Part 3

While other birds are hunting for insects that fly in the air, or creep on the ground, or lurk under the leaves of trees, the woodpecker has designs on those that burrow into tree-trunks or hide in the crevices of the bark. These the woodpecker evicts by means of its bill and tongue. The former is stout and square at the end, which presents a chisel-like edge. The bird is thereby enabled to cut holes in the hardest wood. Occasionally it literally excavates its quarry, but, as a rule, it is not obliged to resort to such drastic measures. A series of vigorous taps on the bark under which insects are lurking usually frightens them to such an extent that they bolt from their hiding-places as hastily as men leave their habitations during an earthquake. When the insects expose themselves the woodpecker’s tongue comes into operation. This organ is a fly-paper of the most approved “catch-’em-alive-o” type. It is covered with a secretion as sticky as bird-lime. The insects it touches adhere to it, one and all are drawn into the woodpecker’s mouth, and forthwith gathered unto their fathers!

The nest is of the usual woodpecker type, that is to say, a cavity in the trunk or a thick branch of a tree, partially, at any rate, excavated by the bird. Although the chisel-like bill of the woodpecker can cut the hardest wood, the bird usually selects for the site of its nest a part of the tree where the internal wood is rotten. This, of course, means less work for the bird. The only hard labour it has then to perform is to cut through the sound external wood a neat, round passage leading to the decayed core. When once this is reached, little further effort is required.

Last year I spent a few days at Easter in the Himalayas, and there had leisure to watch a pair of pied woodpeckers at work on their nest. These birds were brown-fronted pied woodpeckers—_Dendrocopus auriceps_. Their nest was being excavated in the trunk of a large rhododendron tree, at a spot some thirty feet from the ground. When I first began to watch the birds the cock was at work. He confined his operations to a spot about four inches from the surface, so that, as he hammered away, his head, neck, and a part of his shoulders disappeared in the hole. His fore toes grasped the inside of the aperture, and his hind toes the bark of the tree. The wood at which he was working was sufficiently hard to cause the taps of his bill to ring out clearly. After I had been watching him for about ten minutes he flew off to a tree hard by and uttered a number of curious low notes. Then his spouse appeared and he caressed her. After this both birds flew off. A few seconds later the hen came to the nest hole and set to work. Her efforts were not directed to the part of the cavity at which the cock had been working. Her taps were at a spot deeper down, so that while at work her tail, although at right angles to her body, derived no support from the trunk. She was operating on soft wood, hence the tapping of her bill was scarcely audible. After working for about eight minutes she began to remove the chips of wood she had detached. This operation is performed so rapidly that it is apt to be overlooked. The bird plunges its head into the hollow, seizes some chips, draws out its head and jerks this violently to one side, usually to the right, and thus casts the chips over its shoulder.

After the hen had been at work for nearly ten minutes she flew away. Within one minute and a half of her departure the cock arrived on the scene, and at once set to work in a most business-like fashion. He now operated on the right side of the cavity, and not at the spot to which his wife had directed her attention. After working for exactly twenty-five minutes the cock flew off. Then for a fraction over ten minutes the hole was deserted. At the end of this time it was the cock who again appeared. He put in a spell of thirty-five minutes’ work, in the course of which he indulged in a “breather” lasting three minutes. I then went away, and returned nearly three hours later, by which time the work had advanced to such an extent that when a bird was excavating at the deepest part of the cavity only the tail and the tip of the wing were visible. I found that the habit of the birds was to cease working about 4 p.m. I do not know at what hour they commenced work.

Five days later the nest hole had attained such a size that the birds were able to turn round in it, and so now emerged head foremost. When throwing away the chips, the head of the bird would appear at the aperture with the beak full of chips and dispose of them with a jerk of the head. The head of a woodpecker at the entrance to its hole is a pretty sight, so bright and keen is its eye. The excavation of the nest from start to finish probably occupies from ten to fourteen days.

The yellow-fronted pied woodpecker sometimes selects as a nesting site a spot in a tree-trunk only a few inches above the level of the ground.

Some years ago my ignorance of this fact afforded me a rather amusing experience. I noticed a pied woodpecker with some insects in its bill. Obviously it was about to carry these to its young. As there was only one clump of about six trees in the vicinity the nest was necessarily in one of these. Having half an hour to spare, I determined to wait and discover the whereabouts of the nest. The sun was powerful, so I elected to squat in the shade close by the trunk of the smallest of the trees. I anticipated that the woodpecker would fly direct to its nest with the food. Birds that nest in holes are usually quite indifferent to the presence of man; instinct teaches them that their nest is in an inaccessible place. But, in this instance, the bird kept hopping about looking very distressed. Consequently, I came to the conclusion that its nest must be in the trunk of the tree near which I was crouching. I stood up and examined the trunk carefully, but found no signs of a nest. I again sat down and waited until the patience of the woodpecker should be exhausted, but it continued to hop about on a log of wood with the food in its beak and disgust plainly depicted in its face. At the end of half an hour I went off mystified. The following day I returned to the spot, and the first thing that caught my eye was the entrance to the woodpecker’s nest eight inches off the ground in the trunk by which I had sat on the previous day. I had then unwittingly been blocking the approach of the bird!

VII A JHIL OUT OF SEASON

Even as every English seaside resort has its “season,” so is there for every Indian _jhil_ a period of the year when it is thronged with avian visitors. At other times of the year the _jhil_, like the seaside town, is, comparatively speaking, deserted. The season of the _jhil_ extends from October to April—a term long enough to turn the average lodging-house keeper green with envy! During the winter months the _jhils_ of Northern India are full to overflowing with ducks, geese, coots, pelicans, cormorants, and waders of every length of leg. As the weather grows hot, the majority of these take to their wings and hie themselves to cooler climes, where they enter upon the joyous toil of rearing up their families. Thus, from May to September, the permanent residents hold undisputed possession of the _jhil_. The number of these permanent residents is considerable, so that a _jhil_, even in the rains, when it contains most water, has not the forlorn appearance of, let us say, Margate in winter.

It is very pleasant during a short break in the rains to visit a _jhil_ late in the afternoon, especially if a breeze be blowing. The sky presents a panorama of clouds of the most varied and fantastic shapes, to which the setting sun imparts hues wonderful and beautiful. The slanting rays are reflected and refracted from cloud to cloud, so that not infrequently there appear to be two suns behind the clouds, a major one setting in the west and a minor one sinking to the eastern horizon. The earth below is very beautiful. It is clothed in a mantle of green of every hue, from the vivid emerald of the young rice crop to the dark bluish green of the pipal tree. As likely as not the _jhil_ is so thickly studded with grasses and other aquatic plants as to present the appearance, from a little distance, of a number of flooded fields, in most of which are well-grown crops—the water being visible only in patches here and there.

The most conspicuous of the occupants of the _jhil_ are the snow-white egrets (_Herodias alba_). These birds, which attain a length of a yard, strut about solemnly in the shallower parts of the lake, seeking their quarry. Their long necks project high above the vegetation; so slender are these that they might almost belong to swans. Here and there stands motionless a “long-necked heron, dread of nimble eels” (_Ardea cinerea_), waiting patiently until a luckless frog shall approach. The grey plumage of this species, dull and sober though it be, stands out in bold contrast to the surrounding greenery. In another part of the _jhil_ a couple of sarus cranes (_Grus antigone_) are visible. This is the only species of crane resident in India; the others are to be numbered among those which visit the _jhil_ in the “season.” One of the saruses, like the heroine of the “penny dreadful,” has drawn himself up to his full height, and his grey form, relieved by patches of red and white on the head and neck, shows well against the background of dark foliage. His mate is apparently sitting down. This probably indicates the presence of a nest. To discover this we must wade and chance an occasional immersion to the waist. Risking this, we advance, to the disgust of the saruses, who set up a loud trumpeting. Sometimes the parent birds attack the intruders. Such conduct is, however, rare. Usually the sarus indulges in Lloyd-Georgian methods of meeting an enemy.

The nest in question is a pile of rushes and water-weeds, rising a couple of feet from the water and large enough for a man to stand upon. It contains two whitish eggs faintly blotched with yellowish brown.

Viewed from the margin, the _jhil_ appears to be utterly devoid of waterfowl; but in this case things are not what they seem. Before we have waded far in the direction of the nest of the sarus, numbers of duck and teal which were hidden by the sedges and grasses get up and fly to another part of the _jhil_. The first birds to be disturbed are some cotton-teal (_Nettopus coromandelianus_). As these consist of a flock of eight or ten they are obviously not nesting. The cotton-teal drake is a bird easy to identify. Its small size, white head, and black necklace are unmistakable, and the white margins to the wings are very conspicuous during flight.

On another part of the _jhil_ a pair of spot-billed ducks (_Anas poecilorhyncha_) settle down. These are recognisable even at a considerable distance when in the water by the white patch on each flank. As there are two of these birds together it is probable that they have a nest hidden in one of the sedge-covered islets studded about the tank. The other ducks disturbed by our approach are whistling teal (_Dendrocycna javanica_), which occur in considerable flocks, and a few comb-duck (_Sarcidiornis melanotus_). All these species of duck and teal are permanent residents in India.

Not a single coot is to be seen upon the _jhil_. The explanation of this is that this particular tank dries up in the hot weather, and coots usually keep to those lakes that contain water all the year round.

Half a dozen terns form a conspicuous and beautiful feature of the _jhil_. As they sail overhead, with every now and then a descent to the water to secure a frog or small fish, their silvery wings stand out boldly from a dark cloud on the southern horizon. The terns at the _jhil_ are all of the black-bellied species (_Sterna melanogaster_). The other species haunt rivers in preference to shallow lakes.

Last, but not least, mention must be made of Pallas’s fishing eagle (_Haliaetus leucoryphus_). One or more pairs of this bird are to be seen in the vicinity of every _jhil_. In the earlier part of the day they are

## active, screaming creatures, but when once they have made a good meal

off a teal or some fish they become very sluggish. Two of them are sitting about fifty yards apart on a _band_ alongside the _jhil_, looking like kites with whitish heads. They sit as motionless as statues. They are obviously feeling very lazy. Presently a king-crow (_Dicrurus ater_) comes up and, uttering that soft note which seems to be peculiar to the rainy season, makes repeated feints at the head of one of the fishing eagles. Save for a slight inclination of the head, the eagle pays no attention to the attack of its puny adversary. Eventually, the king-crow gives up in despair and flies off, probably to find something which will take more notice of his threatening demonstrations.

Even when I approach the fishing eagle the phlegmatic bird only flies a few yards. There is no creature more sluggish than a bird or beast of prey that has recently made a good meal.

VIII BIRDS IN WHITE

Almost every species of bird and beast throws off an occasional albinistic variation or sport, which tends to breed true. Such sports are of two kinds—complete and incomplete albinos. In the former, the organism is totally devoid of external pigment, so that the eye looks red, there being no colouring matter in the iris to mask the small blood vessels in it. In the incomplete albinistic form the iris retains the pigment, so that the eye colour is normal. True albinos have very poor sight, hence when such sports occur in a species in a state of nature they soon perish in the struggle for existence. The white varieties with pigmented eyes are not handicapped by bad eyesight, but their whiteness makes them conspicuous to the creatures that prey upon them; so that, unless they are well able to defend themselves or unless they dwell in a region of everlasting snow, they tend to be eliminated by natural selection.

If protective colouring were as important to the welfare of birds as Wallaceians and modern Darwinians assert, all the birds of the Polar regions would be white and not a single white species would be found in the temperate zones or in the Tropics. That coloured species occur in the Arctic regions and white species in the Tropics is conclusive proof that in those particular cases, at any rate, it is not of paramount importance to the species that they be protectively coloured.

Finn and I have shown in _The Making of Species_ that the ice-bound Arctic and Antarctic regions are not inhabited, as popular works on zoology would have us believe, by a snow-white fauna. We have shown that in the Polar countries the coloured species of birds outnumber the white species. I will, therefore, not dilate further upon this subject. It will suffice to repeat that in the area of eternal snow the white forms are at an advantage in the struggle for existence, as their whiteness tends to render them difficult to see, while, in regions where snow is unknown, such organisms labour under a disadvantage because of their conspicuousness, and, other things being equal, they ought not to be able to hold their own against less showy rivals.

The fact that white birds exist in the plains of India must mean that their colour is not a matter of great importance, that a conspicuous organism can survive in the fight for life provided it be otherwise well equipped for the contest. From this it follows that it is incorrect to speak of the whiteness of such organisms as the direct product of natural selection.

Let us take a brief survey of those birds of India of which the plumage is largely white, and try to discover how it is that each of them is able to hold its own in the struggle for existence, notwithstanding its showy plumage. These birds are the spoonbill, the egrets, the black-winged stilt, the avocet, the white ibis, the flamingo, adult cock paradise flycatcher, and certain of the gulls, terns, pelicans and storks, including the open-bill. With many of these every one is familiar. Accordingly, it will not be necessary to describe the sea gulls, the pelicans or the flamingo.

The spoonbill (_Platalea leucorodia_) is a bird larger than a kite with very long black legs and a bill of the same hue which is flat and expanded at the end like a spoon, hence the popular name of the bird. Perhaps another name for the bird—Banjo-bill—still better describes its beak. Spoonbills dwell on the fringe of water and feed much as ducks do.

The white ibis (_Ibis melanocephala_) is another wading bird, rather smaller than the spoonbill and with considerably shorter legs. All its plumage is white, but the legs, bill, and featherless head and upper neck are black. The bill is long and curved like that of the curlew. The stilt (_Himantopus candidus_) may be described as a sandpiper on red stilts. It is a white bird with dark wings and back which spends its days wading in shallow water. The avocet (_Recurvirostra avocetta_) is perhaps the most elegant of all wading birds. It is slightly bigger than the stilt but with shorter legs. Its body is white picked out with black. Its most characteristic feature is a long, slender bill which curves upwards. Like the species already mentioned, it feeds in shallow water, and I have seen it on the Cooum.

The open-bill (_Anastomus oscitans_) looks like a shabby specimen of the common white stork. It is characterised by a peculiar beak, of which the mandibles do not meet in the middle and look as though they had been bent in an attempt to crack a hard nut. The egrets, of which there are several species in India, are snow-white, heron-like birds. The most familiar is the cattle egret (_Bubulcus coromandus_), which Finn characterises as one of the most picturesque birds in the East. This is the bird that struts along beside a cow or buffalo and seizes the grasshoppers disturbed by the motion of the quadruped. It is the least aquatic of all the egrets, most of which are true waders.

Terns may be described as very graceful and slenderly built gulls. Their feet are webbed, so that they can swim after the manner of ducks and sea gulls, but they spend most of their time on their powerful pinions and so elegant is their flight that they have been called sea-swallows. The adult cock paradise flycatcher (_Terpsiphone paradisi_) is one of the most beautiful birds in the world. As he is described in another essay it is only necessary for me to state in this place that he is a white bird with a black-crested head. He is not much larger than a sparrow, but his two median tail feathers are twenty inches in length and float behind him like streamers of white satin as he flits from tree to tree.

It will be observed that of the above list of Indian birds that are mainly white, only the paradise flycatcher belongs to the great Order of _Passeres_; moreover, with this exception, all are wading or aquatic birds. These are significant facts if we can interpret them aright. I interpret them in the following manner. It may be taken as a fact that every species throws off occasionally white mutations or sports, which breed true, so that, if allowed to persist, they form the starting point for new varieties and species. As most passerine birds are small and preyed upon by the _raptores_, white varieties among them usually perish at an early age on account of their conspicuousness. Thus there are very few white passerine birds. The paradise flycatcher lives amid thick foliage, and so is comparatively immune from the attacks of birds of prey; but even here it is note-worthy that the hens are not white but chestnut in colour throughout life, and the cocks have chestnut-coloured plumage until they are two years old. As the cock shares in the duties of incubation equally with the hen, her failure to acquire white plumage cannot be accounted for by supposing her to have a greater need of protection. Finn has suggested that the whiteness of the cock is a senile character; that it is the livery of old age.

The majority of the non-passerine birds that are altogether or mainly white are large and able to fight well, so that they are comparatively immune from the attacks of raptorial birds. The gulls and terns, although small, fly so powerfully as to be equally safe. In the case of birds which secure their food in the water, whiteness is probably useful in rendering them less conspicuous to organisms living in the liquid medium than they would be were they coloured.

Further, whiteness of feather seems to be correlated in some way with the power to resist cold and damp.

It should be noted that not one of the larger fruit-eating birds is white. The reason of this would seem to be that in the case of non-aquatic birds such white species possess no advantage in the struggle for existence, but, on the contrary, the whiteness of their plumage is perhaps correlated with weakness of constitution. This, of course, is a heavier handicap to a large bird than being conspicuous is.

The correlation or interdependence of various characteristics and organs is a subject full of interest, but one which has hitherto attracted comparatively little attention. Close study of this phenomenon may eventually revolutionise zoological thought. Whether this surmise prove right or wrong, one thing is certain, and that is there is more in the philosophy of whiteness than the old-fashioned evolutionist dreams of.

IX THE PIED CRESTED CUCKOO