marsupial too, differs inexpressibly in psychological development from
the kangaroo and the wombat. Your opossum, in short, is active, sly,
and extremely intelligent. He knows his way about the world he lives
in. 'A 'possum up a gum-tree' is accepted by the observant American
mind as the very incarnation of animal cleverness, cunning, and
duplicity. In negro folk-lore the resourceful 'possum takes the place
of Reynard the Fox in European stories: he is the Macchiavelli of wild
beasts: there is no ruse on earth of which he isn't amply capable, no
artful trick which he can't design and execute, no wily manoeuvre which
he can't contrive and 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 Yankee marsupial and his backward and belated Australian
cousins? Why, nothing but the possession of a prehensile hand and tail.
Therein lies the whole secret. The opossum's hind foot has a genuine
opposable 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
get up steam, then lets go suddenly, and flies away to a distant
branch, which he clutches by means of his hand-like hind feet. If the
toes play him false, he can 'recover his tip,' as circus-folk put it,
with his prehensile tail. The consequence 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 of the American continent, he has been forced to
develop an amount of cleverness and low cunning which leaves his
Australian poor relations far behind in the Middle Ages of evolution.
At the risk of seeming to run off at a tangent and forsake our
ostensible subject, pretty Poll, altogether, I must just pause for one
moment more to answer an objection which I know has been trembling on
the tip of your tongue any time the last five minutes. You've been
waiting till you could get a word in edgeways to give me a friendly
nudge and remark very wisely, 'But look here, I say; how about the dog
and the horse in your argument? _They've_ got no prehensile organ that
ever I heard of, and yet they're universally allowed to be the
cleverest and most intelligent of all earthly quadrupeds.' True, O most
sapient and courteous objector. I grant it you at once. But observe the
difference. The cleverness of the horse and the dog is acquired, not
original. It has probably arisen in the course of their long hereditary
intercourse and companionship with man, the cleverest and most
serviceable individuals being deliberately selected from generation to
generation, as dams and sires to breed from. We can't fairly compare
these artificial human products, therefore, with wild races whose
intelligence is all native and self-evolved. Moreover, the horse at
least _has_ to some slight extent a prehensile organ in his very mobile
and sensitive lip, which he uses like an undeveloped or rudimentary
proboscis to feel things all over with. So that the dog alone remains
as a contradictory instance; and even the dog derives his cleverness
indirectly from man, whose hand and thumb in the last resort are really
at the bottom of his vicarious wisdom.
We may conclude, then, I believe, that touch, as Mr. Herbert Spencer
admirably words it, 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. Now, how does this bear upon the family of parrots? Well, in
the first place, everybody who has ever kept a cockatoo or a macaw in
domestic 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 opposability of the thumbs and in perfection of
grasping power. The toes on 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 take possession of. True,
this peculiarity isn't entirely confined to the parrots alone, as such.
They share the division of the foot into two thumbs and two fingers
with a whole large group of allied birds, called, in the charmingly
concise and poetical language of technical ornithology, the Scansorial
Picarians, and more generally, known to the unlearned herd (meaning you
and me) by their several names of woodpeckers, cuckoos, toucans, and
plantain-eaters. 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. But
in none is the arrangement so perfect as in the parrots, and in none is
the power of grasping an object all round so completely developed and
so pregnant in moral and intellectual consequences.
All the Scansorial Picarians, however (if the reader with his
proverbial courtesy will kindly pardon me the inevitable use of such
very bad words), are essentially tree-haunters; and the tree-haunting
and climbing habit, as is well beknown, seems particularly favourable
to the growth of intelligence. Thus schoolboys climb trees--but I
forgot: this is a scientific article, and such levity is inconsistent
with the dignity of science. Let us be serious! Well, at any rate,
monkeys, squirrels, opossums, wild cats, are all of them climbers, and
all of them, in the act of clinging, jumping, and balancing themselves
on boughs, gain such an accurate idea of geometrical figure,
perspective, distance, and the true nature of space-relations, as could
hardly be acquired in any other manner. In one word, they thoroughly
understand space of three dimensions, and the tactual realities that
answer to and underlie each visible appearance. This is the very
substratum of all intelligence; and the monkeys, possessing it more
profoundly than any other animals, have accordingly taken the top of
the form in the competitive examination perpetually conducted by
survival of the fittest.
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
woodpecker, 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 woodpeckers 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, legs,
hands, fingers, bill and tongue, they are in fact 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 that 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 a copy-book maxim, we
are in no way astonished at its surpassing smartness.
Parrots are vegetarians; with a single degraded exception to whom I
shall recur hereafter, Sir Henry Thompson himself couldn't find fault
with their regimen. They live chiefly upon a light but nutritious diet
of fruit and seeds, or upon the abundant nectar of rich tropical
flowers. And it is mainly for the sake of getting at their chosen food
that they have developed the large and powerful bills which
characterise the family. You may have perhaps noted that most tropical
fruit-eaters, like the hornbills and the toucans, are remarkable for
the size and strength of their beaks: if you haven't, I dare say you
will generously take my word for it. And, _per contra_, it may also
have struck you that most tropical fruits have thick or hard or
nauseous rinds, which need to be torn off before the monkeys or birds
for whose use they are intended, can get at them and eat them. Our
little northern strawberries, and raspberries, and currants, and
whortleberries, developed with a single eye to the petty robins and
finches of temperate climates, can be popped into, the mouth whole and
eaten as they stand: they are meant for small birds to devour, and to
disperse the tiny undigested nut-like seeds in return for the bribe of
the soft pulp that surrounds them. But it is quite otherwise with
oranges, shaddocks, bananas, plantains, mangoes, and pine-apples: those
great tropical fruits can only be eaten properly with a knife and fork,
after stripping off the hard and often acrid rind that guards and
preserves them. They lay themselves out for dispersion by monkeys,
toucans, and other relatively large and powerful fruit-eaters; and the
rind is put there as a barrier against small thieves who would rob the
sweet pulp, but be absolutely incapable of carrying away and dispersing
the large and richly-stored seeds it covers.
Parrots and toucans, however, have no knives and forks to cut off the
rind with; but as monkeys use their fingers, so the birds use for the
same purpose 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
either side of the face which bring together the cutting edges with
extraordinary energy. The way the bird holds the 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 on either side
with those sly and stealthy eyes of his 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 canny parrot ever prepared for his rapid attack, and ever
eager to make him pay with five joints of his tail for his impertinent
interference with an unoffending fellow-citizen of the arboreal
community.
Still, there are parrots and parrots, of course. Not all this vast
family are in all things of like passions one with another. The great
black cockatoo, for example, the largest of the tribe, lives almost
entirely off the central shoot or 'cabbage' of palm-trees: an expensive
kind of food, for when once the 'cabbage' is eaten the tree dies
forthwith, so that each black cockatoo must have killed in his time
whole groves of cabbage-palms. Others, again, feed off fruits and
seeds; and not a few are entirely adapted for flower-haunting and
honey-sucking.
As a group, the parrots are 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 pretty certain that
fruits and nuts are for the most part of very recent and special
evolution. To put it 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 just to the same extent be no fruits to speak of.
Most of the parrots very much resemble the monkeys and other tropical
fruit-feeders in their habits and manners. They are gregarious,
mischievous, noisy, and irresponsible. They have no moral sense, and
are fond of practical jokes and other schoolboy horseplay. 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 alarm and 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 troop is on the wing at once,
vociferous and eager, roaring forth a song in their own tongue which
may be roughly interpreted as stating in English that they don't want
to fight, but by Jingo, if they do, they'll tear their enemy to shreds
and drink his blood up too.
The common grey 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; so that he shares with other West Africans that perfect
command of language which has always been a marked characteristic of
the negro race. 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. His wife
accompanies him in his solitary rambles, for they are not gregarious.
In her native haunts, indeed, Polly is an unsociable bird. It is only
in confinement that her finer qualities come out, and that she develops
into a speech-maker of distinguished attainments.
A very peculiar and exceptional offshoot of the parrot group is the
brush-tongued lory, several species of which are common in Australia,
India, and the Molucca Islands. These pretty and interesting creatures
are in point of fact parrots which have practically made themselves
into humming-birds by long continuance in the poetical habit of
visiting flowers for food. Like Mr. Oscar Wilde in his æsthetic days,
they breakfast off a lily. Flitting about from tree to tree with great
rapidity, they thrust their long extensible tongues, pencilled 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 all the larger flowers there
have 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 sun-birds. The prevalence of very large and
brilliantly coloured flowers in the Malayan region must be set down for
the most part to the selective action of these æsthetic and
colour-loving little brush-tongued parrots.
Australia 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 strangest and most abnormal 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, to put it
plainly, a lory which has assumed all the outer appearance 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.
Now, why should a parrot so strangely disguise itself and belie its
ancestry? The reason is plain. It found a place for it ready made in
nature. New Zealand is a remote and sparsely-stocked island, peopled by
mere casual waifs and strays of life from adjacent but still very
distant continents. There are no dangerous enemies there. Here, then,
was a clear chance 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 it
acquired in time the dingy plumage, crepuscular eyes, and broad
disk-like reflectors of other prowling night-fliers. 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 tree to its
accustomed feeding-ground. To get up again, it climbs, parrot-like,
with its hooked claws, up the surface of the trunk or the face of a
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 abjured the gentle ancestral vegetarianism of the
cockatoos and macaws, in favour of a carnivorous diet of singular
ferocity. And what is odder still, this evil habit has been developed
in the kea since the colonization of New Zealand by the English, those
most demoralizing of new-comers. The settlers have taught the Maori to
wear tall 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, in fact, the kea was a mild-mannered fruit-eating
or honey-sucking bird. But as soon as sheep-stations were established
in the island these degenerate parrots began to acquire a distinct
taste for raw mutton. At first, to be sure, they ate only the sheep's
heads and offal that were thrown out from the slaughter-houses picking
the bones as clean of meat as a dog or a jackal. But in process of
time, as the taste for blood grew upon them, a still viler idea entered
into their wicked heads. The first step on the downward path suggested
the second. If dead sheep are good to eat, why not also living ones?
The kea, pondering deeply on this abstruse problem, solved it at once
with an emphatic affirmative. And he straightway proceeded to act upon
his convictions, and invent a really hideous mode of procedure.
Perching on the backs of the living sheep he has now learnt the exact
spot where the kidneys are to be found; and he tears open the flesh to
get at these dainty morsels, which he pulls out and devours, leaving
the unhappy animal to die in miserable agony. As many as two hundred
ewes have thus been killed in a night at a single station. I need
hardly add that the sheep-farmer naturally resents this irregular
proceeding, so opposed to all ideals of good grazing, and that the days
of the kea are now numbered in New Zealand. But from the purely
psychological point of view the case is an interesting one, as being
the best recorded instance of the growth of a new and complex instinct
actually under the eyes of human observers.
One word as to the general colouring of the parrot group as a whole.
Tropical forestine birds have usually a ground tone of green because
that colour enables them best to escape notice among the monotonous
verdure of equatorial woodland scenery. In the north, to be sure, green
is a very conspicuous colour; 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 characterises the forests of all hot
countries. Therefore, in temperate climates, the common ground-tone of
birds is brown, to harmonise with the bare boughs and leafless twigs,
the clods of earth and dead turf or stubble. But in the evergreen
tropics green is the right hue for concealment or defence. Therefore
the parrots, the most purely tropical family of birds on earth, are
mostly greenish; and among the smaller and more defenceless sorts, like
the familiar little love-birds, where the need for protection is
greatest, the green of the plumage is almost unbroken. Of the tiny
Pigmy Parrots of New Guinea, for instance, Mr. Bowdler Sharpe says:
'Owing to their small size and the resemblance of their green colouring
to the forests they inhabit, they are not easily seen, and until recent
years were very hard to procure.' And of the green parrot of Jamaica,
Mr. Gosse remarks: 'Often we hear their voices proceeding from a
certain tree, or else have marked the descent of a flock on it; but on
proceeding to the spot, though the eye has not wandered from it, we
cannot discover an individual. We go close to the tree, but all is
silent and still as death. We institute a careful survey of every part
with the eye, to detect the slightest motion, or the form of a bird
among the leaves, but all in vain. We begin to think they have stolen
off unperceived; but on throwing a stone into the tree, a dozen throats
burst forth into a cry, and as many green birds rush forth upon the
wing. Green may thus be regarded as the normal or basal parrot tint,
from which all other colours are special decorative variations.
But fruit-eating and flower-feeding creatures, like butterflies and
humming-birds--seeking their food ever among the bright berries and
brilliant flowers, almost invariably acquire in the long run an
æsthetic taste for pure and varied colouring, and by the aid of sexual
selection this taste stereotypes itself at last in their own wings and
plumage. They choose their mates for colour as they choose their
foodstuffs. Hence 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 crimson, yellow, or blue, which in some cases
take possession of the entire body. The largest kinds of all, like the
great blue and yellow or crimson macaws, are as gorgeous as Solomon in
all his glory: and they are also the species least afraid of enemies;
for in Brazil you may often see them wending their way homeward openly
in pairs every evening, with as little attempt at concealment as rooks
in England. In the Moluccas and New Guinea, says Mr. Wallace, white
cockatoos and gorgeous lories in crimson and blue are the very
commonest objects in the local fauna. Even the New Zealand owl-parrot,
however, still retains many traces of his original greenness, mixed
with the dirty brown and dingy yellow of his acquired nocturnal and
burrowing nature.
If fruit-eaters are fine, flower-haunters are magnificent. And the
brush-tongued lories, that search for nectar among the bells of Malayan
blossoms, are the brightest-coloured of all the parrot tribes. Indeed,
no group of birds, according to Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace (who ought to
know, if anybody does), exhibits within the same limited number of
types so extraordinary a diversity and richness of colouring as the
parrots. 'As a rule,' he says, 'parrots may be termed green birds, the
majority of the species having this colour as the basis of their
plumage, relieved by caps, gorgets, bands and wing-spots of other and
brighter hues. Yet this general green tint sometimes changes into light
or deep blue, as in some macaws; into pure yellow or rich orange, as in
some of the American macaw-parrots; into purple, grey or dove-colour,
as in some American, African, and Indian species; into the purest
crimson, as in some of the lories; into rosy-white and pure white, as
in the cockatoos; and into a deep purple, ashy or black, as in several
Papuan, Australian, and Mascarene species. There is in fact hardly a
single distinct and definable colour that cannot be fairly matched
among the 390 species of known parrots. Their habits, too, are such as
to bring them prominently before the eye. They usually feed in flocks;
they are noisy, and so attract attention; they love gardens, orchards,
and open sunny places; they wander about far in search of food, and
towards sunset return homeward in noisy flocks, or in constant pairs.
Their forms and motions are often beautiful and attractive. The
immensely long tails of the macaws and the more slender tails of the
Indian parroquets, the fine crest of the cockatoos, the swift flight of
many of the smaller species, and the graceful motions of the little
love-birds and allied forms, together with their affectionate natures,
aptitude for domestication, and power of mimicry, combine to render
them at once the most conspicuous and the most attractive of all the
specially tropical forms of bird life.'