A Gathering of Birds

by Donald Culross Peattie

  In looking over the accounts given of the ivory-billed woodpecker by the naturalists of Europe, I find it asserted, that it inhabits from New Jersey to Mexico. I believe, however, that few of them are ever seen to the north of Virginia, and very few of them even in that state. The first place I observed this bird at, when on my way to the south, was about twelve miles north of Wilmington in North Carolina. Having wounded it slightly in the wing, on being caught, it uttered a loudly reiterated, and most piteous note, exactly resembling the violent crying of a young child; which terrified my horse so, as nearly to have cost me my life. It was distressing to hear it. I carried it with me in the chair, under cover, to Wilmington. In passing through the streets, its affecting cries surprised every one within hearing, particularly the females, who hurried to the doors and windows with looks of alarm and anxiety. I drove on, and, on arriving at the piazza of the hotel, where I intended to put up, the landlord came forward, and a number of other persons who happened to be there, all equally alarmed at what they heard; this was greatly increased by my asking, whether he could furnish me with accommodations for myself and my baby. The man looked blank and foolish, while the others stared with still greater astonishment. After diverting myself for a minute or two at their expense, I drew my woodpecker from under the cover, and a general laugh took place. I took him up stairs and locked him up in my room, while I went to see my horse taken care of. In less than an hour I returned, and, on opening the door, he set up the same distressing shout, which now appeared to proceed from grief that he had been discovered in his attempts at escape. He had mounted along the side of the window, nearly as high as the ceiling, a little below which he had begun to break through. The bed was covered with large pieces of plaster; the lath was exposed for at least fifteen inches square, and a hole, large enough to admit the fist, opened to the weather-boards; so that in less than another hour he would certainly have succeeded in making his way through. I now tied a string round his leg, and, fastening it to the table, again left him. I wished to preserve his life, and had gone off in search of suitable food for him. As I reascended the stairs, I heard him again hard at work, and on entering had the mortification to perceive that he had almost entirely ruined the mahogany table to which he was fastened, and on which he had wreaked his whole vengeance. While engaged in taking a drawing, he cut me severely in several places, and, on the whole, displayed such a noble and unconquerable spirit, that I was frequently tempted to restore him to his native woods. He lived with me nearly three days, but refused all sustenance, and I witnessed his death with regret.

  The head and bill of this bird is in great esteem among the southern Indians, who wear them by way of amulet or charm, as well as ornament; and, it is said, dispose of them to the northern tribes at considerable prices. An Indian believes that the head, skin, or even feathers of certain birds, confer on the wearer all the virtues or excellencies of those birds. Thus I have seen a coat made of the skins, heads, and claws of the raven; caps stuck round with heads of butcher-birds, hawks, and eagles; and as the disposition and courage of the ivory-billed woodpecker are well known to the savages, no wonder they should attach great value to it, having both beauty, and, in their estimation, distinguished merit to recommend it.

  This bird is not migratory, but resident in the countries where it inhabits. In the low countries of the Carolinas it usually prefers the large timbered cypress swamps for breeding in. In the trunk of one of these trees, at a considerable height, the male and female alternately, and in conjunction, dig out a large and capacious cavity for their eggs and young. Trees thus dug out have frequently been cut down, with sometimes the eggs and young in them. This hole, according to information,—for I have never seen one myself,—is generally a little winding, the better to keep out the weather, and from two to five feet deep. The eggs are said to be generally four, sometimes five, as large as a pullet’s, pure white, and equally thick on both ends—a description that, except in size, very nearly agrees with all the rest of our woodpeckers. The young begin to be seen abroad about the middle of June. Whether they breed more than once in the same season is uncertain.

  So little attention do the people of the countries where these birds inhabit, pay to the minutiæ of natural history, that, generally speaking, they make no distinction between the ivory-billed and pileated woodpecker; and it was not till I shewed them the two birds together, that they knew of any difference. The more intelligent and observing part of the natives, however, distinguish them by the name of the large and lesser logcocks. They seldom examine them but at a distance, gunpowder being considered too precious to be thrown away on woodpeckers; nothing less than a turkey being thought worth the value of a load.

  The food of this bird consists, I believe, entirely of insects and their larvæ. The pileated woodpecker is suspected of sometimes tasting the Indian corn: the ivory-billed never. His common note, repeated every three or four seconds, very much resembles the tone of a trumpet, or the high note of a clarionet, and can plainly be distinguished at the distance of more than half a mile; seeming to be immediately at hand, though perhaps more than one hundred yards off. This it utters while mounting along the trunk or digging into it. At these times it has a stately and novel appearance; and the note instantly attracts the notice of a stranger. Along the borders of the Savannah river, between Savannah and Augusta, I found them very frequently; but my horse no sooner heard their trumpet-like note, than, remembering his former alarm, he became almost ungovernable.

  The ivory-billed woodpecker is twenty inches long, and thirty inches in extent; the general colour is black, with a considerable gloss of green when exposed to a good light; iris of the eye, vivid yellow; nostrils, covered with recumbent white hairs; fore part of the head, black; rest of the crest of a most splendid red, spotted at the bottom with white, which is only seen when the crest is erected; this long red plumage being ash-coloured at its base, above that white, and ending in brilliant red; a stripe of white proceeds from a point, about half an inch below each eye, passes down each side of the neck, and along the back, where they are about an inch apart, nearly to the rump; the first five primaries are wholly black; on the next five the white spreads from the tip higher and higher to the secondaries, which are wholly white from their coverts downward. These markings, when the wings are shut, make the bird appear as if his back were white; hence he has been called by some of our naturalists the large white-backed woodpecker. The neck is long; the beak an inch broad at the base, of the colour and consistence of ivory, prodigiously strong and elegantly fluted. The tail is black, tapering from the two exterior feathers, which are three inches shorter than the middle ones, and each feather has the singularity of being greatly concave below; the wing is lined with yellowish white; the legs are about an inch and a quarter long, the exterior toe about the same length, the claws exactly semi-circular and remarkably powerful, the whole of a light blue or lead colour. The female is about half an inch shorter, the bill rather less, and the whole plumage of the head black, glossed with green; in the other parts of the plumage, she exactly resembles the male. In the stomachs of three which I opened, I found large quantities of a species of worm called borers, two or three inches long, of a dirty cream colour, with a black head; the stomach was an oblong pouch, not muscular like the gizzards of some others. The tongue was worm-shaped, and for half an inch at the tip as hard as horn, flat, pointed, of the same white colour as the bill, and thickly barbed on each side.

  XIV

  ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE

  TO THE theory of natural selection Darwin was led in part by a study of the birds of the Galapagos islands, each island with a different species of thrush, of creeper, of ground finch, and of flycatcher. Wallace, studying birds of paradise, parrots, bee-eaters and pigeons of the East Indies, was first astonished, and then enlightened, by the high degree of endemism which the avifauna of each archipelago possessed. Simultaneously from their studies of island faunas, they reached the same momentous conclusions, and they s
hare the honors of their joint discovery.

  Alfred Russel Wallace was born in 1823 at Usk in south Wales. His schooling was very brief and he never had any formal training in his future profession. He used to assist his brother who was a surveyor, and as he trudged with the transit he would note the beauty of the wildflowers, without knowing their names or that he might learn more of them. He was eighteen when he saw and purchased a shilling book on British wildflowers, and, having a great deal of leisure, began to use it. A world of enchantment seemed to open to him. His delight in collecting and his appreciation of the beauty of flora were only equaled by the fascination of the science he guessed at behind the sketchy systematics of his book. Later he purchased Lindley’s splendid old classic on the elements of botany and Loudon’s ever excellent encyclopedia of plants. With these he soon made himself not only a good field botanist but developed a flair for classification (with its implications of relationship and evolution) and a strong sense of the geographical distribution of species. These principles, no matter with what group of organisms one begins to apply them, carry over perfectly in any other group, and tinge one’s thinking for life.

  A friendship with H. W. Bates, the famous collector and author of the theory of protective mimicry, definitely decided him on a naturalist’s career. His ambition was to become a collector for museums and amateurs of natural history, and his was an era when rare and exotic species commanded such high prices that it was possible to find a ready market and earn a good competence in this fashion.

  Wallace’s first expedition was with Bates to the valley of the Amazon. He was able to sell his specimens through a London agent, and on his return to England he was welcomed at the museums as a collector of great promise. In 1854 set out on his memorable journey to the East Indies.

  His travels, now under idyllic conditions, again under great hardship, took him to Singapore (whose birds were well known from a collector’s point of view) and Java, which he found overcivilized, to Borneo and Celebes, wondrously rich in birds, to Ceram, wondrously poor in them, to Amboyna (an ornithological museum), and to New Guinea and to the Aru Islands where he found his birds of paradise, so in demand with collectors.

  One of his shipments of birds, shells and insects consisted in a consignment of 16,000 specimens. What part birds played in them may be judged from the following:

  “There were numbers of gorgeous lories, parrots, and parrakeets, white and black cockatoos, exquisite fruit-pigeons of a great variety of colours, many fine king-fishers from the largest to the most minute, as well as the beautiful racquet-tailed species, beautiful black, green, and blue ground-thrushes, some splendid specimens of the Papuan and King paradise-birds, and many beautiful bee-eaters, rollers, flycatchers, grakles, sun-birds, and paradise crows, making altogether such an assemblage of strange forms and brilliant colours as no one of my visitors had ever imagined to exist so near them.”

  It was while he was lying ill with intermittent fever at Ternate that there flashed into Wallace’s mind the idea that species are not immutable but have evolved through the ages by natural selection. In his rather exalted frame of mind attendant on his fever, the whole subject seemed to precipitate out of a murky solution and crystallize. As soon as he was well, he wrote out his ideas, sent them to Darwin, and requested him to have them published.

  Darwin, who had been amassing evidence for twenty years and planning a book that he never seemed to complete, was delighted at confirmation of his beliefs and aghast at finding his discovery forestalled. Hooker, the botanist, urged Darwin and Wallace to present joint papers to the scientific world, and this was done (though Wallace was still in the isles of the Orient), with what memorable results everyone knows. Wallace offered to put himself and all his findings entirely under Darwin’s captaincy, a gesture unsurpassed in generosity, though scientists are habitually generous to each other. Darwin assumed that leadership, but never without complete acknowledgment of Wallace’s great and original contribution.

  On his return to England, after eight years in the East, Wallace found himself well off as a result of the sale of his specimens. He spent years in the museums “working up” his collections and enjoying the society of all the leading British scientists. His fame called him to lecturing and authorship. Among his most delightful books are the wondrously suggestive Island Life, and The Malay Archipelago (1869) from which I have made my selection. The Geographical Distribution of Animals is probably his greatest written monument.

  Wallace, at the age of forty-three, married the young daughter of William Mitten, a well known specialist on the mosses. The rest of his very long life was passed in tranquillity and honor. He received the first Darwin medal of the Royal Society, the Royal medal, and a government pension in recognition of his services. On one of his American trips, he visited the mountains of Colorado, and the forests and peaks of California. His lectures all over the United States attracted large audiences and fired the minds of young students of natural history on the Kansas plains as in the atmosphere of Boston. His engaging personality swayed all who heard him.

  The last years of his life were taken up with inquiries into the supernatural, as well as in furthering idealistic tax and land reforms and projects for the betterment of human misery through a revival of Christianity. In these necessarily extra-scientific endeavors he was sincerely absorbed.

  Birds of paradise, of which Wallace writes so vividly in the following excerpt, are confined to the Australasian faunal province and belong to some sixty species of a family whose relationships are with the beautiful bower birds on the one hand and on the other with the crows—not all of which are of a forbidding monotone.

  The first birds of paradise were brought to Europe by Magellan’s followers. Speedily their plumage grew in great demand in Europe, both for wear and in the collections of wealthy amateurs. Wallace found that the natives were themselves indifferent to creatures they beheld daily, but they well understood their monetary value. So intensive had been previous collecting (of an unscientific sort) that he was put to it to find, even seventy-five years ago, the very species he had, above all, come so far to collect. As he says:

  “It must be considered as somewhat extraordinary that, during five years’ residence and travel in Celebes, the Moluccas, and New Guinea, I should never have been able to purchase skins of half the species which Lesson,* forty years ago, obtained during a few weeks in the same countries. I believe that all, except the common species of commerce, are now much more difficult to obtain than they were even twenty years ago; and I impute it principally to their having been sought after by the Dutch officials through the Sultan of Tidore.…

  “The birds of paradise are an article of commerce, and are the monopoly of the chiefs of the coast villages, who obtain them at a low rate from the mountaineers, and sell them to the Bugis traders. A portion is also paid every year as tribute to the Sultan of Tidore. The natives are therefore very jealous of a stranger, especially a European, interfering in their trade, and above all of going into the interior to deal with the mountaineers themselves.”

  As a result of the habit of native collectors of cutting off the feet of the birds before shipment, it was long believed in Europe that birds of paradise had none, and spent their entire lives upon the wing. Whether jokingly or not, Linnaeus named one Paradisea apoda (the “footless"). Others believed that the birds fed only on dew, or not at all. The females being seldom sent in commercial channels, they were long unknown to European collections, and even today their nestings and life histories are none too well known.

  If paradise birds were growing scarce in Wallace’s time, they were rarer in the decades that followed. The millinery trade kept up a constant demand for them, which was satisfied by natives not in the least touched by sentiment. It was not until 1913 in the United States that, through the exertions of the Audubon Societies, the importation for sale of bird of paradise plumes was forbidden by act of Congress. This date seems very late indeed; it is much earlier, so far
as I know, than that of any similar law in any other country, if indeed there are any so thorough-going. The Netherlands government did not seek even to regulate the exportation of birds of paradise until 1924.

  * The author of the excellent Traité d’Omithohgie. [Ed.]

  KING BIRD OF PARADISE

  The Aru Islands, March to May, 1857:—One of my first objects was to inquire for the people who are accustomed to shoot the paradise birds. They lived at some distance in the jungle, and a man was sent to call them. When they arrived, we had a talk by means of the orang-kaya as interpreter, and they said they thought they could get some. They explained that they shoot the birds with a bow and arrow, the arrow having a conical wooden cap fitted to the end as large as a tea-cup, so as to kill the bird by the violence of the blow without making any wound or shedding any blood. The trees frequented by the birds are very lofty; it is therefore necessary to erect a small leafy covering or hut among the branches, to which the hunter mounts before daylight in the morning and remains the whole day, and whenever a bird alights they are almost sure of securing it. They returned to their homes the same evening, and I never saw any thing more of them, owing, as I afterward found, to its being too early to obtain birds in good plumage.

  The first two or three days of our stay here were very wet, and I obtained but few insects or birds, but at length, when I was beginning to despair, my boy Baderoon returned one day with a specimen which repaid me for months of delay and expectation. It was a small bird, a little less than a thrush. The greater part of its plumage was of an intense cinnabar red, with a gloss as of spun glass. On the head the feathers became short and velvety, and shaded into rich orange. Beneath, from the breast downward, was pure white, with the softness and gloss of silk, and across the breast a band of deep metallic green separated this color from the red of the throat. Above each eye was a round spot of the same metallic green; the bill was yellow, and the feet and legs were of a fine cobalt blue, strikingly contrasting with all the other parts of the body. Merely in arrangement of colors and texture of plumage this little bird was a gem of the first water, yet these comprised only half its strange beauty. Springing from each side of the breast, and ordinarily lying concealed under the wings, were little tufts of grayish feathers about two inches long, and each terminated by a broad band of intense emerald green. These plumes can be raised at the will of the bird, and spread out into a pair of elegant fans when the wings are elevated. But this is not the only ornament. The two middle feathers of the tail are in the form of slender wires about five inches long, and which diverge in a beautiful double curve. About half an inch of the end of this wire is webbed on the outer side only, and colored of a fine metallic green, and being curled spirally inward, forms a pair of elegant glittering buttons.