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The best-known stories of animal graveyards are those of elephants.
But when I asked the curator of mammals about them the answer I got
was little better than a snort. Apparently the evidence for them is so
vague that it's little better than a myth.
But in birds we have a few bits of evidence from far-scattered places
that occasionally such things as graveyards exist.
In the antarctic Dr. Robert Cushman Murphy found on the island of South
Georgia a place where Johnny penguins went to die. It was in a lake
in a coastal range of hills. The lake bottom was thickly strewn with
scores of penguin bodies, all of which had apparently died a natural
death. The icy water, Murphy thought, might preserve them for years.
The hills, away from the sea, seem a surprising place for the graveyard
of such aquatic birds as the penguins, but it correlates with another
peculiarity of their mental makeup. They like to nest on high land, or
at least far from the sea. The blind instinctiveness of much penguin
behavior is well shown by these birds when there is no high land on
their nesting island. Then they may nest so far from the beach on which
they land that they are close to the water on the other side. Yet they
always returned to the sea by the long route, never taking the shorter
route.
Another aspect of this preference for land distant from the sea is
shown by their behavior when threatened with danger from man or dog.
They flee away from the sea, back onto the land, when safety for them
actually lies in the sea. Presumably this fixed behavior dates back to
the time when the seal that is called the sea leopard was the penguin's
main enemy. Then the sea held their only danger. With man's arrival the
situation changed, but only after considerable experience with man do
the birds change this behavior.
Apparently, when the time came for the penguins in this South Georgia
graveyard to die, they followed their age-old pattern, climbing to the
high country and away from the sea.
IN A HOLLOW TREE In a hole about eighteen inches in diameter and twelve
feet deep in the trunk of a wych elm in Hants, England, Ursula M.
Grigg reports finding the bones of at least ninety jackdaws, thirteen
starlings, six green woodpeckers, and twenty-five stock doves. All the
remains were clean, and not much broken or decomposed. The idea that
these bones were the remains of owls' or other predators' feasts was
discarded for a number of reasons; as was the idea that this had been
a natural trap, the birds entering to roost or nest and being unable
to escape. The most tenable idea seems to be that this was a favorite
roosting place in winter, and that during the severe weather old and
weakened birds, roosting there, succumbed and added their bodies to
this communal grave.
ON AN ISLAND Another instance comes from the little Cape Verde Isle of
Cima in the South Atlantic. A photograph in the _National Geographic_
magazine for 1927, Vol. 52, P. 27, has the caption that this island is
unique and uninhabited and covered with the tiny bones of millions of
petrels which in ages past have come here to die. Certainly the plate
shows an amazing litter of bird bones on the tiny plateau of this islet.
Petrels are mostly pelagic birds, coming to the land only to nest on
isolated islets. Can this "graveyard" be merely the normal accumulation
of the bones of the nesting season mortality, or can it be that the
birds actually come here to die?