The notes of the Burrowing Owl are peculiar. The birds do not “hoot,” nor is there anything lugubrious or foreboding in their cry. Sometime they chuckle, chatter, and squeal in an odd way, as if they had caught a habit of barking from the “dogs” they live with, and were trying to imitate the sound. But their natural cry is curiously similar to that of the Rain Crow, or Cuckoo of America—so much so, that more than one observer has been deceived. They scream hoarsely when wounded and caught, though this is but seldom, since, if any life remains, they scramble quickly into a hole and are not easy to recover. The flight is perfectly noiseless, like that of other Owls, owing to the peculiar downy texture of the plumage. By day they seldom fly far from the entrance of their burrow, and rarely, if ever, mount in the air. I never saw one on wing more than a few moments at a time, just long enough for it to pass from one hillock to another, as it does by skimming low over the surface of the ground in a rapid, easy, and rather graceful manner. They live chiefly upon insects, especially grasshoppers; they also feed upon lizards, as I once determined by dissection, and there is no doubt that young prairie-dogs furnish them many a meal. As commonly observed, perched on one of the innumerable little eminences that mark a dog-town, amid their curious surroundings, they present a spectacle not easily forgotten. Their figure is peculiar, with their long legs and short tail; the element of the grotesque is never wanting; it is hard to say whether they look most ludicrous as they stand stiffly erect and motionless, or when they suddenly turn tail to duck into the hole, or when engaged in their various antics. Bolt upright, on what may be imagined their rostrum, they gaze about with a bland and self-satisfied, but earnest air, as if about to address an audience upon a subject of great pith and moment. They suddenly bow low, with profound gravity, and rising as abruptly, they begin to twitch their face and roll their eyes about in the most mysterious manner, gesticulating wildly, every now and then bending forward till the breast almost touches the ground, to propound the argument with more telling effect. Then they face about to address the rear, that all may alike feel the force of their logic; they draw themselves up to their fullest height, outwardly calm and self-contained, pausing in the discourse to note its effect upon the audience, and collect their wits for the next rhetorical flourish. And no distant likeness between these frothy orators and others is found in the celerity with which they subside and seek their holes on the slightest intimation of danger.
XVI
FRANK M. CHAPMAN
AMONG New World naturalists who devote themselves entirely to ornithology, Dr. Chapman would be considered, I think, easily the most distinguished of all the older men. Expert in the field and the museum alike, systematist, life historian and behaviorist, ecologist and sensitive appreciator of the beauty of bird life, he and his writings have influenced young American ornithologists more than any other living man and his work.
Frank Michler Chapman was born in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1864. His mother was musically gifted, and to this he attributes his receptivity toward the vocal charms and speech of birds. His environment was then a country one, and from childhood he enjoyed and followed the birds of orchard and the sweet, cool temperate forest, of meadow and village street. Such an environment was the perfect nurse for him. To this he added the talents of a keen young sportsman. And sportsmanship is undoubtedly one of the doorways by which many naturalists have found their way to science. For a future systematist and anatomist, a bird in the hand is indeed sometimes indispensable. So the boy shot and trapped and bird-nested with the best of country lads, and stocked his mind with a wealth of field knowledge.
While still very young he went to work in a New York bank, not relinquishing his undirected and untrained interest in birds but unable to imagine how he could use it save as a diversion upon his rare holidays. The work at the bank was very exacting, and Dr. Chapman still thanks it because it taught him promptness and thoroughness, business management, precision and responsibility with money affairs, qualities of which naturalists are sometimes lamentably unpossessed.
In the meantime Dr. Chapman had begun volunteer work in recording bird migrations and the use of valuable or endangered species of birds on New York millinery. In these fields, though almost without personal friends among the ornithologists, he attracted attention as by far the best amateur reporter. Then one day in the window of a Dodd, Mead bookshop, he tells us, he saw a copy of Elliott Coues’ Key to North American Birds. He went in and purchased it, and, as any future student would have done (and no dabbling or mentally indolent amateur could have) he began to master it, technicalities and all. For the mark of a real scientist is that a new and difficult thing is a challenge he will not refuse. To a love of birds and a fowler’s knowledge of their ways, he had now added pure or theoretical science. One thing more was needed to make him an ornithologist.
He tells in his Autobiography how this was attained, not as the result of an outward event, but as an inward and instant revelation or call:
“I had gone to the Union Trust Company, to collect a draft. While waiting, I saw a man whom I did not know but whom I recognized as a messenger of the First National Bank. … He was at least ten years older than I. … He, too, was waiting, but while he waited he wrote on a pad he held in his hand, and it seemed to me that what he wrote had no connection with the First National Bank. Rather did he look like a priest who, while acting as a bank messenger, was living the life of a student. Perhaps there was sufficient resemblance in our relation to our vocations to make him and his evident remoteness from his surroundings appeal strongly to my attention and imagination; and as I looked at him there suddenly sprang into my mind with the force of a revelation a determination to devote my life to the study of birds.”
After thus changing his soul’s identity on the road to Damascus, Dr. Chapman resigned from the bank and his next steps were also very instructive in the way to find the true short road to scientific eminence. He did not seek a position for a position’s sake but, in the field and as a volunteer around the American Museum of Natural History, he began to make himself invaluable. Then the congenial employment sought him out, and at the age of twenty-four, with no university training in science, he had become associate curator of birds and mammals in a leading museum of the western world.
The rest of his museum career is too well known on both sides of the Atlantic to need mention here. Dr. Chapman is the creator of the new style in the museum exhibition of birds, and his influence in this line has spread all over the world, and directly and indirectly educated countless thousands. Among his many popular books which have given the first impulse to hosts of young ornithologists, his Handbook of Birds of the Eastern United States is still preëminent, going through many new editions. His public career has brought him the medal of the Roosevelt Memorial Association, the Burroughs Memorial medal, and the medals of the Linnaean Society of New York and the National Academy of Sciences. Enviable are his rich friendships, for he has known such diverse naturalists as Burroughs and Roosevelt, Grey and Hudson, Fuertes and Coues, Brewster and Merriam.
But in nothing does one envy him so much as in his wide experience of bird life, in every part of temperate North America and above all in the tropics—Mexico and the West Indies, Florida and the Bahamas, northern South America and, notably in his present studies, on Barro Colorado Island in the Canal Zone. He has enjoyed rapid trips covering wide areas, and long residence in a limited area. His fundamental attitude toward the study of bird life is significant. He says, “I had also a growing belief, which in time became almost a religion, in the re-creational and spiritual value of close contact with nature, and birds, I was convinced, are nature’s most eloquent expressions.”
From his delightful book Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist (1908) I have selected his account of a visit to the nesting sites of the American flamingo, that bird incredible even when you see one. I say, “when you see one.” Unless you are Dr. Chapman, or one of two negroes who frequent certain inaccessible “swashes
” of Andros Island, you have not seen one, it is pretty safe to say—not in the wild. For this bird who looks like, and is, something out of another era in the earth’s history, is now exceedingly rare as a nesting species. Its range in theory extends from southern Florida to Brazil and the Galapagos. Its actual occurrence in those regions is very scattered and irregular. In the Bahamas, where it finds abundance of a small spiral mollusc (Cerithium) and where the land is all sea, and the sea is all mud, the American flamingo still finds life possible.
THE FLAMINGO
ALL day we had been following broad, shallow creeks, which, meeting other creeks, widened at intervals into lagoons, while, on every side, the country spread away into the low, flat swash, neither land nor water and wholly worthless for everything—except Flamingos. When for the second time I asked Peter, “But where are the birds?” he replied, “Dere dey are, sir,” and pointed across the swash to a thin pink line, distant at least a mile, but showing plainly against the green of the mangroves. Flamingos, surely; but were they nesting? We lost no time in speculation but started at once to investigate. Ten minutes wading through the mud and shallow water, brought us so near the now much enlarged pink streak that with a glass, the birds could be seen unmistakably seated on their conical nests, and with an utterly indescribable feeling of exultation, we advanced rapidly to view at short range this wonder of wonders in bird-life.
At a distance of about three hundred yards, the wind being from us, toward the birds, we first heard their honking notes of alarm, which increased to a wave of deep sound. Soon the birds began to rise, standing on their nests, facing the wind and waving their black, vermillion-lined wings. As we came a little nearer, in stately fashion the birds began to move; uniformly, like a great body of troops, they stepped slowly forward, pinions waving and trumpets sounding, and then, when we were still one hundred and fifty yards away, the leaders sprang into the air. File after file of the winged host followed. The very earth seemed to erupt birds, as flaming masses streamed heavenward. It was an appalling sight. One of the boatmen said, it looked “like hell,” and the description is apt enough to be set down without impropriety.
The birds were now all in the air. At the time, I should have said that there were at least four thousand of them, but a subsequent census of nests showed that this number should be halved. This was a tense moment. Knowing, through many disappointed experiences, how excessively shy Flamingos are, I feared that even the lately aroused parental instinct might not be sufficient to hold them to their homes and that, after all, I should be denied the fruits of victory,—the privilege of studying these birds on their nesting ground. Imagine, then, a relief I cannot describe, when the birds, after flying only a short distance to windward, turned abruptly and with set wings sailed over us, a rushing, fiery cloud, to alight in a lagoon bordering the western edge of the rookery.
Soon we were among the apparently innumerable, close-set mud nests each with its single white egg, while two held newly hatched Flamingos! Not only were these the first young Flamingos ever seen in the nest by a naturalist, but their presence was an assurance that this rookery was not composed of the birds whose homes had been flooded by the storm of May 17, but another colony and one which had not suffered a similar catastrophe. I should not therefore have to wait at least three weeks for the eggs to hatch, but had arrived at the most favorable period it would have been possible to select.
While we were standing, half dazed by the whole experience, the army of birds which had gathered in the lagoon rose, and with harsh honkings bore down on us. The action was startling. The birds in close array came toward us without a waver, and for a few moments one might well have believed they were about to attack; but with a mighty roar of wings and clanging of horns, they passed overhead, turned, and on set wings again shot back to the lagoon.
On every one of the hundreds of occasions when, in fancy, I had entered a city of Flamingos, I had devised some plan for a place of concealment from which the birds might be observed and photographed. But the sight of the birds over the swash, as we landed, had banished from my mind every thought but the desire to know whether they were nesting; the blind was forgotten, and fearing now to keep them too long from their homes, I erected around a small bush, some thirty feet from the border of the rookery, a shield of branches behind which the blind might be placed the following day.
We now returned to the boats, seeing, with immense satisfaction, the Flamingos go back to their nests when we were but half across the swash. The claim had been located; it promised nuggets at every step, and our next move was to prepare to work it.
The prospects of the morrow were fatal to sleep, and at an early hour preparations were made for the second invasion of the rookery. As with blind and cameras we now approached, the birds left their nests with the same orderly sequence of movement shown the preceding afternoon, gathering in a densely massed flock in the lagoon. The blind was quickly set in place arranged for it, and hung with mangrove branches and palmetto leaves. I entered it and Mrs. Chapman at once started for camp.
This was a moment of supreme interest. Would the birds return to their nests, the nearest of which were about thirty feet from me, or would the blind arouse their suspicions? Twice they rose in a body and swept over the rookery, each time alighting again in the lagoon. It was a reconnoissance in force, with evidently satisfactory results. No signs of danger were detected in the rookery, and, in the absence of ability to count, the retreat of one figure across the swash was as reassuring as the approach of two figures had been alarming.
Without further delay, the birds returned to their homes. They came on foot, a great red cohort, marching steadily toward me. I felt like a spy in an enemy’s camp. Might not at least one pair of the nearly four thousand eyes detect something unnatural in the newly grown bush almost within their city gates? No sign of alarm, however, was shown; without confusion, and as if trained to the evolution, the birds advanced with stately tread to their nests. There was a bowing of a forest of slender necks as each bird lightly touched its egg or nest with its bill; then, all talking loudly, they stood up on their nests; the black wings were waved for a moment, and bird after bird dropped forward upon its egg. After a vigorous, wriggling motion, designed evidently to bring the egg into close contact with the skin, the body was still, but the long necks and head were for a time in constant motion, preening, picking material at the base of the nest, dabbling in a near-by puddle, or perhaps drinking from it. Occasionally a bird sparred with one of the three or four neighbors which were within reach, when, bill grasping bill, there ensued a brief and harmless test of strength.
In some instances a bird was seen adding to a nest in which an egg had already been deposited. Standing on the nest, it would drag up mud from the base with its bill, which was then used to press the fresh material into place. The feet were also of service in treading down the soft, marly clay.
The nests of this side of the rookery were below the average in size. Few of them reached a height of eight inches, while nests in the older part of this city of huts measured thirteen inches in height, with a diameter of fourteen inches at the top and twenty-two at the bottom. The depression forming the nest proper was never more than an inch in depth, and was without lining of any kind.
After watching a nesting colony of Flamingos in the Bahamas for “nearly an hour", at a distance of one hundred and fifty yards, Sir Henry Blake stated that the females sat upon the nests while the males stood up together, evidently near by. My dissections, however, showed that both sexes incubate, while continued observation from the tent revealed the presence of only one bird of the pair in the rookery at the same time. The bird on the nest was relieved late in the afternoon and early in the morning. The one, therefore, which incubated during the day, fed at night, and his or her place was taken by another which had been feeding during the day. Or as Peter put it: “I do t’ink sir, dat when de lady Fillymingo leave de nest, den de gen’leman Fillymingo take her place, sir; yes, sir.�
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Morning and evening, then, there was much activity in the rookery. Single birds, or files of as many as fifty, were almost constantly arriving and departing, coming from and radiating to every point of the compass.
Flamingos in flight resemble no other bird known to me. With legs and neck fully outstretched, and the comparatively small wings set half-way between bill and toes, they look as if they might fly backward or forward with equal ease. They progress more rapidly than a Heron, and, when hurried, fly with a singular serpentine motion of the neck and body, as if they were crawling in the air.
As noon approached, the birds disposed themselves for sleep. The long necks were arranged in sundry coils and curves, the heads tucked snugly beneath the feathers of the back, and, for the first time, there was silence in the red city. Suddenly—one could never tell whence it came—the honking alarm-note was given. Instantly, and with remarkable effect, the snake-like necks shot up all over the glowing bed of color before me, transforming it into a writhing mass of flaming serpents; then, as the alarm-note continued and was taken up by a thousand throats, the birds, like a vast congregation, with dignified precision of movement, gravely arose, pressing their bills into the nests to assist themselves.
Under circumstances of this kind the birds rarely left their nests, and it was difficult to determine the cause of their alarm. Often, doubtless, it was baseless, but at times it was due to a circling Turkey Vulture, the gaunt ogre of Flamingo-dom, which, in the absence of the parent birds, is said to eat not only eggs but nestlings. Possibly some slight sound from my tent, where, with ill-controlled excitement, I was making photograph after photograph, may have occasioned the deep-voiced, warning huh-huh-huh.
A Gathering of Birds Page 24