little monkey had long ago forgotten his momentary abstraction and was
curled in a slumbering ball high among the dense foliage of a jungle
tree.... If there is such a thing as prophecy; if the first beginnings
of great and momentous things make themselves felt abroad, then the
cool night wind carried with it more than the scent of orchids and the
calls of the night folk. It must have vibrated with the sense of the
end of a great regime. The dominance of animals was tottering, the
beginning of the end of earthly evolution. Something introspective
had come to pass--a glimpse of the ego--a momentary flash of self
consciousness. The little face in the water was not really another
monkey. And the end of this realization was to be man.
But one such revelation was of no avail, and whether the little monkey
was finally caught by his arch enemies--the serpents or leopards--or
sometime slipped and fell into his pool we shall never know. But his
memory can never die, for he was the first Seer; his eyes were the
first to look Beyond and Within.
Then the new thing happened to great ape-like creatures. Day after day
they would stop in their swift, hand over hand swinging through the
tree-tops and gaze into space for a moment. These primitive _penseurs_
were at a disadvantage, for when their less psychic brethren caught
them off guard they promptly crept up and slew them. But relentless and
remorseless as the waters of the open sea, these waves of abstraction
rolled on. And like bits of drifting wreckage, came tossed and tumbled
thoughts, dumb and inarticulate, groping and quite inadequate for any
use.
The first periods of self-realization were like trances or
obsessions, wholly subconscious and involuntary. For that which we have
not conceived, we cannot intentionally formulate. With feet and hands
clasped about branches, the great ape beings swayed back and forth in
the ecstasy of day dreams. Then from the inward view, the inner sight
with unseeing eyes of what they could not name, they came gradually to
look again upon the outer world. And now was wrought the great change,
for linked ideas flashed upon their confused brain, twin stars of
thought which in their grand-apesons might evolve into knowledge of
cause and effect, and the greatest of all things thoughtful-correlation.
Against single thinkers, the thoughtless ones could easily prevail.
And all the more easily because in the beginning it was as it shall be
in the end--the law of compensation allots brawn to one, and mind to
another, as dominant attributes. This abstraction was a thing apart,
and unlike all other changes which had come in the past. When one
stumbled upon a new way of opening cocoanuts, or experienced witless
facility in walking upright for a few steps, one naturally kept the
knowledge to oneself. Why should any new-found ability be shared! But
these disturbing, inexplicable trances often led to a greater interest
in one’s neighbor or one’s mate.
Ah, one’s mate! One had not thought of this before, except as a
pleasing something to be kept near one. Blindly one had captured it
somehow and one felt that one would tear that fellow ape apart with
teeth and sheer muscle if he came nearer one’s mate; and if ... but
here some buzzing fly was sure to distract, or a troublesome itching
of one’s back which required one’s whole attention, and then, ... well
there was always something else, or food or sleep.
Not only to the great bull apes came these lightning glimpses of self,
but to the females. But there was a difference. The correlation was
direct. The momentary loss due to introspection was all but negatived
by the instantaneous return to the objective: a return which was
like the ascent of the diver with his pearl: a swift recovery of
consciousness leavened with the unfathomable mystery of intuition. And
through all the throes of thought conception, when bull apes travailed
with wrinkled brows and aching heads for the sustained glimmer which
ever faded and died out, their mates went about, ambling on crooked
knuckles, and their little pig eyes shot swiftly their message to one
another--they understood.
They understood and waited quietly. And for this waiting they shall
have naught but praise, superlative praise. For it is not difficult to
wait in ignorance. Thus the crystal waits for its perfect growth: the
seed for the century-delayed warmth and water. But with understanding
to have patience: to feel, however dumbly and blindly, the future of
equality, of splendid unanimity of interest and respect, and to play
one’s hopeless, inarticulate part and wait--this is very wonderful.
And this was the part of the female apes, and the ape women. And the
difference between these was too fine for any written words. But as
nearly as may be it was the difference between waiting, and waiting
with understanding. And there were ape women when as yet there were no
ape men for them to mate with. They followed the law and accepted any
bull ape who broke through their subconscious restraint--that restraint
and appraisement which worked for evolution a hundred thousand years
ago--and will tomorrow. So the bulls continued to come wooing like
great brutal things of lust and brawn. And the ape women, with a last
sidewise glance at their sisters, went with them.
And the bull apes, they too obeyed the law, and performed the three
functions of their life--they sought their food, escaped their enemies,
and enjoyed their mates. But they also did a fourth thing equally
important in the long run, which was hardly classifiable, because it
was instinctive and its selfishness obscured by heredity. They killed
every weakling, or crippled bull or disabled female. One great brawny
female had to use tooth and muscle to save her baby. Thus for once the
law failed. And the failure of the law was due to intuition. And this
was the second great result of the vision of the Seer.
The bulls had made but little use of their new-found self-realizations.
But now the ape woman fought for her babe’s life and won. Weak and
small he certainly was, but he possessed wonderful quickness, and
every pursuit and attempt on his life was unsuccessful. And he grew up
and became a failure as an ape. For he tired of catching flies, and
scratching and sunning and sleeping did not seem to fill up all the
hours of daylight. He played with stones and gathered them in heaps,
and then fled. For at this point all the bull apes in sight, having
forgotten yesterday’s identical experience, rushed up, expecting that
such labor must mean new-found food. Then he found hollow trees and
beat upon them for hours with palm or stick. But he sought no mate,
which was perhaps fortunate, for he would doubtless have returned
maimed, or else been slain outright by the outraged female.
Then one day came to pass the third wonderful thing. A great woman,
who had left her fang marks on every bull who had tried to woo her,
came shuffling along and joined the weakling. He fled only a short
distance and then returned fearlessly. For deceit and treachery were
still to be evolved, and when the mighty ape woman showed favor to
him he knew that it was truth. He accepted her, and continued to fear
the world and to potter about with his stones, and bright-colored
blossoms, and his banging of hollow trees. Then he commenced making
club-like affairs, and sat outside the burrows of small animals and
smashed them when they appeared. And one day he smashed the head of a
female ape, who, following the fourth law had attempted to slay him,
the unbearable weakling. Her mate was roused to such a pitch, that his
self-consciousness dominated and he hunted his victim down. And this
was the end of the weakling, who yet had carried out his destiny.
When the great ape woman bore a child, it fulfilled the promise of the
little monkey’s first ecstasy. The prophecy of the night wind had come
to pass. Here was balance of brawn and mind. Against his twin thoughts,
his correlation, his weapons, his resources, opponents melted away. And
this first ape man found ape women ready: waiting and understanding.
THE BIRD OF THE WINE-COLORED EGG
In this life of ours it is the striking and startling things which
attract our attention and the inexplicable which focus and hold it. A
tinamou fulfills all these requirements, but thrills only one person
in a hundred thousand, because that is about the proportion of human
beings which ever sees or hears or eats him. Nevertheless, tinamous
range over forests and pampas of such extent that the whole United
States could be laid down twice upon them without overlapping.
Quail, partridges and pheasants are birds of the north and temperate
regions, and we are all familiar with the part they play in the
life of mankind--æsthetic, recreational, and commercial. The stress
of competition or some innate constitutional barrier hinders the
dominance of these terrestrial birds in the jungles of the tropics. In
the area of research at my British Guiana laboratory, only a single
small partridge has found and retained a foothold, and this is a very
uncommon bird. In its low call-note, its arched-over nest and its
dead leaf plumage, it seems thoroughly affected by the great, lonely
dimness of its unusual haunts, and an observant traveller could remain
for months ignorant of its very existence.
Another group of fowl-like birds has solved life in these great jungles
by taking to the trees, even nesting high up among the branches. These
guans and curassows have retained the whiteness of egg-shell but have
reduced the number of eggs in a single laying to two.
In the abhorrence of the well-known vacuum accredited to Nature,
the absence of terrestrial gallinaceous birds is compensated by the
presence of tinamous, bob-tailed, sturdy running chaps, who defy all
the dangers of the tropics and carry on their lives in the face of
innumerable foes. To those few fortunates like myself, who have had
opportunity to admire, watch, study, listen to, shoot and eat these
birds, the substitution is eminently satisfactory.
Five o’clock in the afternoon of a newcomer’s first day in the jungle
apprises him of the proximity of tinamous--although if unaided by
Indian or ornithological lore, it may be months before he knows to
what he is listening. From its sweetness, his guess will never be
far from some song bird, perhaps of beautiful plumage, and from its
ventriloquial character he will have no idea whether it comes from
high overhead or from right or left on the ground.
Little by little, year after year, I have gleaned a habit here, a
peculiarity there, until at last it is possible to piece them together
into a mosaic of sorts, a shadowy palimpsest of life history which
gives us more or less of an idea of the voice and fears, the food
and courtship, and the strange domestic relationship of the sexes.
The most familiar of the three species occurring in the quarter of a
square mile of jungle at Kartabo is the variegated tinamou. My Akawai
Indian hunters know him as orri-orri or maam, rolling the r’s like any
Spaniard, and when referring to him technically I call him _Crypturus
variegatus variegatus_ (Gmelin). This, for a wonder, is appropriate
when translated, and the variegated hiddentail is an excellent and
distinctive name.
My first problem was to discover whether the birds which I heard
calling every evening were the same individuals or whether these
tinamous wandered casually through the jungle except when actually
nesting.
By means of slight peculiarities in the call-notes, I was able in two
instances to locate with certainty the home range of the variegated
tinamou. One bird, a female as it ultimately proved, was always to
be found in one of two small snarls of lianas and underbrush. Any
time during the night the bird could be flushed from this spot. In
the morning about 5:30 she began calling, timidly at first, then with
more assurance. As it grew light she left her retreat and moved slowly
west across one of our trails and then turned south to several trees
with fallen fruit. Here the calling ceased for about half an hour and
then recommenced as she retraced her steps, turned west again and
went on until I lost her in the maze of thick jungle. Her last call
was given about seven o’clock. During the period of a full month she
followed this identical routine every one of the eighteen mornings on
which I trailed her, with a single change to a new feeding ground when
the supply from the first gave out. On five evenings I found her back
in the brush pile, when she began a new period of calling, usually
beginning about 5:15 and continuing intermittently until nearly seven
o’clock.
Before the beginning of the regular silvery, staccato trill, a single
high, sweet, long-drawn-out note is uttered, of about two seconds’
duration, followed by an interval of three or four seconds, when
the call proper is given. Rarely, when the bird becomes suddenly
suspicious, the first note is given alone, but almost invariably it is
the precursor of the call. When the birds rise they are always silent,
unlike pheasants, no matter how terrified they may be. On moonlit
nights I have heard their usual call at intervals throughout the night,
on cloudy days it is sometimes uttered at noon, while during no month
of the year is the variegated tinamou wholly silent. The call is, of
course, always given from the ground, and probably nine-tenths of the
utterances occur between 5:00 and 7:00 P.M. and 5:30 and 6:30 A.M.
The first note is usually on F natural, and is very sweet and
penetrating, with considerable carrying power, being audible for long
distances through the jungle. Several times I have heard these birds
across the Cuyuni River, almost a mile away. It is a characteristic
vocal utterance of solitary birds which inhabit deep woods, taking the
place of motion, elaborate plumage, pattern and color of birds which
have more of a chance to communicate by sight.
I have, as regards the enemies of the tinamou, three times found
the feathers or other remains of this species in the jungle, once
accompanied by the tracks of a margay cat or ocelot, and again by the
pugs of some smaller carnivore; another record is of feathers of a
tinamou in juvenile plumage in the stomach of a spectacled owl.
Variegated tinamous are naturally timid birds with a regular system of
escape. When flushed in deep jungle they rise with a sudden rush of
wings and scale off for twenty or thirty yards. They then come to earth
and freeze for ten or fifteen minutes. If, as rarely happens, their
landing place is accurately located, either by actually seeing the bird
descend or the leaves moving, it is an easy matter to approach quite
close and watch the bird for some time. It never moves while under
surveillance but stands like a bit of mottled jungle débris with its
eye full upon the disturber of its peace. Nine times out of ten, the
individual flushed evades all scrutiny or search. Even more than in
the great tinamou, the plumage of this species merges with the jungle
floor. There is no doubt that the birds unconsciously trust to their
protective coloring, both at first in permitting a close approach and
in freezing after the escape dash. When one is crashing through dense
undergrowth, the birds escape by creeping silently to one side, as I
have now and then observed when crouching and watching the progress of
one of my party near-by.
Once I saw a bird collide with a tree-trunk and fall stunned, although
it ultimately recovered. But I believe that such accidents, due to
imperfect steering ability, occur more frequently with the large
tinamou than with either of the small ones.
These solitary birds seem to have no especial association with any
other creatures of the jungle; more than once I have seen them stop
feeding and look up in alarm at the warning rattle of an ant-bird which
had discovered me, but this recognition of the quality of alarm in
other birds’ notes is common to most of the jungle fraternity.
Small berries or fruits form almost the whole vegetable diet, many
cherry-like with round pits, wild plums with oblong stones, hard
acorn-like seeds and occasionally fleshy fruits without pits or seeds.
All the food is procured on the ground, and the birds in company with
agoutis have favorite berry trees, under which, at the season of
falling fruit, they may be found evening after evening.
They are as solitary in their roosting as in other ways; they roost on
the ground, or, as in two cases at least, on fallen logs a few inches
up. Usually the choice of place is deep within a tangle of lianas and
vines, from which the bird could not possibly take immediate flight.
I have kept close watch on a bird, which eventually proved to be a
female, through a brief period of intensive vocal courtship, and
neither then nor afterwards did the tinamou fail each night to roost by
herself in her solitary tangle.
There are only three months during which I have no record of breeding
and these would undoubtedly be filled up if I had more thorough
knowledge of the field under observation. The calling of the females
during every month would indicate that there is no absolute cessation
of breeding, as there is in the case of the large _Tinamus_. The
males of these tinamous take full charge of the single egg and the
subsequent rearing of the chick, and I have found a male, attended by a
three-quarters grown chick, incubating a newly laid egg.
I should not like to make any assertion as to a single male taking
charge of more than three eggs in succession, but from two-month-period
reawakenings of vocal calling in the vicinity of a single nesting
area, and the number of young secured or reported from that place, I
am quite sure that three eggs, one after another, were incubated. It
is interesting to note that the same female, judging from the break
in a preliminary note of its call, in the time under consideration,
underwent at least three other periods of song development in an area
somewhat to the northward, and although I could never locate a nest
or a brooding male there, it is probable that she was courting if not
actually laying eggs for another male bird.
In addition to this instance, at the end of March I have secured a
male variegated tinamou with one-third of the juvenile plumage still on
the body, incubating an egg with a week-old embryo, and twice I have
seen half-grown young birds in company with a single adult, presumably
the male parent. My earlier experience with these birds indicated the
remarkable proportion of sexes of eight males to one female. I now have
a much larger series for comparison, and of forty birds secured within
the area under observation, thirty-two are males and eight females,
a very exact proportion of four to one. This is probably the correct
percentage.
Almost all of the usual calling is done by the females, while the
more excited vocal courtship is wholly feminine. Only once have I
ever heard two birds directly answering each other, and on this
same occasion I had my first glimpse of tinamou courtship. The male
(presumably) was perched on a fallen log near my hiding place, while
an approaching bird (later proven a female) came slowly, by short
quick runs, from a bit of open jungle farther west. In the intervals
between runs she gave utterance to a veritable ecstasy of calling--the
usual dignified, deliberate scale being run and jumbled together in
an excited, high-pitched flood of tone. The male answered from time
to time with the usual call, quite unexcitedly. With perhaps several
months of brooding cares behind him, and more to come, we can hardly
blame him for a restrained, philosophical exhibition of emotion. As
the female approached, her runs became shorter and more irregular, her
body plumage flattened, the head and neck were raised almost straight,
and with rapid, mincing steps, her body vibrating with the effort of
the continuous notes, she zigzagged toward the calm recipient of her
attention. An abominable ant-bird discovered me at this moment, and
rattled and screamed his loudest. Both tinamous seemed to perceive me
at once, the male slipped off his log, and the female rose in a sharp,
twisting spiral and I shot her as she turned, to make certain of the
presumed fact that it was indeed the females which did the courting.
[Illustration: The Tinamou
From a painting by Helen Damrosch Tee Van]
A few weeks later I was hidden between two fallen logs waiting for
a quadrille bird to return to its nest, when a tinamou walked into
view,--jigged, I might have said, for the bird was stiff-legged, and
taking little mincing steps which shook her whole body and scuffed up
the fallen leaves. It was exactly the tremulous heel-walk of an East
Indian dancer when, with motionless body, he moves, or almost floats
across the floor with short, rigid, almost imperceptible jerks. The
tinamou revolved slowly, and when her tail came around into view I
could hardly believe it was the usual dull-hued species. The tail,
or rather, the ten, loose-vaned feathers which represent this almost
obsolete organ, were upright, thereby pushing up all the elongated
feathers of the lower back and rump. Closely applied behind were the
under tail-coverts and even the feathers of the flanks, which now,
flattened and with much of their surface exposed, proved to be really
brilliant in color. With a shaft of sunlight striking them they fairly
glowed; the tips of the tail feathers were buffy brown, then came a row
of rich chestnut, then two rows of pale creamy buff with semi-circular
narrow bands, then a beautiful patch of variegated feathers,
white-tipped, with broad black and russet-red bars, and finally the
softer, black-banded flank feathers. The wings drooped, the tips nearly
touching the ground, the beak pointed upward, and the rich cinamon
breast feathers were puffed out.
Three and a half turns did the courting bird make before she pirouetted
behind the second log. What followed I did not see. I knew that the
least movement on my part would send the bird headlong. My quadrille
bird subsequently returned, I learned what I wished about her, and
then, stiff from a prolonged squat, I arose painfully. Like a shot,
the two tinamous were up and bludgeoned off. Not a sound had they
uttered, and after the faint scuffling of leaves which continued for a
few moments after the birds disappeared, I had no knowledge that any
tinamous remained in the vicinity.
The proportion of the sexes makes it almost certain that these birds
are polyandrous, although judging by the slender spatial and temporal
bond between them, promiscuous would probably be the more appropriate
term. The lack of spurs and the insistence of vocality indicates that
courtship and rivalry are carried on in ladylike fashion.
Of six nests found within the quarter mile of jungle under observation,
three were in dry, moderately flat jungle, two in somewhat swampy
places, and one on a trail half-way up the slope of a low hill. They
are apparently chosen without any thought of escape, for in three
instances when the bird got up, it either struck against intervening
lianas, or had some difficulty in getting away clear. There is little
doubt but that the site is chosen by the male; the hen tinamou sticks
too closely to her calling place, her feeding and roosting areas to do
more than court the male and lay her single egg. Once I was sure of a
second site being near a former one. I took an egg in a damp low bit
of jungle and a week later flushed the bird from a new, well-formed,
but as yet eggless hollow eight feet distant from the first. He did
not, however, return after this second alarm.
No attempt is made to form a nest. Attracted by some unknown choice, a
spot is selected, and is made into a home literally by squatting. If
leaves and twigs and other jungle litter are beneath the breast of the
bird, they are pressed down and form the sole lining; if not, the mold
alone receives the pressure and is gradually rounded into a shallow
form.