VERT--VERT; OR PARROT GOSSIP
I am not an admirer of pet parrots. To me, and I have made the
discovery that to many others too, it is a depressing experience, on a
first visit to nice people, to find that a parrot is a member of the
family. As a rule he is the most important member. When I am compelled
to stand in the admiring circle, to look on and to listen while he
exhibits his weary accomplishments, it is but lip service that I
render: my eyes are turned inward, and a vision of a green forest
comes before them resounding with the wild, glad, mad cries of flocks
of wild parrots. This is done purposely, and the sound which I
mentally hear and the sight of their vari-coloured plumage in the
dazzling sunlight are a corrective, and keep me from hating the bird
before me because of the imbecility of its owners. In his proper
place, which is not in a tin cage in a room of a house, he is to be
admired above most birds; and I wish I could be where he is living his
wild life; that I could have again a swarm of parrots, angry at my
presence, hovering above my head and deafening me with their
outrageous screams. But I cannot go to those beautiful distant
places--I must be content with an image and a memory of things seen
and heard, and with the occasional sight of a bird, or birds, kept by
some intelligent person; also with an occasional visit to the Parrot
House in Regent's Park. There the uproar, when it is at its greatest,
when innumerable discordant voices, shrill and raucous, unite in one
voice and one great cry, and persons of weak nerves stop up their ears
and fly from such a pandemonium, is highly exhilarating.
Of the most interesting captive parrots I have met in recent years I
will speak here of two. The first was a St Vincent bird, Chrysotis
guildingi, brought home with seven other parrots of various species by
Lady Thompson, the wife of the then Administrator of the Island. This
is a handsome bird, green, with blue head and yellow tail, and is a
member of an American genus numbering over forty species. He received
his funny specific name in compliment to a clergyman who was a zealous
collector not of men's souls, but of birds' skins. To ornithologists
this parrot is interesting on account of its rarity. For the last
thirty years it has existed in small numbers; and as it is confined to
the island of St Vincent it is feared that it may become extinct at no
distant date. Altogether there are about five hundred species of
parrots in the world, or about as many parrots as there are species of
birds of all kinds in Europe, from the great bustard, the hooper swan,
and golden eagle, to the little bottle-tit whose minute body, stript
of its feathers, may be put in a lady's thimble. And of this multitude
of parrots the St Vincent Chrysotis, if it still exists, is probably
the rarest.
The parrot I have spoken of, with his seven travelling companions,
arrived in England in December, and a few days later their mistress
witnessed a curious thing. On a cold grey morning they were enjoying
themselves on their perches in a well-warmed room in London, before a
large window, when suddenly they all together emitted a harsh cry of
alarm or terror--the sound which they invariably utter on the
appearance of a bird of prey in the sky, but at no other time. Looking
up quickly she saw that snow in big flakes had begun to fall. It was
the birds' first experience of such a phenomenon, but they had seen
and had been taught to fear something closely resembling falling
flakes--flying feathers to wit. The fear of flying feathers is
universal among species that are preyed upon by hawks. In a majority
of cases the birds that exhibit terror and fly into cover or sit
closely have never actually seen that winged thunderbolt, the
peregrine falcon, strike down a duck or pigeon, sending out a small
cloud of feathers; or even a harrier or sparrow-hawk pulling out and
scattering the feathers of a bird it has captured, but a tradition
exists among them that the sight of flying feathers signifies danger
to bird life.
When I was in the young barbarian stage, and my playmates were gaucho
boys on horseback on the pampas, they taught me to catch partridges in
their simple way with a slender cane twenty to twenty-five feet long,
a running noose at its tip made from the fine pliant shaft of a rhea's
wing feather. The bird was not a real partridge though it looks like
it, but was the common or spotted tinamou of the plains, Nothura
maculosa, as good a table bird as our partridge. Our method was, when
we flushed a bird, to follow its swift straight flight at a gallop,
and mark the exact spot where it dropped to earth and vanished in the
grass, then to go round the spot examining the ground until the
tinamou was detected in spite of his protective colouring sitting
close among the dead and fading grass and herbage. The cane was put
out, the circle narrowed until the small noose was exactly over the
bird's head, so that when he sprang into the air on being touched by
the slender tip of the cane he caught and strangled himself. To make
the bird sit tight until the noose was actually over his head, we
practised various tricks, and a very common one was, on catching sight
of the close-squatting partridge, to start plucking feathers from a
previously-killed bird hanging to our belt and scatter them on the
wind. Sometimes we were saved the trouble of scattering feathers when
we were followed by a pair of big carrion hawks on the look-out for an
escaped bird or for any trifle we throw to them to keep them with us.
The effect was the same in both cases; the sight of the flying
feathers was just as terrifying as that of the big hovering hawks, and
caused the partridge to sit close.
This way of taking the tinamou may seem unsportsmanlike. Well, if I
were a boy in a wild land again--with my present feelings about bird
life, I mean--I should not do it. Nor would I shoot them; for I take
it that the gun is the deadliest instrument our cunning brains have
devised to destroy birds in spite of their bright instinct of
self-preservation, their faculty of flight, and their intelligence. It
is a hundred times more effective than the boy-on-horseback's long
cane with its noose made of an ostrich feather--therefore more
unsportsmanlike.
To return. The resemblance of falling flakes to flying white feathers
does not deceive birds accustomed to the sight of snow: it is very
striking, nevertheless, and so generally recognised that most persons
in Europe have heard of the old woman plucking her geese in the sky.
It is curious to find the subject discussed in Herodotus. In Book IV.
he says: "The Scythians say that those lands which are situated in the
northernmost parts of their territories are neither visible nor
practicable by reason of the feathers that fall continually on all
sides; for the earth is so entirely covered, and the air is so full of
these feathers, that the sight is altogether obstructed." Further on
he says: "Touching the feathers ... my opinion is that perpetual snows
fall in those parts, though probably in less quantity during the
summer than in winter, and whoever has observed great abundance of
snow falling will easily comprehend what I say, for snow is not unlike
feathers."
Probably the Scythians had but one word to designate both. To go back
to the St Vincent parrot. Concerning a bird of that species I have
heard, and cannot disbelieve, a remarkable story. During the early
years of the last century a gentleman went out from England to look
after some landed property in the island, which had come to him by
inheritance, and when out there he paid a visit to a friend who had a
plantation in the interior. His friend was away when he arrived, and
he was conducted by a servant into a large, darkened, cool room; and,
tired with his long ride in the hot sun, he soon fell asleep in his
chair. Before long a loud noise awoke him, and from certain scrubbing
sounds he made out that a couple of negro women were engaged in
washing close to him, on the other side of the lowered window blinds,
and that they were quarrelling over their task. Of course the poor
women did not know that he was there, but he was a man of a sensitive
mind and it was a torture to him to have to listen to the torrents of
exceedingly bad language they discharged at one another. It made him
angry. Presently his friend arrived and welcomed him with a hearty
hand-shake and asked him how he liked the place. He answered that it
was a very beautiful place, but he wondered how his friend could
tolerate those women with their tongues so close to his windows. Women
with their tongues! What did he mean? exclaimed the other in great
surprise. He meant, he said, those wretched nigger washerwomen outside
the window. His host thereupon threw up the blind and both looked out:
no living creature was there except a St Vincent parrot dozing on his
perch in the shaded verandah. "Ah, I see, the parrot!" said his
friend. And he apologised and explained that some of the niggers had
taken advantage of the bird's extraordinary quickness in learning to
teach him a lot of improper stuff.
Another parrot, which interested me more than the St Vincent bird, was
a member of the same numerous genus, a double-fronted amazon,
Chrysotis lavalainte, a larger bird, green with face and fore-part of
head pure yellow, and some crimson colour in the wings and tail. I
came upon it at an inn, the Lamb, at Hindon, a village in the South
Wiltshire downs. One could plainly see that it was a very old bird,
and, judging from the ragged state of its plumage, that it had long
fallen into the period of irregular or imperfect moult--"the sere, the
yellow leaf" in the bird's life. It also had the tremor of the very
aged--man or bird. But its eyes were still as bright as polished
yellow gems and full of the almost uncanny parrot intelligence. The
voice, too, was loud and cheerful; its call to its mistress--"Mother,
mother!" would ring through the whole rambling old house. He talked
and laughed heartily and uttered a variety of powerful whistling notes
as round and full and modulated as those of any grey parrot. Now, all
that would not have attracted me much to the bird if I had not heard
its singular history, told to me by its mistress, the landlady. She
had had it in her possession fifty years, and its story was as
follows:--
Her father-in-law, the landlord of the Lamb, had a beloved son who
went off to sea and was seen and heard of no more for a space of
fourteen years, when one day he turned up in the possession of a
sailor's usual fortune, acquired in distant barbarous lands--a parrot
in a cage! This he left with his parents, charging them to take the
greatest care of it, as it was really a very wonderful bird, as they
would soon know if they could only understand its language, and he
then began to make ready to set off again, promising his mother to
write this time and not to stay away more than five or at most ten
years.
Meanwhile, his father, who was anxious to keep him, succeeded in
bringing about a meeting between him and a girl of his acquaintance,
one who, he believed, would make his son the best wife in the world.
The young wanderer saw and loved, and as the feeling was returned he
soon married and endowed her with all his worldly possessions, which
consisted of the parrot and cage. Eventually he succeeded his father
as tenant of the Lamb, where he died many years ago; the widow was
grey when I first knew her and old like her parrot; and she was like
the bird too in her youthful spirit and the brilliance of her eyes.
Her young sailor had picked up the bird at Vera Cruz in Mexico. He saw
a girl standing in the market place with the parrot on her shoulder.
She was talking and singing to the bird, and the bird was talking,
whistling, and singing back to her--singing snatches of songs in
Spanish. It was a wonderful bird, and he was enchanted and bought it,
and brought it all the way back to England and Wiltshire. It was, the
girl had told him, just five years old, and as fifty years had gone by
it was, when I first knew it, or was supposed to be, fifty-five. In
its Wiltshire home it continued to talk and sing in Spanish, and had
two favourite songs, which delighted everybody, although no one could
understand the words. By and by it took to learning words and
sentences in English, and spoke less in Spanish year after year until
in about ten to twelve years that language had been completely
forgotten. Its memory was not as good as that of Humboldt's celebrated
parrot of the Maipures, which had belonged to the Apures tribe before
they were exterminated by the Caribs. Their language perished with
them, only the long-living parrot went on talking it. This parrot
story took the fancy of the public and was re-told in a hundred books,
and was made the subject of poems in several countries--one by our own
"Pleasures of Hope" Campbell.
Nevertheless I thought it would be worth while trying a little Spanish
on old Polly of the Lamb, and thought it best to begin by making
friends. It was of little use to offer her something to eat. Poll was
a person who rather despised sweeties and kickshaws. It had been the
custom of the house for half a century to allow Polly to eat what she
liked and when she liked, and as she--it was really a he--was of a
social disposition she preferred taking her meals with the family and
eating the same food. At breakfast she would come to the table and
partake of bacon and fried eggs, also toast and butter and jam and
marmalade, at dinner it was a cut off the joint with (usually) two
vegetables, then pudding or tart with pippins and cheese to follow.
Between meals she amused herself with bird seed, but preferred a meaty
mutton-bone, which she would hold in one hand or foot and feed on with
great satisfaction. It was not strange that when I held out food for
her she took it as an insult, and when I changed my tactics and
offered to scratch her head she lost her temper altogether, and when I
persisted in my advances she grew dangerous and succeeded in getting
in several nips with her huge beak, which drew blood from my fingers.
It was only then, after all my best blandishments had been exhausted,
and when our relations were at their worst, that I began talking to
her in Spanish, in a sort of caressing falsetto like a "native" girl,
calling her "Lorito" instead of Polly, coupled with all the endearing
epithets commonly used by the women of the green continent in
addressing their green pets. Polly instantly became attentive. She
listened and listened, coming down nearer to listen better, the one
eye she fixed on me shining like a fiery gem. But she spoke no word,
Spanish or English, only from time to time little low inarticulate
sounds came from her. It was evident after two or three days that she
was powerless to recall the old lore, but to me it also appeared
evident that some vague memory of a vanished time had been
evoked--that she was conscious of a past and was trying to recall it.
At all events the effect of the experiment was that her hostility
vanished, and we became friends at once. She would come down to me,
step on to my hand, climb to my shoulder, and allow me to walk about
with her.
It saddened me a few months later to receive a letter from her
mistress announcing Polly's death, on 2nd December 1909.
I have thought since that this bird, instead of being only five years
old when bought, was probably aged twenty-five years or more.
Naturally, the girl who had been sent into the market-place to dispose
of the bird would tell a possible buyer that it was young; the parrots
one wants to buy are generally stated to be five years old. However,
it may be that the bird grew old before its time on account of its
extraordinary dietary. The parrot may have an adaptive stomach, still,
one is inclined to think that half a century of fried eggs and bacon,
roast pork, boiled beef and carrots, steak and onions, and stewed
rabbit must have put a rather heavy strain on its system.
Many parrots have lived longer than Polly in captivity, long as her
life was; and here it strikes me as an odd circumstance that Polly's
specific name was bestowed on the species, the double-fronted amazon,
as a compliment to the distinguished French ornithologist, La
Valainte, who has himself recorded the greatest age to which a captive
parrot has been known to attain. This bird was the familiar African
grey species. He says that it began to lose its memory at the age of
sixty, to moult irregularly at sixty-five, that it became blind at
ninety, and died aged ninety-three.
We may well believe that if parrots are able to exist for fifty years to
a century in the unnatural conditions in which they are kept, caged or
chained in houses, over-fed, without using their enormously-developed
wing-muscles, the constant exercise of which must be necessary to
perfect health and vigour, their life in a state of nature must be twice
as long.
To return to parrots in general. This bird has perhaps more points of
interest for us than any other of the entire class: his long life,
unique form, and brilliant colouring, extreme sociability,
intelligence beyond that of most birds, and, last, his faculty of
imitating human speech more perfectly than the birds of other
families.
The last is to most persons the parrot's greatest distinction; to me
it is his least. I do not find it so wonderful as the imitative
faculty of some mocking birds or even of our delightful little
marsh-warbler, described in another book. This may be because I have
never had the good fortune to meet with a shining example, for we know
there is an extraordinary difference in the talking powers of parrots,
even in those of the same species--differences as great, in fact, as
we find in the reasoning faculty between dog and dog, and in the songs
of different birds of the same species. Not once but on several
occasions I have heard a song from some common bird which took my
breath away with astonishment. I have described in another book
certain blackbirds of genius I have encountered. And what a wonderful
song that caged canary in a country inn must have had, which tempted
the great Lord Peterborough, a man of some shining qualities, to get
the bird from its mistress, an old woman who loved it and refused to
sell it to him, by means of a dishonest and very mean trick. Denied
the bird, he examined it minutely and went on his way. In due time he
returned with a canary closely resembling the one he wanted in size,
colour, and markings, concealed on his person. He ordered dinner, and
when the good woman was gone from the room to prepare it, changed his
bird for hers, then, having had his meal, went on his way rejoicing.
Still he was curious to learn the effect of his trick, and whether or
not she had noticed any difference in her loved bird; so, after a long
interval, he came once more to the inn, and seeing the bird in its
cage in the old place began to speak in praise of its beautiful
singing as he had heard it and remembered it so well. She replied
sadly that since he listened to and wanted to buy it an unaccountable
change had come over her bird. It was silent for a spell, perhaps
sick, but when it resumed singing its voice had changed and all the
beautiful notes which everyone admired were lost. The great man
expressed his regret, and went away chuckling at his deliciously funny
joke.
The ordinary talking parrot is no more to me than the ordinary or
average canary, piping his thin expressionless notes; he is a prodigy
I am pleased not to know. On the other hand there are numerous
authenticated cases of parrots possessed of really surprising powers,
and it was doubtless the mimicking powers of such birds of genius
which suggested such fictions as that of the Tota Kuhami in the East;
and in Europe, Gresset's lively tale of Vert Vert and the convent
nuns.
It was perhaps a parrot of this rare kind which played so important a
part in the early history of South America. It is nothing but a legend
of the Guarani nation, which inhabit Paraguay, nevertheless I do
believe that we have here an account mainly true of an important event
in the early history of the race or nation. This parrot is not the
impossible bird of the fictitious Tota Kahami order we all know, who
not only mimics our speech but knows the meaning of the words he
utters. He was nothing but a mimic, exceptionally clever, and the
moral of the story is the familiar one that great events may proceed
from the most trivial causes, once the passions of men are inflamed.
The tradition was related centuries ago to the Jesuit Fathers in
Paraguay, and I give it as they tell it, briefly.
* * * * *
In the beginning a great canoe came over the waters from the east and
was stranded on the shores of Brazil. Out of the canoe came the
brothers Tupi and Guarani and their sons and daughters with their
husbands and wives and their children and children's children.
Tupi was the leader, and being the eldest was called the father, and
Tupi said to his brother: Behold, this great land with all its rivers
and forests, abounding in fish and birds and beasts and fruit, is
ours, for there are no other men dwelling in it; but we are few in
number, let us therefore continue to live together with our children
in one village.
Guarani consented, and for many years they lived together in peace and
amity like one family, until at last there came a quarrel to divide
them. And it was all about a parrot that could talk and laugh and sing
just like a man. A woman first found it in the forest, and not wishing
to burden herself with the rearing of it she gave it to another woman.
So well did it learn to talk from its new mistress that everybody
admired it and it grew to be the talk of the village.
Then the woman who had found and brought it, seeing how much it was
admired and talked about, went and claimed it as her own. The other
refused to give it up, saying that she had reared it and had taught it
all it knew, and by doing so had become its rightful owner.
Now, no person could say which was in the right, and the dispute was
not ended and tongues continued wagging until the husbands of the two
women became engaged in the quarrel. And then brothers and sisters and
cousins were drawn into it, until the whole village was full of
bitterness and strife, all because of the parrot, and men of the same
blood for the first time raised weapons against one another. And some
were wounded and others killed in open fight, and some were
treacherously slain when hunting in the forest.
Now when things had come to this pass Tupi the Father, called his
brother to him and said: O brother Guarani, this is a day of grief to
us who had looked to the spending of our remaining years together with
all our children at this place where we have lived so long. Now this
can no longer be on account of the great quarrel about a parrot, and
the shedding of blood; for only by separating our two families can we
save them from destroying one another. Come then, let us divide them
and lead them away in opposite directions, so that when we settle
again they may be far apart. Guarani consented, and he also said that
Tupi was the elder and their head, and was called the Father, and it
was therefore in his right to remain in possession of the village and
of all that land and to end his days in it. He, on his part, would
call his people together and lead them to a land so distant that the
two families would never see nor hear of each other again, and there
would be no more bitter words and strife between them.
Then the two old brothers bade each other an eternal farewell, and
Guarani led his people south a great distance and travelled many moons
until he came to the River Paraguay, and settled there; and his people
still dwell there and are called by his name to this day.
Only, I beg to add, they do not call their nation by that word, as the
Spanish colonists first spelt it in their carelessness, and as they
pronounce it. Heaven knows how we pronounce it! They, the Guarani
people, call themselves Wae-rae-nae-ee, in a soft musical voice. Also
they call their river, which we spell Paraguay, and pronounce I don't
know how, Pae-rae-wae-ee.