Naturalists place the parrot group at the head of bird creation. This is
done, not, of course, because parrots can talk, but because they
display, on the whole, a greater amount of intelligence, of cleverness
and adaptability to circumstances than other birds, including even their
cunning rivals, the ravens and the jackdaws.
It may well be asked what are the causes of the exceptionally high
intelligence in parrots. The answer which I suggest is that an intimate
connection exists throughout the animal world between mental development
and the power of grasping an object all round, so as to know exactly its
shape and its tactile properties. The possession of an effective
prehensile organ—a hand or its equivalent—seems to be the first great
requisite for the evolution of a high order of intellect. Man and the
monkeys, for example, have a pair of hands; and in their case one can
see at a glance how dependent is their intelligence upon these grasping
organs. All human arts base themselves ultimately upon the human hand;
and our nearest relatives, the anthropoid apes, approach humanity to
some extent by reason of their ever-active and busy little fingers. The
elephant, again, has his flexible trunk, which, as we have all heard
over and over again, is equally well adapted to pick up a pin or to
break the great boughs of tropical forest trees. The squirrel, also,
remarkable for his unusual intelligence when judged by a rodent
standard, uses his little paws as hands by which he can grasp a nut or
fruit all round, and so gain in his small mind a clear conception of its
true shape and properties. Throughout the animal kingdom generally,
indeed, this chain of causation makes itself everywhere felt; no high
intelligence without a highly-developed prehensile and grasping organ.
Perhaps the opossum is the best and most crucial instance that can be
found of the intimate connection which exists between touch and
intellect. The opossum is a marsupial; it belongs to the same group of
lowly-organized, antiquated and pouch-bearing animals as the kangaroo,
the wombat, and other Australian mammals. Everybody knows that the
marsupials, as a class, are preternaturally dull—are perhaps the least
intelligent of all existing quadrupeds. And this is reasonable when one
considers the subject, for they represent a very early type, the first
“rough sketch” of the mammalian idea, with brains unsharpened as yet by
contact with the world in the fierce competition of the struggle for
life as it displays itself on the crowded stage of the great continents.
They stand, in fact, to the lions and tigers, the elephants and horses,
the monkeys and squirrels of America and Europe, as the native
Australian stands to the American or the Englishman. They are the last
relic of the original secondary quadrupeds, stranded for centuries on a
Southern island, and still keeping up among Australian forests the
antique type of life that went out of fashion elsewhere a vast number of
years ago. Hence they have brains of poor quality, a fact amply
demonstrated by the kangaroo when one watches his behavior in the
zoological gardens.
[Illustration: ]
Every high-school graduate is well aware that the opossum, though it is
a marsupial, differs in psychological development from the kangaroo and
the wombat. The opossum is active and highly intelligent. He knows his
way about the world in which he lives. “A ’possum up a gum tree” is
accepted by observant minds as the very incarnation of animal cunning
and duplicity. In negro folklore the resourceful ’possum takes the place
of the fox in European stories; he is the Macchiavelli of wild beasts;
there is no ruse on earth of which he is not amply capable; and no wily
manoeuvre exists which he cannot carry to an end successfully. All guile
and intrigue, the possum can circumvent even Uncle Remus himself by his
crafty diplomacy. And what is it that makes all the difference between
this ’cute marsupial and his backward Australian cousins? It is the
possession of a prehensile hand and tail. Therein lies the whole secret.
The opossum’s hind foot has a genuine apposable thumb; and he also uses
his tail in climbing as a supernumerary hand, almost as much as do any
of the monkeys. He often suspends himself by it, like an acrobat, swings
his body to and fro to obtain speed, then lets go suddenly, and flies
away to a distant branch, which he clutches by means of his hand-like
hind foot. If the toes make a mistake, he can recover his position by
the use of his prehensile tail. The result is that the opossum, being
able to form for himself clear and accurate conceptions of the real
shapes and relations of things by these two distinct grasping organs,
has acquired an unusual amount of general intelligence. And further, in
the keen competition for life, he has been forced to develop an amount
of cunning which leaves his Australian poor relations far behind in the
Middle Ages of psychological evolution.
At the risk of appearing to forsake my ostensible subject altogether, I
must pause for a moment to answer a very obvious objection to my
argument. How about the dog and the horse? They have no prehensile
organ, and yet they are admitted to be the most intelligent of all
quadrupeds. The cleverness of the horse and the dog, however, is
acquired, not original. It has arisen in the course of long and
hereditary association with man, the cleverest and most serviceable
individuals having been deliberately selected from generation to
generation as dams and sires to breed from. We cannot fairly compare
these artificial human products with wild races whose intelligence is
entirely self-evolved. In addition, the horse has, to a slight extent, a
prehensile organ in his mobile and sensitive lip, which he uses like an
undeveloped or rudimentary proboscis with which he can feel things all
over. We may conclude, I believe, that touch is “the mother-tongue of
the senses;” and that in proportion as animals have or have not highly
developed and serviceable tactile organs will they rank high or low in
the intellectual hierarchy of nature. It may well be asked how all this
concerns the family of parrots. In the first place, anybody who has ever
kept a parrot or a macaw in slavery is well aware that in no other birds
do the claws so closely resemble a human or simian hand, not indeed in
outer form or appearance, but in apposability of the thumbs and in
perfection of grasping power. The toes upon each foot are arranged in
opposite pairs—two turning in front and two backward, which gives all
parrots their peculiar firmness in clinging on a perch or on the branch
of a tree with one foot only, while they extend the other to grasp a
fruit or to clutch at any object they desire to possess. This
peculiarity, it must be admitted, is not confined to the parrots, for
they share the division of the foot into two thumbs and two fingers with
a large group of allied birds, called, in the exact language of
technical ornithology, the Scansorial Picarians, and more generally
known by their several names of cockatoos, toucans and wood-peckers. All
the members of this great group, of which the parrots proper are only
the most advanced and developed family, possess the same arrangement of
the digits into front-toes and back-toes, and in none is the power of
grasping an object all round so completely developed and so full of
intellectual consequences.
All the Scansorial Picarians are essentially tree-haunters; and the
tree-haunting and climbing habit seems specially favorable to the growth
of intellect. Monkeys, squirrels, opossums, wild cats, are all of them
climbers, and all of them, in the act of climbing, jumping, and
balancing themselves on boughs, gain such an accurate idea of
geometrical figures, distance, perspective and the true nature of
space-relations, as could hardly be acquired in any other way. In a few
words, they thoroughly understand the tactual realities that answer to
and underlie each visible appearance. This is, in my opinion, one of the
substrata of all intelligence; and the monkeys, possessing it more
profoundly than any other animals, except man, have accordingly reached
a very high place in the competitive examination perpetually taking
place under the name of Natural Selection.
So, too, among birds, the parrots and their allies climb trees and rocks
with exceptional ease and agility. Even in their own department they are
the great feathered acrobats. Anybody who watches a wood-pecker, for
example, grasping the bark of a tree with its crooked and powerful toes,
while it steadies itself behind by digging its stiff tail-feathers into
the crannies of the outer rind, will readily understand how clear a
notion the bird must gain into the practical action of the laws of
gravity. But the true parrots go a step further in the same direction
than the wood-peckers or the toucans; for in addition to prehensile
feet, they have also a highly-developed prehensile bill, and within it a
tongue which acts in reality as an organ of touch. They use their
crooked beaks to help them in climbing from branch to branch; and being
thus provided alike with wings, hands, fingers, bill and tongue, they
are the most truly arboreal of all known animals, and present in the
fullest and highest degree all the peculiar features of the
tree-haunting existence.
Nor is this all. Alone among birds or mammals, the parrots have the
curious peculiarity of being able to move the upper as well as the lower
jaw. It is this strange mobility of both the mandibles together,
combined with the crafty effect of the sideways glance from those artful
eyes, that gives the characteristic air of intelligence and wisdom to
the parrot’s face. We naturally expect so clever a bird to speak. And
when it turns upon us suddenly with some well-known maxim, we are not
astonished at its remarkable intelligence.
Parrots are true vegetarians; with a single degraded exception, to which
I shall recur hereafter, they do not touch animal food. They live
chiefly upon a diet of fruit and seeds, or upon the abundant nectar of
rich tropical flowers. And it is mainly for the purpose of getting at
their chosen food that they have developed the large and powerful bills
which characterize the family. Most of us have probably noticed that
many tropical fruit-eaters, like the hornbills and the toucans, are
remarkable for the size and strength of their beaks; and the majority of
thinking people are well acquainted with the fact that tropical fruits
often have thick or hard or bitter rinds, which must be torn off before
the monkeys or birds, for whose use they are intended, can get at them
and eat them.
As monkeys use their fingers in place of knives and forks, so birds use
their sharp and powerful bills. No better nut-crackers and fruit-parers
could possibly be found. The parrot, in particular, has developed for
the purpose his curved and inflated beak—a wonderful weapon, keen as a
tailor’s scissors, and moved by powerful muscles on both sides of the
face which bring together the cutting edges with extraordinary energy.
The way the bird holds a fruit gingerly in one claw, while he strips off
the rind dexterously with his under-hung lower mandible, and keeps a
sharp look-out meanwhile for a possible intruder, suggests to the
observing mind the whole living drama of his native forest. One sees in
that vivid world the watchful monkey ever ready to swoop down upon the
tempting tail-feathers of his hereditary foe; one sees the parrot ever
prepared for his rapid attack, and eager to make him pay with five
joints of his tail for his impertinent interference with an unoffending
fellow-citizen of the arboreal community.
Of course there are parrots and parrots. The great black cockatoo, for
example, the largest of the tribe, lives almost exclusively upon the
central shoot of palm-trees; an expensive kind of food, for when once
this so-called “cabbage” has been eaten the tree dies, so that each
black cockatoo must have killed in his time whole groves of
cabbage-palms. Other parrots live on fruits and seeds; and quite a
number are adapted for flower-haunting and honey-sucking.
As a group, the parrots must be comparatively modern birds. Indeed, they
could have no place in the world till the big tropical fruits and nuts
were beginning to be developed. And it is now generally believed that
fruits and nuts are for the most part of recent and special evolution.
To put the facts briefly, the monkeys and parrots developed the fruits
and nuts, while the fruits and nuts returned the compliment by
developing conversely the monkeys and parrots. In other words, both
types grew up side by side in mutual dependence, and evolved themselves
pari passu for one another’s benefit. Without the fruits there could be
no fruit-eaters; and without the fruit-eaters to disperse their seeds,
there could not be any great number of fruits.
Most of the parrots very much resemble the monkeys and other tropical
fruit-eaters in their habits and manners. They are gregarious,
mischievous and noisy. They have no moral sense, and are fond of
practical jokes. They move about in flocks, screeching aloud as they go,
and alight together on some tree well covered with berries. No doubt
they herd together for the sake of protection, and screech both to keep
the flock in a body and to strike consternation into the breasts of
their enemies. When danger threatens, the first bird that perceives it
sounds a note of warning; and in a moment the whole troupe is on the
wing at once, vociferous and eager, roaring forth a song in their own
tongue, which may be interpreted to mean that they are ready to fight if
it is necessary.
The common gray parrot, the best known in confinement of all his kind,
and unrivalled as an orator for his graces of speech, is a native of
West Africa. He feeds in a general way upon palm-nuts, bananas, mangoes,
and guavas, but he is by no means averse, if opportunity offers, to the
Indian corn of the industrious native. It is only in confinement that
this bird’s finer qualities come out, and that it develops into a
speechmaker of distinguished attainments.
A peculiar and exceptional offshoot of the parrot group is the
brush-tongued lory, several species of which are common in Australia and
India. These interesting birds are parrots which have a resemblance to
humming birds. Flitting about from tree to tree with great rapidity,
they thrust their long extensible tongues, penciled with honey-gathering
hairs, into the tubes of many big tropical blossoms. The lories, indeed,
live entirely on nectar, and they are so common in the region they have
made their own that the larger flowers there present the appearance of
having been developed with a special view to their tastes and habits, as
well as to the structure of their peculiar brush-like honey-collector.
In most parrots the mouth is dry and the tongue horny; but in the lories
it is moist and much more like the same organ in the humming-birds and
the sun-birds. The prevalence of very large and brilliantly-colored
flowers in the Malayan region must be set down for the most part to the
selective action of the color-loving, brush-tongued parrots.
The Australian continent and New Zealand, as everybody knows, are the
countries where everything goes by contraries. And it is here that the
parrot group has developed some of its most curious offshoots. One would
imagine beforehand that no two birds could be more unlike in every
respect than the gaudy, noisy, gregarious cockatoos and the sombre,
nocturnal, solitary owls. Yet the New Zealand owl-parrot is a lory which
has assumed all the appearances and habits of an owl. A lurker in the
twilight or under the shades of night, burrowing for its nest in holes
in the ground, it has dingy brown plumage like the owls, with an
undertone of green to bespeak its parrot origin; while its face is
entirely made up of two great disks, surrounding the eyes, which succeed
in giving it a most marked and unmistakable owl-like appearance.
Why should a parrot so strangely disguise itself and belie its ancestry?
The reason is not difficult to discover. It found a place for itself
ready made in nature. New Zealand is a remote and sparsely-stocked
island, peopled by various forms of life from adjacent but still distant
continents. There are no dangerous enemies there. Here, then, was a
great opportunity for a nightly prowler. The owl-parrot, with true
business instinct, saw the opening thus clearly laid before it, and took
to a nocturnal and burrowing life, with the natural consequence that
those forms survived which were dingy in color. Unlike the owls,
however, the owl-parrot, true to the vegetarian instincts of the whole
lory race, lives almost entirely upon sprigs of mosses and other
creeping plants. It is thus essentially a ground bird; and as it feeds
at night in a country possessing no native beasts of prey, it has almost
lost the power of flight, and uses its wings only as a sort of parachute
to break its fall in descending from a rock or a tree to its accustomed
feeding-ground. To ascend a steep place or a tree, it climbs,
parrot-like, with its hooked claws, up the surface of the trunk or the
face of the precipice.
Even more aberrant in its ways, however, than the burrowing owl-parrot,
is that other strange and hated New Zealand lory, the kea, which, alone
among its kind, has adjured the gentle ancestral vegetarianism of the
cockatoos and macaws, in favor of a carnivorous diet of remarkable
ferocity. And what is stranger still, this evil habit has been developed
in the kea since the colonization of New Zealand by the British, the
most demoralizing of new-comers, as far as all aborigines are concerned.
The English settlers have taught the Maori to wear silk hats and to
drink strong liquors, and they have thrown temptation in the way of even
the once innocent native parrot. Before the white man came, the kea was
a mild-mannered, fruit-eating or honey-sucking bird. But as soon as
sheep-stations were established on the island these degenerate parrots
began to acquire a distinct taste for raw mutton. At first they ate only
the offal that was thrown out from the slaughter-houses, picking the
bones as clean of meat as a dog or a jackal. But in course of time, as
the taste for blood grew, a new and debased idea entered their heads. If
dead sheep are good to eat, are not living ones? The keas, having
pondered deeply over this abstruse problem, solved it in the
affirmative. Proceeding to act upon their convictions, they invented a
truly hideous mode of procedure. A number of birds hunt out a weakly
member of a flock, almost always after dark. The sheep is worried to
death by the combined efforts of the parrots, some of whom perch
themselves upon the animal’s back and tear open the flesh, their object
being to reach the kidneys, which they devour at the earliest possible
moment. As many as two hundred ewes are said to have been killed in a
single night on one “station”—ranch, we should call it. I need hardly
say that the New Zealand sheep-farmer resents this irregular procedure,
so opposed to all ideas of humanity, to say nothing of good-farming,
and, as a result, the existence of the kea is now limited to a few
years. But from a purely psychological point of view the case is
interesting, as being the best recorded instance of the growth of a new
and complex instinct actually under the eyes of human observers.
A few words as to the general coloring of the parrot group. Tropical
forestine birds have usually a ground tone of green because that color
enables them best to escape notice among the monotonous verdure of
equatorial woodland scenery. In the north, it is true, green is a very
conspicuous color; but that is only because for half the year our trees
are bare, and even during the other half they lack that “breadth of
tropic shade” which characterizes the forests of all hot countries.
Therefore, in temperate climates, the common ground-tone of birds is
brown, to harmonize with the bare boughs and leafless twigs, the dead
grass or stubble. But in the ever-green tropics, green is the proper hue
for concealment or defense. Therefore the parrots, the most purely
tropical family of birds on earth, are chiefly greenish; and among the
smaller and more defenceless sorts, like the little love-birds, where
the need for protection is greatest, the green of the plumage is almost
unbroken. Green, in truth, must be regarded as the basal parrot tint,
from which all other colors are special decorative variations.
But fruit-eating and flower-feeding creatures—such as butterflies and
humming birds—seeking their food among the brilliant flowers and bright
berries, almost invariably acquire a taste for varied coloring, and by
the aid of the factor in evolution, known as sexual selection, this
taste stereotypes itself at last upon their wings and plumage. They
choose their mates for their attractive coloring. As a consequence, all
the larger and more gregarious parrots, in which the need for
concealment is less, tend to diversify the fundamental green of their
coats with red, yellow or blue, which in some cases takes possession of
the entire body. The largest kinds of all, like the great blue and
yellow or crimson macaws, are as gorgeous as birds well could be; they
are also the species least afraid of enemies. In Brazil, it is said,
they may often be seen moving about in pairs in the evening with as
little attempt at concealment as storks in Germany.
[Illustration: ]
Even the New Zealand owl-parrot still retains many traces of his
original greenness, mixed with the brown and dingy yellow of his
nocturnal and burrowing nature.
I now turn to the parrot’s power of mimicry in human language. This
power is only an incidental result of the general intelligence of
parrots, combined with the other peculiarities of their social life and
forestine character. Dominant woodland animals, like monkeys and
parrots, at least if vegetarian in their habits, are almost always
gregarious, noisy, mischievous, and imitative. And the imitation results
directly from a somewhat high order of intelligence. The power of
intellect, in all except the very highest phases, is merely the ability
to accurately imitate another. Monkeys imitate action to a great extent,
but their voices are hardly flexible enough for very much mimicry of the
human voice. Parrots and some other birds, on the contrary, like the
mocking bird, being endowed with considerable flexibility of voice,
imitate either songs or spoken words with great distinctness. In the
parrot the power of attention is also very considerable, for the bird
will often repeat to itself the lesson it has decided to learn. But most
of us forget that at best the parrot knows only the general application
of a sentence, not the separate meanings of its component words. It
knows, for example, that “Polly wants a lump of sugar” is a phrase often
followed by a gift of food. But to believe it can understand an
exclamation like “What a homely lot of parrots!” is to credit the bird
with genuine comprehension. A careful consideration of the evidence has
convinced almost all scientific men that, at the most, a parrot knows
the meaning of a sentence in the same way as a dog understands the
meaning of “Rats” or a horse knows the significance of “Get up.”
Lawrence Irwell.
How can our fancies help but go
Out from this realm of mist and rain,
Out from this realm of sleet and snow,
When the first Southern violets blow?
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich, “Spring in New England.”