VII
KEEN BIRDS AND DULL MEN
If all men could know how greatly the human species varies from highest to lowest, and how the minds and emotions of the lowest men parallel and dove-tail with those of the highest quadrupeds and birds, we might be less obsessed with our own human ego, and more appreciative of the intelligence of animals.
A thousand times in my life my blood has been brought to the boiling point by seeing or reading of the cruel practices of ignorant and vicious men toward animals whom they despised because of their alleged standing "below man." By his vicious and cruel nature, many a man is totally unfitted to own, or even to associate with, dogs, horses and monkeys. Many persons are born into the belief that every man is necessarily a "lord of creation," and that all animals per se are man's lawful prey. In the vicious mind that impression increases with age. Minds of the better classes can readily learn by precept or by reasoning from cause to effect the duty of man to observe and defend the God- given rights of animals.
It was very recently that I saw on the street a group that represented man's attitude toward wild animals. It consisted of an unclean and vicious-looking man in tramp's clothing, grinding an offensive hand-organ and domineering over a poor little terrorized "ringtail" monkey. The wretched mite from the jungle was encased in a heavy woolen straight-jacket, and there was a strap around its loins to which a stout cord was attached, running to the Root of All Evil. The pavement was hot, but there with its bare and tender feet on the hot concrete, the sad-eyed little waif painfully moved about, peering far up into the faces of passers-by for sympathy, but all the time furtively and shrinkingly watching its tormentor. Every now and then the hairy old tramp would jerk the monkey's cord, each time giving the frail creature a violent bodily wrench from head to foot. I think that string was jerked about forty times every hour.
And that exhibition of monkey torture in a monkey hell continues in summer throughout many states of our country,—because "it pleases the children!" The use of monkeys with hand-organs is a cruel outrage upon the monkey tribe, and no civilized state or municipality should tolerate it. I call upon all humane persons to put an end to it.
As an antidote to our vaulting human egotism, we should think often upon the closeness of mental contact between the highest animals and the lowest men. In drawing a parallel between those two groups, there are no single factors more valuable than the home, and the family food supply. These hark back to the most primitive instincts of the vertebrates. They are the bedrock foundations upon which every species rests. As they are stable or unstable, good or bad, so lives or dies the individual, and the species also.
In employing the term "highest animals" I wish to be understood as referring to the warm-blooded vertebrates, and not merely the apes and monkeys that both structurally and mentally are nearest to man.
Throughout my lifetime I have been by turns amazed, entertained and instructed by the marvelous intelligence and mechanical skill of small mammals in constructing burrows, and of certain birds in the construction of their nests. Today the hanging nest of the Baltimore oriole is to me an even greater wonder than it was when I first saw one over sixty years ago. Even today the mechanical skill involved in its construction is beyond my comprehension. My dull brain can not figure out the processes by which the bird begins to weave its hanging purse at the tip end of the most unstable of all earthly building sites,—a down-hanging elm-tree branch that is swayed to and fro by every passing breeze. The situation is so "impossible" that thus far no moving picture artist has ever caught and recorded the process.
Take in your hand a standard oriole nest, and examine it thoroughly. First you will note that it is very strong, and thoroughly durable. It can stand the lashings of the fiercest gales that visit our storm-beaten shore.
How long would it take a man to unravel that nest, wisp by wisp, and resolve it into a loose pile of materials? Certainly not less than an entire day. Do you think that even your skilful fingers,— unassisted by needles,—could in two days, or in three, weave of those same materials a nest like that, that would function as did the original? I doubt it. The materials consist of long strips of the thin inner bark of trees, short strings, and tiny grass stems that are long, pliable and tough. Who taught the oriole how to find and to weave those rare and hard-to-find materials? And how did it manage all that weaving with its beak only? Let the wise ones answer, if they can; for I confess that I can not!
Down in Venezuela, in the delta of the Orinoco River, and elsewhere, lives a black and yellow bird called the giant cacique (pronounced cay-seek'), which as a nest-builder far surpasses our oriole. Often the cacique's hanging nest is from four to six feet long. The oriole builds to escape the red squirrels, but the cacique has to reckon with the prehensile-tailed monkeys.
Sometimes a dozen caciques will hang their nests in close proximity to a wasps' nest, as if for additional protection. A cacique's nest hangs like a grass rope, with a commodious purse at its lower end, entered by a narrow perpendicular slit a foot or so above the terminal facilities. It is impossible to achieve one of these nests without either shooting off the limb to which it hangs, or felling the tree. If it hangs low enough a charge of coarse shot usually will cut the limb, but if high, cutting it down with a rifle bullet is a more serious matter.
[Illustration with caption: HANGING NEST OF THE BALTIMORE ORIOLE
(From the "American Natural History")]
[Illustration with caption: GREAT HANGING NESTS OF THE CRESTED
CACIQUE As seen in the delta of the Orinoco Rover, Venezuela.]
To our Zoological Park visitors the African weaver birds are a wonder and a delight. Orioles and caciques do not build nests in captivity, but the weavers blithely transfer their activities to their spacious cage in our tropical-bird house. The bird-men keep them supplied with raffia grass, and they do the rest. Fortunately for us, they weave nests for fun, and work at it all the year round! Millions of visitors have watched them doing it. To facilitate their work the upper half of their cage is judiciously supplied with tree-branches of the proper size and architectural slant. The weaving covers many horizontal branches. Sometimes a group of nests will be tied together in a structure four feet long; and it branches up, or down, or across, seemingly without rhyme or reason.
Some of the weavers, which inhabit Africa, Malayana and Australia, are "communal" nest-builders. They build colonies of nests, close together. Imagine twenty-five or more Baltimore orioles massing their nests together on one side of a single tree, in a genuine village. That is the habit of some of the weaver birds;—and this brings us to what is called the most wonderful of all manifestations of house-building intelligence among birds. It is the community house of the little sociable weaver-bird of South Africa (Philetoerus socius). Having missed seeing the work of this species save in museums, I will quote from the Royal Natural History, written by the late Dr. Richard Lydekker, an excellent description: —This species congregates in large flocks, many pairs incubating their eggs under the same roof, which is composed of cartloads of grass piled on a branch of some camel- thorn tree in one enormous mass of an irregular umbrella shape, looking like a miniature haystack and almost solid, but with the under surface (which is nearly flat) honeycombed all over with little cavities, which serve not only as places for incubation, but also as a refuge against rain and wind.
"They are constantly being repaired by their active little inhabitants. It is curious that even the initiated eye is constantly being deceived by these dome-topped structures, since at a distance they closely resemble native huts. The nesting- chambers themselves are warmly lined with feathers."
Here
