BIRDING IN THE MARSHES
Visiting the marshes--Pajonales and Juncales--Abundant bird life--A
Coots' metropolis--Frightening the Coots--Grebe and Painted Snipe
colonies--The haunt of the Social Marsh Hawk--The beautiful Jacana and
its eggs--The colony of Marsh Trupials--The bird's music--The aquatic
plant Durasmillo--The Trupial's nest and eggs--Recalling a beauty that
has vanished--Our games with gaucho boys--I am injured by a bad boy--
The shepherd's advice--Getting my revenge in a treacherous manner--Was
it right or wrong?--The game of Hunting the Ostrich.
At this time of my boy-life most of the daylight hours were spent out
of doors, as when not watching the birds in our plantation or asked to
go and look at the flock grazing somewhere a mile or so from home, in
the absence of the shepherd or his boy, I was always away somewhere on
the plain with my small brother on egg-hunting or other expeditions.
In the spring and summer we often visited the lagoons or marshes, the
most fascinating places I knew on account of their abundant wild bird
life. There were four of these lagoons, all in different directions
and all within two or three miles from home. They were shallow
lakelets, called _lagunas,_ each occupying an area of three or four
hundred acres, with some open water and the rest overgrown with bright
green sedges in dense beds, called _pajonales,_ and immense beds of
bulrushes, called _juncales._ These last were always the best to
explore when the water was not deeper than the saddle-girth, and where
the round dark polished stems, crowned with their bright brown tufts,
were higher than our heads when we urged our horses through them.
These were the breeding-places of some small birds that had their
beautifully-made nests a couple of feet or so above the water,
attached in some cases to single, in others to two or three, rush
stems. And here, too, we found the nests of several large species--
egret, night-heron, cormorant, and occasionally a hawk--birds which
build on trees in forest districts, but here on the treeless region of
the pampas they made their nests among the rushes. The fourth lakelet
had no rush-or sedge-beds and no reeds, and was almost covered with a
luxuriant growth of the floating _camalote,_ a plant which at a
distance resembles the wild musk or mimulus in its masses of bright
green leaves and brilliant yellow blossoms. This, too, was a
fascinating spot, as it swarmed with birds, some of them being kinds
which did not breed in the reeds and rushes. It was a sort of
metropolis of the coots, and before and after the breeding season they
would congregate in flocks of many hundreds on the low wet shore,
where their black forms had a singular appearance on the moist green
turf. It looked to me like a reproduction in small size of a scene I
had witnessed--the vast level green pampa with a scattered herd of two
or three thousand black cattle grazing on it, on a large cattle estate
where only black beasts were bred. We always thought it great fun when
we found a big assembly of coots at some distance from the margin.
Whipping up our horses, we would suddenly charge the flock to see them
run and fly in a panic to the lake and rush over the open water,
striking the surface with their feet and raising a perfect cloud of
spray behind them.
Coots, however, were common everywhere, but this water was the only
breeding-place of the grebe in our neighbourhood; yet here we could
find scores of nests any day--scores with eggs and a still greater
number of false nests, and we could never tell which had eggs in it
before pulling off the covering of wet weeds. Another bird rarely seen
at any other spot than this was the painted snipe, a prettily-marked
species with a green curved bill. It has curiously sluggish habits,
rising only when almost trodden upon, and going off in a wild sacred
manner like a nocturnal species, then dropping again into hiding at a
short distance. The natives call it _dormilon_--sleepy-head. On one
side of the lagoon, where the ground was swampy and wet, there was
always a breeding-colony of these quaint birds; at every few yards one
would spring up close to the hoofs, and dismounting we would find the
little nest on the wet ground under the grass, always with two eggs so
thickly blotched all over with black as to appear almost entirely
black.
There were other rushy lagoons at a greater distance which we visited
only at long intervals, and one of these I must describe, as it was
almost more attractive than any one of the others on account of its
bird life. Here, too, there were some kinds which we never found
breeding elsewhere.
It was smaller than the other lagoons I have described and much
shallower, so that the big birds, such as the stork, wood-ibis,
crested screamer, and the great blue ibis, called _vanduria,_ and the
roseate spoonbill, could wade almost all over it without wetting their
feathers. It was one of those lakes which appear to be drying up, and
was pretty well covered with a growth of _camalote_ plant, mixed with
reed, sedge, and bulrush patches. It was the only water in our part of
the country where the large water-snail was found, and the snails had
brought the bird that feeds on them--the large social marsh hawk, a
slate-coloured bird resembling a buzzard in its size and manner of
flight. But being exclusively a feeder on snails, it lives in peace
and harmony with the other bird inhabitants of the marsh. There was
always a colony of forty or fifty of these big hawks to be seen at
this spot. A still more interesting bird was the jacana, as it is
spelt in books, but pronounced ya-sa-NA by the Indians of Paraguay, a
quaint rail-like bird supposed to be related to the plover family:
black and maroon-red in colour, the wing-quills a shining greenish
yellow, it has enormously long toes, spurs on its wings, and yellow
wattles on its face. Here I first saw this strange beautiful fowl, and
here to my delight I found its nest in three consecutive summers, with
three or four clay-coloured eggs spotted with chestnut-red.
Here, too, was the breeding-place of the beautiful black-and-white
stilt, and of other species too many to mention. But my greatest
delight was in finding breeding in this place a bird I loved more than
all the others I have named--a species of marsh trupial, a bird about
the size of the common cowbird, and like it, of a uniform deep purple,
but with a cap of chestnut-coloured feathers on its head. I loved this
bird for its song--the peculiar delicate tender opening notes and
trills. In spring and autumn large flocks would occasionally visit our
plantation, and the birds in hundreds would settle on a tree and all
sing together, producing a marvellous and beautiful noise, as of
hundreds of small bells all ringing at one time. It was by the water I
first found their breeding-place, where about three or four hundred
birds had their nests quite near together, and nests and eggs and the
plants on which they were placed, with the solicitous purple birds
flying round me, made a scene of enchanting beauty. The nesting-site
was on a low swampy piece of ground grown over with a semi-aquatic
plant called _durasmillo_ in the vernacular. It has a single white
stalk, woody in appearance, two to three feet high, and little
thicker than a man's middle finger, with a palm-like crown of large
loose lanceolate leaves, so that it looks like a miniature palm, or
rather an ailanthus tree, which has a slender perfectly white bole.
The solanaceous flowers are purple, and it bears fruit the size of
cherries, black as jet, in clusters of three to five or six. In this
forest of tiny palms the nests were hanging, attached to the boles,
where two or three grew close together; it was a long and deep nest,
skilfully made of dry sedge leaves woven together, and the eggs were
white or skim-milk blue spotted with black at the large end.
That enchanting part of the marsh, with its forest of graceful
miniature trees, where the social trupials sang and wove their nests
and reared their young in company--that very spot is now, I dare say,
one immense field of corn, lucerne, or flax, and the people who now
live and labour there know nothing of its former beautiful
inhabitants, nor have they ever seen or even heard of the purple-
plumaged trupial, with its chestnut cap and its delicate trilling
song. And when I recall these vanished scenes, those rushy and flowery
meres, with their varied and multitudinous wild bird life--the cloud
of shining wings, the heart-enlivening wild cries, the joy unspeakable
it was to me in those early years--I am glad to think I shall never
revisit them, that I shall finish my life thousands of miles removed
from them, cherishing to the end in my heart the image of a beauty
which has vanished from earth.
My elder brother occasionally accompanied us on our egg-hunting visits
to the lagoons, and he also joined us in our rides to the two or three
streams where we used to go to bathe and fish; but he took no part in
our games and pastimes with the gaucho boys: they were beneath him. We
ran races on our ponies, and when there were race-meetings in our
neighbourhood my father would give us a little money to go and enter
our ponies in a boys' race. We rarely won when there were any stakes,
as the native boys were too clever on horseback for us, and had all
sorts of tricks to prevent us from winning, even when our ponies were
better than theirs. We also went tinamou, or partridge, catching, and
sometimes we had sham fights with lances, or long canes with which we
supplied the others. These games were very rough, and one day when we
were armed, not with canes but long straight pliant green poplar
boughs we had cut for the purpose, we were having a running fight,
when one of the boys got in a rage with me for some reason and,
dropping behind, then coming quietly up, gave me a blow on the face
and head with his stick which sent me flying off my pony. They all
dashed on, leaving me there to pick myself up, and mounting my pony I
went home crying with pain and rage. The blow had fallen on my head,
but the pliant stick had come down over my face from the forehead to
the chin, taking the skin off. On my way back I met our shepherd and
told him my story, and said I would go to the boy's parents to tell
them. He advised me not to do so; he said I must learn to take my own
part, and if any one injured me and I wanted him punished I must do
the punishing myself. If I made any fuss and complaint about it I
should only get laughed at, and he would go scot free. What, then, was
I to do? I asked, seeing that he was older and stronger than myself,
and had his heavy whip and knife to defend himself against attack.
"Oh, don't be in a hurry to do it," he returned. "Wait for an
opportunity, even if you have to wait for days; and when it comes, do
to him just what he did to you. Don't warn him, but simply knock him
off his horse, and then you will be quits."
Now this shepherd was a good man, much respected by every one, and I
was glad that in his wisdom and sympathy he had put such a simple,
easy plan into my head, and I dried my tears and went home and washed
the blood from my face, and when asked how I had got that awful wound
that disfigured me I made light of it. Two days later my enemy
appeared on the scene. I heard his voice outside the gate calling to
some one, and peering out I saw him sitting on his horse. His guilty
conscience made him afraid to dismount, but he was anxious to find out
what was going to be done about his treatment of me, also, if he could
see me, to discover my state of mind after two days.
I went out to the timber pile and selected a bamboo cane about twenty
feet long, not too heavy to be handled easily, and holding it up like
a lance I marched to the gate and started swinging it round as I
approached him, and showing a cheerful countenance. "What are you
going to do with that cane?" he shouted, a little apprehensively.
"Wait and see," I returned. "Something to make you laugh." Then, after
whirling it round half a dozen times more, I suddenly brought it down
on his head with all my force, and did exactly what I had been
counselled to do by the wise shepherd--knocked him clean off his
horse. But he was not stunned, and starting up in a screeching fury,
he pulled out his knife to kill me. And I, for strategic reasons,
retreated, rather hastily. But his wild cries quickly brought several
persons on the scene, and, recovering courage, I went back and said
triumphantly, "Now we are quits!" Then my father was called and asked
to judge between us, and after hearing both sides he smiled and said
his judgment was not needed, that we had already settled it all
ourselves, and there was nothing now between us. I laughed, and he
glared at me, and mounting his horse, rode off without another word.
It was, however, only because he was suffering from the blow on his
head; when I met him we were good friends again.
More than once during my life, when recalling that episode, I have
asked myself if I did right in taking the shepherd's advice? Would it
have been better, when I went out to him with the bamboo cane, and he
asked me what I was going to do with it, if I had gone up to him and
shown him my face with that broad band across it from the chin to the
temple, where the skin had come off and a black crust had formed, and
had said to him: "This is the mark of the blow you gave me the day
before yesterday, when you knocked me off my horse; you see it is on
the right side of my face and head; now take the cane and give me
another blow on the left side"? Tolstoy (my favourite author, by the
way) would have answered: "Yes, certainly it would have been better
for you--better for your soul." Nevertheless, I still ask myself:
"Would it?" and if this incident should come before me half a second
before my final disappearance from earth, I should still be in doubt.
One of our favourite games at this period--the only game on foot we
ever played with the gaucho boys--was hunting the ostrich. To play
this game we had bolas, only the balls at the end of the thong were
not of lead like those with which the grown-up gaucho hunter captures
the real ostrich or rhea. We used light wood to make balls, so as not
to injure each other. The fastest boy was chosen to play the ostrich,
and would be sent off to roam ostrich-fashion on the plain, pretending
to pick clover from the ground as he walked in a stooping attitude, or
making little runs and waving his arms about like wings, then standing
erect and mimicking the hollow booming sounds the cock bird emits when
calling the flock together.
The hunters would then come on the scene and the chase begin, the
ostrich putting forth all his speed, doubling to this side and that,
and occasionally thinking to escape by hiding, dropping upon the
ground in the shelter of a cardoon thistle, only to jump up again when
the shouts of the hunters drew near, to rush on as before. At
intervals the bolas would come whirling through the air, and he would
dodge or avoid them by a quick turn, but eventually he would be hit
and the thong would wind itself about his legs and down he would come.
Then the hunters would gather round him, and pulling out their knives
begin operations by cutting off his head; then the body would be cut
up, the wings and breast removed, these being the best parts for
eating, and there would be much talk about the condition and age of
the bird, and so on. Then would come the most exciting part of the
proceedings--the cutting the gizzard open and the examination of its
varied contents; and by and by there would be an exultant shout, and
one of the boys would pretend to come on a valuable find--a big silver
coin perhaps, a _patacon,_ and there would be a great gabble over
it and perhaps a fight for its possession, and they would wrestle and
roll on the grass, struggling for the imaginary coin. That finished,
the dead ostrich would get up and place himself among the hunters,
while the boy who had captured him with his bolas would then play
ostrich, and the chase would begin anew.
When this game was played I was always chosen as first ostrich, as at
that time I could easily outrun and out-jump any of my gauche
playmates, even those who were three or four years older than myself.
Nevertheless, these games--horse-racing, sham fights, and ostrich-
hunting, and the like--gave me no abiding satisfaction; they were no
sooner over than I would go back, almost with a sense of relief, to my
solitary rambles and bird-watching, and to wishing that the day would
come when my masterful brother would allow me to use a gun and
practise the one sport of wild-duck shooting I desired.
That was soon to come, and will form the subject of the ensuing
chapter.