Birds and Nature Vol. 9 No. 3 [March 1901]. Various
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consequences.
All the Scansorial Picarians are essentially tree-haunters; and the tree-haunting and climbing habit seems specially favorable to the growth of intellect. Monkeys, squirrels, opossums, wild cats, are all of them climbers, and all of them, in the act of climbing, jumping, and balancing themselves on boughs, gain such an accurate idea of geometrical figures, distance, perspective and the true nature of space-relations, as could hardly be acquired in any other way. In a few words, they thoroughly understand the tactual realities that answer to and underlie each visible appearance. This is, in my opinion, one of the substrata of all intelligence; and the monkeys, possessing it more profoundly than any other animals, except man, have accordingly reached a very high place in the competitive examination perpetually taking place under the name of Natural Selection.
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 wood-pecker, 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 wood-peckers 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, hands, fingers, bill and tongue, they are 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 this 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 some well-known maxim, we are not astonished at its remarkable intelligence.
Parrots are true vegetarians; with a single degraded exception, to which I shall recur hereafter, they do not touch animal food. They live chiefly upon a diet of fruit and seeds, or upon the abundant nectar of rich tropical flowers. And it is mainly for the purpose of getting at their chosen food that they have developed the large and powerful bills which characterize the family. Most of us have probably noticed that many tropical fruit-eaters, like the hornbills and the toucans, are remarkable for the size and strength of their beaks; and the majority of thinking people are well acquainted with the fact that tropical fruits often have thick or hard or bitter rinds, which must be torn off before the monkeys or birds, for whose use they are intended, can get at them and eat them.
As monkeys use their fingers in place of knives and forks, so birds use 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 both sides of the face which bring together the cutting edges with extraordinary energy. The way the bird holds a 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 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 parrot ever prepared for his rapid attack, and eager to make him pay with five joints of his tail for his impertinent interference with an unoffending fellow-citizen of the arboreal community.
Of course there are parrots and parrots. The great black cockatoo, for example, the largest of the tribe, lives almost exclusively upon the central shoot of palm-trees; an expensive kind of food, for when once this so-called “cabbage” has been eaten the tree dies, so that each black cockatoo must have killed in his time whole groves of cabbage-palms. Other parrots live on fruits and seeds; and quite a number are adapted for flower-haunting and honey-sucking.
As a group, the parrots must be 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 generally believed that fruits and nuts are for the most part of recent and special evolution. To put the facts 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 not be any great number of fruits.
Most of the parrots very much resemble the monkeys and other tropical fruit-eaters in their habits and manners. They are gregarious, mischievous and noisy. They have no moral sense, and are fond of practical jokes. 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 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 troupe is on the wing at once, vociferous and eager, roaring forth a song in their own tongue, which may be interpreted to mean that they are ready to fight if it is necessary.
The common gray 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. 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. It is only in confinement that this bird’s finer qualities come out, and that it develops into a speechmaker of distinguished attainments.
A peculiar and exceptional offshoot of the parrot group is the brush-tongued lory, several species of which are common in Australia and India. These interesting birds are parrots which have a resemblance to humming birds. Flitting about from tree to tree with great rapidity, they thrust their long extensible tongues, penciled 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 the larger flowers there present the appearance of having 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 the sun-birds. The prevalence of very large and brilliantly-colored flowers in the Malayan region must be set down for the most part to the selective action of the color-loving, brush-tongued parrots.
The Australian continent 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 most curious 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 a lory which has assumed all the appearances 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.
Why should a parrot so strangely disguise itself and belie its ancestry? The reason is not difficult to discover. It found a place for itself ready made in nature. New Zealand is a remote and sparsely-stocked island, peopled by various forms of life from adjacent but still distant continents. There are no dangerous enemies there. Here, then, was a great opportunity 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 those forms survived which were dingy in color. 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