and skillfully administered that it seldom is felt, has been described
as resembling the movement of a circular saw. Haemadipoa, the Ceylon
species, described by Tennent, reportedly has five pairs of keen
eyes and as many as 100 body segments. All the blood eaters have two
suckers, one on the front and one on the rear of the body, by means of
which they cling to their victims. All have the ability to contract the
body to a plump, pear-like form and extend it to a wormlike form.
The green worms are as much of a terror as ever to travelers in Asian
jungles. A species akin to that of the Kandy defense armies guards the
thickly forested approaches to the Himalayas in Nepal It is described
by Dr. George Moore, chief of the United Nations medical mission to
Nepal:
“These leeches, little segmented worms about two inches long, were
particularly provoking and troublesome until our team reached an
altitude of 14,000 feet. Along the trails, on each ledge leading to
the pass, leeches would lie in the shade and moisture until nearby
footsteps vibrated their sense organs. Then they would inch from rock
to rock at incredible speed, traveling their entire length toward the
sound in about a second and then stopping to perch on the rock with
their front ends sticking in the air. Immediately they touched a human
body they would fasten themselves to it and search for warm skin.
Often they would drop from trees. They could penetrate eyelets of
shoes and pores of socks by lengthening the entire body. Huge clots of
blood would be found on the skin where the greedy worms had fattened
themselves to a fragile bursting point.”
The leech encountered by Dr. Moore’s mission long has been notorious as
one of the most vicious animals on earth. It has made some areas of the
Himalayan foothills uninhabitable. Travelers and hunters are terrified
by it. It exists in incalculable numbers and attacks at least all
warm-blooded animals. Horses are driven wild. Cattle and dogs sometimes
are blinded and the young and sick killed. It has been known to attack
the deadly cobra, striking at the eyes and blinding the reptiles.
The respect in which it is held in indicated by its zoological name
montivindictus, or “defender of the mountains.”
Its stronghold is the highly humid zone at the foot of the Himalayas
between altitudes of 4,000 and 6,000 feet. Its period of activity
occurs during the rainy season, when it can move freely without danger
of drying out. At other times it seldom is seen except at night when
grass and bushes are wet with dew.
The worm lurks at the bases of plants. It is stirred to action by
the slightest movement of stems or vibration caused by footfalls. An
inherent impulse, or geotropism, then impels it to climb any plant or
vertical object with which it happens to be in contact. At the top it
extends its body horizontally and probes the surroundings.
Once a victim is found, the hungry worm seeks a thin patch of skin
richly supplied with blood capillaries. There it attaches itself by
means of the cup-like sucker at the front end of its body. Immediately
behind this cup are three radiating ridges, or jaws, each provided
with about 70 sharp teeth. With these three rows of teeth it cuts
three duplicate slits on the skin, meeting at a common center. From
the star-shaped wound the warm blood is sucked. Meanwhile from its own
glands the leech secretes hirudin, a substance which prevents blood
coagulation, and also some as yet unknown substance which preserves
blood. The blood is pumped into a storage tank in the leech’s stomach.
At a single feeding the animal can store up as much as three-fold its
own weight. Then it can live as long as three months without another
meal.
_The Complex Spider’s Web_
A single strand of a spider’s web may consist of several thousand
separate filaments. On the creature’s abdomen are four to six teat-like
organs. Each secretes through several hundred extremely minute tubes a
viscous fluid which hardens immediately when exposed to air. The spider
attaches its abdomen to some solid object and pulls out the threads by
moving its body forward. The hind feet are used to bring the hundreds
of filaments into a single thread.
_Monsters of the Deep: The Great Squids_
Giants of the mollusk family and about the most loathsomely fantastic
creatures on earth are the great squids. One may weigh as much as half
a ton. The largest known specimen, a replica of which is among the
Smithsonian Institution exhibits, was 55 feet long. It had ten arms,
two of them approximately 35 feet long and two-and-a-half inches in
diameter. Its eye measured seven by nine inches. Many strange sea
serpent stories have been told by persons who merely saw a writhing arm
of one of these creatures on the surface. In recent years, however,
there has been no reliable report of an encounter with such an animal
and it may be close to extinction. Normally it is a denizen of profound
depths and darkness and presumably shuns light. It is associated
chiefly with the North Atlantic, especially around Newfoundland.
There are not more than a dozen entirely authenticated accounts of
seeing the monster. Just after the middle of the last century, Rev.
Mr. Harvey of St. Johns, Newfoundland, began to gather “sea devil”
reports from fishermen and these constitute a substantial portion of
the literature on the subject. He reported that in 1874 two St. Johns
fishermen in an open boat observed an object floating in the water
which they thought to be wreckage: “When they approached it reared its
parrot-like beak, big as a six-gallon keg with which it struck the
bottom of the boat violently. It then shot out from around its head two
huge, livid arms and began to entwine them around the boat. One of the
men seized an axe and cut off both arms as they lay over the gunwale,
whereupon the creature moved off and ejected an immense quantity of
inky fluid which darkened the water for two or three hundred yards.
“Early in the morning of November 21, 1877,” Harvey informed Prof.
Addison E. Verrill of Yale, “a big squid was seen on the beach at
Trinity Bay, still alive and struggling desperately to escape. It
had been carried in by the tide and a high inshore wind. In its
struggles to get off it ploughed a trench or furrow 30 feet long and
of considerable depth by the stream of water which it ejected with
great force from its syphon. When the tide receded it died. The body
was eleven feet long, with tentacle arms 33 feet long. The shorter arms
were about eleven feet long.”
“In 1878,” Harvey reported, “Stephen Sherring, a fisherman residing
in Thimble Tickle, was out in a boat with two other men. Not far from
shore they observed some bulky object and supposing it might be part of
a wreck they moved towards it. To their horror they found themselves
close to a huge fish with large, glassy eyes, which was making
desperate efforts to escape and churning the water into foam by the
motions of its immense arms and tail. It was aground and the tide was
ebbing.
“Finding the monster partially disabled, the fishermen plucked up
courage and ventured near enough to throw the grapnel of their boat,
the sharp flukes of which, having sharp points, sunk into the soft
body. To the grapnel they had attached a long rope which they carried
ashore and tied to a tree to prevent the fish going out with the tide.
His struggles were terrific as he flung his ten arms about in dying
agony. Ever and anon the long tentacles darted out like great tongues
from the central mass. At length it became exhausted and when the water
receded it expired. The body measured twenty feet from the beak to the
extremity of the tail. The fishermen, knowing no better, proceeded to
convert it to dog meat.”
At about the same time H. T. Bennett of English Harbor, Newfoundland,
wrote a newspaper account quoted by Prof. Verrill: “A giant cephalopod
was run ashore at Coomb’s Cove whose body measured ten feet in length
and was as big around as a hogshead. One arm 42 feet long and about
the size of a man’s wrist. The other arms were only six feet long but
nine inches in diameter and very stout and strong. The skin and flesh
were 2.25 inches thick and reddish inside as well as out. The suction
cups were all clustered together near the extremity of the long arm and
each cup was surrounded by a serrated edge, almost like the teeth of a
handsaw. I presume it made use of this arm for a cable and the cups for
anchors when it wanted to come to as well as to secure its prey. This
individual, finding a heavy sea was driving it ashore tail first seized
hold of a rock and moored itself quite safely until the men pulled it
ashore. It was probably a female.”
The monstrous ten-tentacled mollusk fights terrible battles with
whales and sometimes large parts of tentacles are spewed by leviathan
in its death agonies. So far as known only one such battle ever has
been witnessed and described. The British author Frank T. Bullen in
the _Cruise of the Cachelot_ tells of seeing in the South Indian ocean
“a very large sperm whale locked in deadly conflict with a cuttlefish
almost as large as himself whose interminable tentacles seemed to
enlace the whole of his body. The head of the whale seemed a perfect
network of writhing arms. It appeared as if the whale had the tail
part of the mollusk in his jaws and in a businesslike, methodical way
was sawing through it. By the side of the black, columnar head of the
whale appeared the head of the great squid, as awful a sight as one
could well imagine in a feverish dream. I established it to be as large
at least as one of our pipes which contained 350 gallons. The eyes
were very remarkable from their size and blackness contrasted with the
livid whiteness of the head. They were at least a foot in diameter. All
around the combatants were numerous sharks, like jackals round a lion,
apparently assisting in the destruction of the huge cephalopod.
“The occasions when these big cuttlefish appear on the surface must be
very rare. From their construction they appear fitted only to grope
among rocks at the bottom of the ocean. Their normal position is head
downward, with tentacles spread like ribs of an umbrella. The two long
ones, like the antennae of an insect, rove unceasingly around seeking
prey. In the center of the network of living traps is a chasm-like
mouth with an enormous parrot-like beak.”
“Insatiable nightmares of the sea,” the French philosopher Michelet
called the creatures. Nothing is known, of course, of their numbers
or of their ways of life in the dark depths. The few seen or captured
probably have been sick or badly injured. It has been estimated that
one female may lay as many 40,000 eggs in a season, but the mortality
of eggs and young must be enormous. It is doubtful if one in a million
ever becomes a mature animal.
A scarcely less fantastic animal, but more familiar and far less
fearsome, is the eight-tentacled octopus. Some of the largest are found
off the coast of Alaska. The largest known had arms 16 feet long and a
radial spread of 28 feet, but the central body itself was not more than
six inches wide and a foot long.
Most familiar of the race is the Mediterranean octopus; its tentacles
often are sold for food in Sicilian markets. The largest known was
nine feet long and weighed about 50 pounds. This animal reportedly was
captured by a fisherman with his bare hands. One specimen found dead on
a beach near Nassau had tentacles five feet long and weighed more than
200 pounds.
It is a rather sluggish, timid animal which seeks shelter in holes and
crevasses among offshore rocks. It feeds mainly on clams and oysters.
When frightened it surrounds itself with a cloud of ink-like fluid.
There is no reliable reason to believe it ever attacks man.
_The Vanishing Whippoorwill_
Probably not one person in a thousand has ever seen a whippoorwill.
Its melancholy song is one of the most familiar chords in the symphony
of the summer evening but to the majority of listeners it is only a
disembodied voice in the dark. The singer has come about as near to
achieving invisibility as any living creature.
The whippoorwill is a migrant bird, spending its winters in Florida and
its summers from March to October in the north. It travels entirely
at night, sometimes in large flocks. It builds no nest but lays its
flecked eggs on the ground depending on the flickering shadows of the
woodland over the background of dried leaves to conceal them.
The bird is masterfully camouflaged by nature and usually selects a
spot for its eggs where the woodland floor is free of underbrush and
the trees are spaced far enough apart to cast an uneven shade. The male
presumably sleeps all day while the female sits on the eggs or broods
the newly hatched young, but at night he stands guard, may take his
turn on the nest, and hunts insects for his mate.
The chick, almost exactly the color of the dead leaves among which it
lies, remains essentially invisible. Nests are found only by accident.
Whippoorwills live almost exclusively on night-flying insects,
especially moths and mosquitoes. They have been recorded, however, as
sometimes hunting for worms, beetles and ants under bark, or on the
ground.
The bird makes no particular effort to conceal itself from humans.
Apparently it does not regard them as dangerous. There are cases where
it actually has lit on the head of a man standing motionless in the
dark. The female has been observed to fly about carrying her young
between her thighs. She also, it has been reported, sometimes carries
them in her bill, but there is no satisfactory evidence of this.
The whippoorwill is fond of taking dust baths. Sometimes one is caught
by the lights of an approaching auto as it dusts itself in the middle
of a country road.
The bird is remarkable for the regularity of its song and for the
number of times the melancholy refrain is repeated without a pause.
From 150 to 200 is not unusual. The naturalist John Burroughs claimed
once to have counted 1058 such repetitions. The song is continuous from
dusk until about 9:30 and from about 2 until dawn. It is heard rarely
in the intervening hours.
The whippoorwill, it is pointed out in a Smithsonian report, has come
to depend almost exclusively on darkness for its protection. For this
reason it has suffered little, as have many other birds, with the
cutting away of the forests and the advances of cities. Its enemies in
the dark are some hawks, owls and foxes, but has exceptional powers of
flight which often enable it to escape even when discovered.