sea-fowl, and the last, with its short thick neck, large beak, and
upright attitudes on land, is perhaps the nearest relative to the
penguin among British birds, with the exception of the little auk. Like
the penguins they fly below water, though, unlike them, they can also
fly in the air, the puffin being almost the only English sea-fowl which
is a true bird of passage, and yearly leaves the cliffs and islands
where it breeds along our coasts, to spend the winter in the
Mediterranean. The young puffin at the Zoo refuses to dive for fish at
present, and only takes to the water when chased by its keeper. The
guillemot is a far more graceful bird. Dark above and white below, with
a long, slender, and curved beak, it combines the submarine powers of
the penguin with the buoyant gracefulness of a water-hen when floating
on the surface. Below water its movements are far more deliberate than
those of the penguin. Like the water-hen, it can use its wings for
aërial or aquatic flight indifferently, but the feet are also used in
turning, and the wing-strokes are more sustained, regular, and slower
than in the case of the true “seal-birds.” As an “all-round performer,”
the guillemot is perhaps the best in the Zoological Society’s
collection, and with the whole of the upper plumage, head and neck,
converted by a “sea-change” into what appears a clinging mantle of
quicksilver, it is certainly the most beautiful in its favourite
element. The “air-jacket” which the guillemot carries with it after each
dive, and which, gradually vanishing in the water, is renewed after its
rise to the surface to breathe or swim, probably plays a useful part in
its submarine flights. It lessens the surface friction of the water,
and, like the air below the “skimming-dish” boat, which some inventors
look upon as the probable means of obtaining the next considerable rise
of speed on the surface, is the simplest and most natural of all
lubricants between the bird and the water.
The other birds in the cages are perhaps more truly classed as divers
than the penguins and their relations. They plunge and swim, using their
wings for aërial flight only.
Those who watch the cormorant’s diving feats are usually so interested
in the fortunes of the chase as the handsome bird dashes after the fish,
that not one visitor in twenty observes that, from the mode of its
entering the water to its exit, its methods of movement are absolutely
different to those of the penguins. The cormorant does not plunge
headlong. It launches itself on the surface and then “ducks” like a
grebe. Its wings are not used as propellers, but trail unresistingly
level with its body, and the speed at which it courses through the water
is wholly due to the swimming powers of its large and ugly webbed feet.
These are set on quite at the end of the body, and work incessantly like
a treadle, or the floats of a stern-wheel steamer. Yet the conditions of
submarine motion are so favourable, that the speed of the bird below the
surface is three or four times greater than that gained by equally rapid
movements of the feet when it has risen and is swimming on the top. The
lustre of the feathers in the clear water, the cloud of brilliant
bubbles which pour from the plumage, like the nebulous train of a comet,
as the bird rushes through the water, and the sapphire light of the
large blue eye, make the cormorant’s fishing one of the prettiest
aquatic exercises in the world.
The darters, though resembling the cormorant rather than the penguin in
using their feet only for propulsion, are so clearly a survival of some
ancient type, with their long snaky necks and pointed mandibles, and
meagre membranous wings, that the imagination travels back at once to
the steamy forests and swamps, and fish and saurian-haunted waters of
some antediluvian epoch. The appearance of these creatures below water
is even stranger than when perched on the bank above. Like the cormorant
they swim with the feet only, and with the same rapid mechanical
alternate movements of each. Like the cormorant also they allow their
wings to float parallel with the body, and the long black-and-white
feathers and tail, loosely set on, and retaining quantities of air in
the interstices, are at once transformed by a surface of velvet and
quicksilver as the bird descends. But, unlike the cormorant, it keeps
its neck drawn back in the form of a flattened S when in pursuit of the
fish. Once within striking distance, the sharp bill is shot out as if
from a catapult, and the fish is spiked through and carried to the
surface. This ascent is made after each single capture. Sometimes the
bird has great difficulty in disentangling the pierced fish from the
spear-like beak, and its companion adroitly relieves it of the
struggling victim and swallows the prize. The brain capacity of these
creatures is probably less in proportion to their size than that of any
other bird. After years of familiarity with their keeper, they would as
soon dart their piercing bills into his eye as into the body of a fish,
and are probably the lowest in the scale of intelligence as well as in
development of the bird creation. Yet their movements below water are
graceful and precise, and their skill in their one accomplishment of
fish-spearing is unrivalled by human dexterity.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TAME DIVERS.
WHEN an ideal home for the diving birds is constructed at the Zoo, we
may hope to see them sitting in the sunlight on the flat rocks they
love, and watch the guillemots and razorbills rearing their young, or
swimming on the surface with their offspring sitting on their backs as
they do off the cliffs of Freshwater and Flamborough Head. These
rock-fowl, unlike the gulls and terns, are more easily tamed, and in a
sense domesticated, than any other bird except the parrot. But unlike
the parrots, they have so little fear of man in a wild state, that is
when quite young, but able to fish for themselves at sea, that two or
three days in human company are enough to attach them firmly to their
new acquaintances. The tameness of the full-grown young razorbills when
engaged in fishing in the narrow waters of the lochs on the west coast
of Scotland has been more than once mentioned to the writer; they hardly
care to move out of the way of a yacht’s boats, when these are rowing to
and from the shore or rowing up the lochs. The young full-grown birds
would allow the boats almost to row over them, and when a hand was
stretched out to pick them up they would just dive below the keel, and
rise as near on the other side. In the Irish Sea they kept so close to a
yacht that the spray from the bow, or the parting waves under the stern,
seemed often about to break over them. That this was due to a certain
confidence in man is partly shown by the behaviour of a young bird which
was found by some members of the same ship’s party, swimming by itself
in a small lagoon left by the tide off the Norfolk coast. Razorbills are
not common near this low shore, and this young bird had probably come in
pursuit of a shoal of fish, and been unable to find its companions
again. In any case it was quite alone, and in the absence of any of its
own kind, made itself one of a bathing party of young people who
frequented the part of the beach where it was first seen. It allowed
itself to be caught and taken up to the house, where, on the arrival of
the elders from a drive, it was found in the stableyard, sitting in the
middle of a large preserving-pan which had been turned into a temporary
stew-pond for a number of small eels which the children had amused
themselves with catching when paddling in the stream the day before. “It
has eaten _all_ the fish!” was the first intelligence of the ways of the
new arrival; as a fact, there were one or two eels left, at which the
razorbill, looking like one who had greatly dined, now and then aimed an
apathetic peck. To be carried inland by children, and then, surrounded
by a whole family of humans, to catch and eat about twenty live eels in
a stew-pan, is good evidence of the confidence which these birds have in
man. From that day until its lamented death the bird was as much a
member of the family as the fox-terrier or the cats. Next day it was
carried down to the beach, and placed on the wet sand by the breakers.
It waddled down to the water, took a swim round, and came back to the
shore. This happened twice or thrice, and as it showed no disposition to
return to the sea it was carried back once more to the house. Every day
the bird was taken down to the beach and set free, while the whole party
bathed from tents set on the shore. It would swim out sometimes as far
as a quarter of a mile, until it was a mere black speck on the water.
Then, just as it seemed about to leave its friends for good, the black
speck turned into a white one as the bird turned its white breast
towards the shore. It would swim steadily towards the bathing-tent,
scramble out of the water, and walk up to the shingle bank on which the
party were lying enjoying the sun after their bathe. The razorbill,
having completely identified itself with the habits of its hosts would
do the same, opening its wings and sunning itself beside them. One
rather rough day, with a choppy sea, it was carried some way down the
shore by a current, and landed at a considerable distance from its usual
point; but it succeeded in landing at a place opposite to where some of
the party were waiting for it. During these excursions it dived and
fished in the small lagoons left by the tide, and the provision of a
further supply was of course a delightful occupation to the children, to
whom the razorbill’s unfailing appetite was a valid reason for being on
the shore and in the water at all hours. This curious alliance lasted
for some nine or ten days, when the bird was choked by its food in a
rather odd way. One of the children was holding in one hand a flat-fish,
which was about to be cut up into pieces of a size more suited to the
size of the razorbill’s throat. The bird was sitting on her other hand
at the time, and reaching across seized the fish by the head, jerked it
from her hand, and swallowed it. But though not choked at the time, it
never recovered the effects of its surfeit of flounder, and died greatly
lamented on the following day.
The penguin can be tamed almost as easily, or rather are often tame from
the first. The keeper of the diving birds, like many others at the
Zoological Gardens, is an East Anglian, coming from one of the most
secluded and least aquatic districts of Central Suffolk. But the
instinct for the care of animals, from cart-horses down to geese and
game-bantams, is innate in the intelligent Suffolk and Norfolk
countryman; and Waterman usually has at least one penguin which is
almost as companionable as a child. Prince, a rock-hopper penguin from
New Zealand, was perhaps the most amusing and interesting of these
amphibious pets. It was the owner of a smart red flannel jacket with
yellow facings, which had been presented to it by an admirer, and
dressed in this the penguin would hop, hop, hop, in the most ludicrous
and serious fashion, after its keeper, or make an excursion on to the
lawn outside, where the _flight_ of the sparrows seemed a constant
source of interest to this wingless bird. Poor Prince died a victim to
influenza, and it will be long before his place is taken by a more
friendly or amusing creature.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE QUEST FOR THE WILD HORSE.
THE sustaining hope of the discoverer of the unknown is seldom wholly
vague or visionary. No man, as a rule, breaks into a new world by
accident or hap-hazard. New worlds, or lands, or men, or beasts, have
lived in the imagination, and been foreshadowed and foretold by a
hundred minute and subtle inductions, grouping themselves round the
central idea in minds so set on finding what they felt was to be found,
that in the end their quest was gained, and they have been able to tell
the world that what they felt must exist, did exist, and was found. Even
though the nominal object of his search be prosaic and matter-of-fact,
the explorer generally cherishes some dear ideal, some side-issue, some
pet project of his own in the realm of discovery, which his efforts
shall bring to light, and which will realize some reasoned result of his
own sagacity and foresight. When Pythias, the first navigator of the
Northern seas, was sent on a “commercial mission” by the colonists of
Marseilles to find the tin-islands, he performed the practical part of
his mission with all good faith and diligence; but to him, the man of
science, the mathematician and astronomer, the bare discovery of new
tribes of barbarians, new islands, and half-frozen seas, could have
brought no such nights of triumph as that on which he tracked the Sun to
his lair behind the Lapland mountain, and saw the brilliant creature
slip again from his cavern, after his brief but necessary repose. Such
must have been the triumph of Columbus when he fancied that he
identified on the shores of America the plants and streams of India and
Cathay; and such, in some sense, the feelings of Prejvalski, the latest
traveller to seek the Eastern limits of the Old World through new and
untried paths, when he realized his hope of discovering in the deserts
of Mongolia the wild camel and the wild horse.
The experiences of this Russian soldier when he had penetrated into the
regions behind the plateau of Tibet to the mysterious lake of Koko-Nor,
lying 10,000 ft. above the sea, are more in the spirit and setting of
the journals of Columbus than any tale of travel of modern times. The
lake, blue as a sapphire, lay in a setting of dull salt sand, with an
encircling rim of snowy mountains. Outside and beyond the mountains lay
on one side the forbidden land of China; on another, Tibet, with its
frozen and stereo-typed government of a priestly caste; and on the west,
the broken tribes of Eastern Turkestan. As he passed towards the great
Desert of Gobi, which divides the dwindling population on one side of
the mountains from the decaying civilization on the other, he found
himself almost alone among the primitive animals and birds of the centre
of the Old World; and as the old Greeks imagined, and as Darwin found in
Patagonia, and voyagers at either Pole, that at the ends of the world
Nature was simplified, with fewer and more primitive forms, so, in the
“centre of the world,” Prejvalski found that in these remote and
solitary regions he was face to face with some of the early and original
types of those animals which man enslaved and turned to his own uses, at
such a distance of time that the original types were believed to have
perished for ever. The hope of discovering the “undescended dark
original” of some of our domesticated animals, especially of those
ancient servants of Eastern mankind, the camel and the horse, seems to
have been ever present to the mind of Prejvalski, and to have affected
his imagination as the vision of the shining walls of El Dorado did the
old adventurers, or the hope of finding the mother-rock of the gold, the
gold-seekers of our day. From the sapphire lake of Koko-Nor he pushed
towards the North-West across the plain of Tsaidam, a strange,
unfinished region, once the bed of a huge lake, a waste of sand,
salt-impregnated clay, and marshes, through clouds of mosquitoes and
gadflies, towards another lake, called Lob-Nor, lying in an extension of
the great Desert of Gobi. He had marked how, as he journeyed across Asia
westward, all the elements of Nature grew more simple and severe, and
that as the more complex landscape resolved itself into waterless
mountains, salt lakes, and rude vegetation, so the types of animal life
grew constantly more primitive. He had left behind him the semi-wild
horses of the Don and Southern Russia, and seen the still wilder ponies
of the Mongols, “under the average height, with thick necks, large
heads, thick legs, and long, shaggy coats.” The camels of the Koko-Nor
were smaller and rougher than those further West, and he rejoiced to
think that he must now be approaching the original home of the wild
camel, and even of the wild horse. “Such a journey,” he wrote, “must
finally set at rest the question of the existence of wild camels and
wild horses; the people have repeatedly told me of both, and described
them fully.” The wild camels were said to live in North-West Tsaidam,
and to have smaller humps and more pointed muzzles than the tame camels,
and grey hair. They were hunted for food, and were exceedingly fleet,
wary, and suspicious of man. These stories of the Mongols were found to
be correct. Several skins of the wild camel were brought to the
traveller, and he was at last rewarded by a sight of one of them, though
the distance was too great to enable him to shoot it or compare it with
the tame animals. Later, however, some have been taken alive, and the
existence of the wild camel in the Desert of Gobi may be taken as
established.[3]
Footnote 3:
The skins and skeletons of the wild camel are now on view at the
Natural History Museum.
The Mongol accounts of the wild horses, though equally positive, were
less satisfactory. They were certain that there did exist wild horses in
the same districts as the wild camels; and they were also certain that
these were distinct from the horselike kiang, the wild ass of Eastern
Turkestan and Mongolia. The kiangs do, in fact, resemble a Mongol horse
in many points. They have the same heavy head, square shoulder, chestnut
colour, and short ears; but they differ in having their lower parts
almost white, and a true ass’s tail. They neigh, but also bray, and,
when going at full speed, have the characteristic appearance of an ass
with “great ugly head stretched out straight before, and scanty tail
straight behind,” as Prejvalski says. They are, in fact, probably only a
variety of the wild ass of Persia and Western Turkestan. But the Mongol
accounts of the wild horse were quite inconsistent with the description
of the kiangs. “The wild horses,” they said, “were numerous near
Lob-Nor, but were so shy that when frightened they continued their
flight for days. They were of a uniform bay [? dun] colour, with black
tails, and manes sweeping the ground; and were never hunted because they
were too difficult of approach.” Prejvalski obtained the skin of one of
these wild horses; but the evidence so obtained did not bear out the
account given by the Mongols, who seem to have fallen into the usual
error of imagining that in the “wild horse” they would find the species
in a condition of original and primitive perfection. Of course nothing
could be more contrary to probabilities. “Wild” animals, compared with
domesticated descendants of the same species, occupy much the same
position as “wild” plants do to their descendants in the garden; and the
absence of fine legs and a flowing mane in the _Equus Prejvalskii_ made
the place assigned to it as the ancestor of the modern horse all the
more probable. Now the news comes that the wild horse of Prejvalski has
been seen, hunted, and captured by two Russian travellers, the brothers
Grum-Grizimailo, and that four specimens have been brought to the
Zoological Gardens of St. Petersburg from their Central Asian home.
These creatures are said to correspond in all respects with the skin
obtained by Prejvalski, and to represent the ancestors of all our modern
horses. From a picture of the animal which appeared in the _Graphic_,
there seems some reason to doubt whether they may not, after all, be
only a variety of the kiang, or wild ass of Turkestan. They have the
ass’s hog-mane, and a tail in which the long hairs, though not confined
to the tip, do not begin to grow until some inches from the root.
Neither has the animal any forelock. On the other hand, the ears are
short, not long, as in all the ass tribe, and the square shoulder is not
more characteristic of the asses than of all neglected breeds of horses.
Moreover, it is a commonplace in natural history, that the primitive
characteristics are shown in the young; and the thin tail, short neck,
and head set on so as to make an angle with the throat instead of a
curve, are as characteristic of a young colt as of the _Equus
Prejvalskii_. But, apart from all external differences between the ass
and the horse, lies the inexplicable fact that the latter adapts itself
to changed conditions in almost all climates, while the former does not.
Under human care and selection, the horse varies so rapidly, that we
meet with all extremes, from the dray-horse to the Shetland, and all
colours from black to white. But the ass in the last five thousand years
has varied little. It will not thrive except in hot climates, and
centuries of careful breeding have not caused it to change colour
further than from grey to white,[4] and have done little to make it a
pleasant animal to ride, or big enough for heavy draught. These facts
give a starting-point from which we may judge whether or not the _Equus
Prejvalskii_ is of the true stock. Let those recently brought to Russia
be made the nucleus of a herd, and the variations of successive
generations be noted. Then if they are true horses, they will vary first
in colour, then in shape, and human selection ought to be able to guide
the varieties towards different types. If, on the other hand, they be
asses, they will refuse to vary, and remain true to the type of the
steppes of Dsungaria.
Footnote 4:
There are black donkeys, but most appear to be instances of “melanism”
rather than of colour gradation.
Even in our own New Forest, this difference between the horse and the
ass is curiously persistent. In the Southern Forest there are many
hundreds of semi-wild donkeys, as well as ponies, which are left to
Nature from year to year. The ponies are of every colour known in the
annals of horse-breeding, but the shaggy little donkeys are all of a
uniform dark stone-colour, which never varies. Looking at the beautiful
wild asses from the Desert of Cutch, Southern Africa, and Central Asia,
which are exhibited at the Zoo, one is tempted to wonder how it comes
that the race in this country has been allowed to degenerate, instead of
being retained as a strong and useful auxiliary to our unrivalled breed
of horses.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ÆSTHETICS AT THE ZOO.
THE ANIMAL SENSE OF BEAUTY.
THAT sense of beauty to which the gorgeous plumage of the male birds in
many species is an obvious and direct appeal, is by no means limited to
the knowledge so naïvely shown by resplendent husbands and adoring
wives, that fine feathers make fine birds. So common and varied is the
pleasure derived from this sense, that in many kinds it extends to the
conscious search for and appliance of beautiful objects in the
decoration of nests, of pleasure-houses, and the enrichment of
collections. This taste for ornament is by no means limited to birds
kept in captivity, in which they often learn tricks and habits foreign
to their nature, from _ennui_ and idleness. In the freedom of English
woods or Papuan jungles, they show the keenest pleasure in the strange
or beautiful shapes and colours of flowers, of feathers, of fruits, of
gay shells and insects, of woven fabrics, of metal, glass, and gems; and
similar tastes shown in captivity are often but the survival and maimed
reproduction of their natural love for surrounding themselves with what
pleases the eye. It appears in species where it might be least expected,
and is developed to a point at which it becomes an artistic passion
identical in motive and the means taken to gratify it, with the same
taste and its expression by civilized man. It is not without reason that
the Papuan, who lives naked under a tree, calls the gardener-bird “the
master,” which can build not only a nest, but a lovely pleasure-house
besides, and adorns this with a hundred beautiful objects to satisfy
æsthetic wants which the savage is not yet developed enough to feel or
understand.