A SHRIKE (LANIUS CAUDATUS, Cab.) ON THE LOOK-OUT FROM THE HIGH BOUGHS OF AN ACACIA. ITS CRIES WHEN IT SEES A HUNTER ON THE MOVE OFTEN WARN THE ANIMALS HE IS STALKING.
High over my head the voice of the pretty avocet (Recurvirostra avocetta, L.), one of the most charming forms of the bird world known to us, transports me by magic to the distant and mournful lakes of the Masailand wilderness. What the dwarf bustards (Otis gindiana, Oust.) keep calling out to each other with their continually repeated “Rágga-ga-rágga” is not to be discovered. But their cry, which has kept the fancy of the natives busy since olden days, is as inseparably associated with regions on which the grass grows high, as the voices and cries of the sandfowl, the francolins, and, above all, the jarring outcries of the guinea-fowl, on the velt. All the manifold voices of doves, cuckoos, parrots, hornbills, bee-eaters, shrikes, orioles, starlings, finches, weaver-birds, sylvians, and the rest, calling, exulting, rejoicing, uttering cries of alarm or complaint, have woven themselves into my recollections of happy days and days of toil.
Thus there still rings in my ear the triple note of the yellowish green bulbul (Pycnonotus layardi, Gurn.), which, like our sparrow, is present everywhere, till one almost tires of it. Most curious is the friendly play which the handsomely coloured glossy starling (Spreo superbus, Rüpp.) carries on with a weaver-bird (Dinemellia dinemelli, [Hartl.] Rüpp) in flights like those of our sparrows. It comes back to me all the more vividly when I recall the notes uttered by these two birds, which, though such close friends and taking such delight in each other’s company, are so distantly related. The curious warbling of the honey-finder (Indicator indicator, Gm.), which often guides the man who follows it to a wild bees’ nest, also easily makes a permanent impression on the ear of the traveller.
And there are many other bird-voices that delight any one who takes pleasure in sound. When silvery moonbeams streamed over the camp, the night-jars (especially Caprimulgus fossei [Verr.] Hartl.) buzzed and hummed forth their strange song everywhere around. No matter how remote and desolate the wilderness in which the traveller laid down his head to rest, these goat-suckers were to be heard. Their voice makes a strong impression on us even in our own country in the lonely woods, but its effect is much more striking, on the far-off equatorial velt. With noiseless soft beating of its wings the bird comes gliding past us; its wings almost touch us. When it pours forth its song, its monotonous sleepy song, I could listen to it for hours. In the daytime it starts up suddenly from the ground here and there in front of you, uttering the feeblest of cries, that it is impossible to represent. In the next instant it vanishes like some huge moth, and even the sharpest eye cannot distinguish it amongst the dry branches and leaves, or clinging close to the rocky ground. The song of the night-jar is among my most vivid recollections of the bird-voices of Africa.
In the neighbourhood of water, wherever it may be, and in the thick undergrowth, wherever the African wilderness extends, you hear the call and cry of a peculiar bird-voice. It rings out through the stillness with a deep double piping note, that impresses itself in a lasting way on the ear. It is the voice of the handsome organ-shrike (Laniarius æthiopicus, Gm.). These shrikes, which mate permanently, always utter this note in such quick succession, one of the pair after the other, that at first you think you are listening to only a single bird. This beautiful bird-note indicates the proximity of water, and thus it has acquired quite a special significance in these countries.
Finally there is no sound from the throat of a bird that I call to mind so plainly, or so continually, as the song of the African nightingale (Erithacus africanus, [Fschr.] Rchw.). I have very frequently heard this beautiful song during the months of our winter, in many districts round Kilimanjaro. When I heard it unexpectedly for the first time, I was most deeply moved by it. Ten years ago I heard it during a day’s march in the wooded gullies of the great volcanic mountain, and it was most clear and full and beautiful. I never expected thus to hear this northern bird-voice in the tropics. Later on, when I was camped at a considerable altitude in the primeval forests of Kilimanjaro, I was saluted with the cries of northern migratory birds, that, wheeling round the mountain, seemed to be flying over its everlasting snowfields. It was a strange coincidence in those Christmas days, the song of the northern nightingale, and those northern birds of passage on the wing under the equatorial sun! It is worth noting that this voice of the nightingale was the only genuine northern bird-song that I ever heard in Africa. That our nightingale also sometimes breeds there is indicated by the discovery of its nest by the late Dr. Fischer. But the problem of the extraordinary identity in character of this nightingale with its northern sister still awaits solution. Many difficult observations will have to be made in order to investigate it thoroughly.
What a contrast to this song of our northern nightingale is presented by the voices of the hyenas and jackals, the strange cry uttered by the leopard, all the sounds emitted by the antelopes, and finally the indescribably startling, harsh-sounding bellow of the crocodile!
But neither individually nor collectively can the effect of all these voices be expressed in words. They associate themselves with the forms of a flora untouched by the hand of man, and the unceasing throb of animal life. I think of them all together as a theatre of nature now flooded with sunlight, now in the mysterious darkness of night, or with glistening moonbeams playing over it. What impresses one so much is not merely these individual voices, but the way in which all the myriad voices mingle in one mighty chorus.
If this symphony of nature is to be written down, it must be by some master who will combine in one marvellous melody these musical utterances that are so mighty and impressive, so full of mystery and charm, and so often dying away in the deepest and most delicate cadences. None of these tones should be missing, no note of them all should be struck out.
I should like to set in contrast with this mighty primeval harmony of the wilderness the sounds and voices of the modern industrial world, which gradually and unwittingly we take to be something natural. He who would feel all its greatness and perfection must keep himself far away for weeks and months from the screaming whistle he hears on the railway, and the howling siren of a steamship.
Then there is the insect world! Those flower-covered bushes have attracted a multitude of great droning beetles. They hasten to them in heavy flight. On the ground a host of scarabæus beetles are busy with their special work. The ceaseless sharp chirps of the cicadas sing their continual song. Through all its variations there goes on this hum and buzz of the millions and millions of the lower creation. And joined with it there ring out the thousands and thousands of songs of the birds; the powerful voices of the great mammals bellow over plain and bushland, through swamps and primeval forests, over dale and hill. The concert of the feathered songsters is suddenly silent, as, it may be, the harsh cry of the leopard resounds, or the mighty, dull, rumbling roar of the king of the desert thunders over the earth; or the trumpet-like cry of the elephant vibrates through the woods; or harsh war-cries from human lips, battle-songs of primitive men, are heard—but heedless of it all, even at these moments, day and night resound the weak voices of all the myriads of lesser creatures of the animal world. But he who penetrates into this wilderness must have receptive senses to understand the full beauty of it all. For him this harmony exists wherever the primitive animal world lives its life.
ON THE WEST SIDE OF KILIMANJARO I FOUND A BROOK, CALLED BY THE MASAI “MOLOGH.” ABOUT TEN MILES FROM THE WESTERN ‘NJIRI SWAMPS IN THE DRY SEASON IT SUDDENLY DISAPPEARS AMONG THE STONES AND REACHES THE SWAMPS BY AN UNDERGROUND CHANNEL.
Glorious and grand, too, is the language of Nature when she herself raises her primeval voice, associated with no sound of life that we can perceive. Thus it is in the hours of storm by night, when on the plain, or in the primeval forest, or on the hill slopes, the thunder roars round the little camp, and the crackling lightning comes down in zig-zags. Then the rumbling thunder, the rushing downpour of the water-floods, the roar of the storm-wind, speak with an impressiveness that is beyond all description. Then in their hour of death the giants of the primeval forest, the mighty, venerable trees, suddenly themselves find a voice that strikes loudly on the ear: they groan in the embrace of the wind, and under its fury crash thundering to the ground. Then, when the earth and the rocks under our feet seem to shake, when the powers of Nature are let loose in all their might, when weak little man in his small tent, alone in the midst of all this violence, listens to the sounds, alone and abandoned like the sailor on a frail plank in the midst of a raging ocean, then it is that the wilderness sings its greatest, noblest, most wonderful song.
The traveller may yet return to the African wilderness and hear once more the voices of the smaller denizens of the wild. The chirping of cicadas will lull him to rest, or the buzzing of the mosquitoes forbid it. Their chirping and buzzing will bear witness that these waves of life roll on untroubled and uninjured by the incoming of civilisation. But the greater voices will become rarer and rarer. Soon the trumpeting of the elephant, the roar of the lion, the bellow of the hippopotamus will be heard no longer.
But to-day one can still hear all these sounds which I have described, and which our most remote ancestors listened to all day and all night in the ages when there still lived in Europe a fauna very similar to that which we find dying out in East Africa. By day and night they go forth in trees and thickets, by swamp and reed-bed. The song of birds is accompanied by the monotonous deafening chorus of the bullfrogs. Even in the traveller’s tent the crickets chirp, and the night-jar buzzes and buzzes past it, and tells and whispers of the nightly life and movement of the animal world, in its monotonous mysterious song.
A jackal holds a conversation with the evening star. In the dark night the deep bass of the hyena is heard; and then it laughs aloud, in a weird, shrill, shrieking treble. This laugh, seldom uttered, but when heard making one’s heart shudder, is not a thing to forget; on feverish nights it plagues one still in memory. No one need jest about it who has not himself heard it. He who has heard it understands how the Arabs take the hyenas to be wicked men living under a spell.
Now at last the lion raises his commanding voice, and one thing only is wanting to the whole nocturnal spell—the noisy trampling of timid and harassed droves of zebras and other herds of wild things. But if the ground of the velt, hardened by the burning sun, rings once more to the thundering hoof-beats of the zebras, the eye fails in the darkness, and only our ears perceive by their numberless sounds the waves of life that are surging around us; and then indeed the listener comes to full consciousness of how rich the animal-language of the Nyíka still is.... Nowhere else in the world of to-day do all the voices of the wild resound more impressively, and for him who listens to this language there is no escape from that mysterious spell—the Spell of the Elelescho!
FOOTNOTES:
1 Cf. Reichenow, Die Vögel Afrikas.
2 El moran = the “young men,” i.e. Masai warriors.
3 Dr. Richard Kandt, Caput Nili. (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.)
4 I gave the skull of this specimen to the Berlin Natural History Museum.
5 As late as the year 1859 the Masai warriors menaced the places on the coast between Tanga and Mombassa! Even in the eighties the explorers Thomson and Fischer had to submit to their demands. To that flourishing period of the Masai belongs the origin of their view that even if the Bantu Negro races have cattle, they must have been stolen from the Masai, for, as say, “God gave us in earlier days all the cattle on the face of the earth.”
6 According to Hollis, the singular of the word is “O-‘l-leleshwa.”
7 As Hollis tells us.
8 The pachyderms seem to feel no ill effects from the natron-bearing water; but for men the water of the lake—at least, near my camp—proved very unpleasant. Our drinking water was obtained from a small marsh near the shore of the lake.
9 John Hanning Speke, one of the discoverers of the Victoria Nyanza, has already remarked that the Arabs know well how to manage their slaves, and to tame them like domestic animals; that they are able to entrust them with business matters, and send them out of their own dominions into foreign countries, without the slaves ever attempting to escape from their masters.
10 The native elephant-hunter—the “Wakua”—use as a rule several small iron bullets with a heavy charge of gunpowder.
11 Singular: en-dito = the young maiden.
12 Cf. also Ostasienfahrt, Erlebnisse und Beobachtungen eines Naturforschers, etc., von Dr. Franz Doflein, Leipzig, 1906.
13 Cf. Friedlander, Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms.
14 In the market of Nice alone, according to official statistics, from November 1, 1881, to the beginning of February 1882, 1,318,356 little song-birds were put up for sale.
15 Strict regulations have lately been put into force for the preservation of the last-named species. But, as the result of the merciless persecution to which it has been subjected, the sea-otter is all but extinct.
16 While this book is passing through the press several correspondents have sent me an article published by Freiherr von Schrötter-Wohnsdorf in the Monatsheften des Allgemeinen Deutschen Jagdschutsvereins of August 24th, 1906. According to this article, during the year 1906, by ministerial orders, in four of the chief forest districts of East Prussia, sixty-seven head of wild elk were killed off, though hitherto the few remaining living specimens of the elk have been so carefully preserved both on public and private estates. This thorough-going course was adopted for the sake of the preservation of the woods from damage by the animals. That this should have been done in the case of a disappearing species of wild animal, hitherto so carefully preserved, and of which private individuals were allowed to shoot only male specimens, is in open contradiction with those views as to the necessity of protecting the rarer beauties of nature, which are making such progress every day. It seems therefore fitting that I should note the fact here as showing how well grounded is my opinion that the progress of civilised culture is destructive to those treasures of nature that have come down to us from primeval times.
17 The author believes that he cannot better give expression to his views as to the preservation of the beauties of nature, than by reproducing an article on the appearance of the stork in the Soldin district, by Herr M. Kurth. He writes in Die Jagd, Illustrierte Wochenschrift für deutsche Jäger, May 13, 1906:
“As for the stork-shooting appointed by the District Committee of the districts of Soldin, Landsberg and Ost-Sternberg for the period from March 1 to June 15, it is to be remarked that the opinions held by sportsmen as to the damage done by storks, especially in reference to small game, are very much divided, and that not much can be put to the reckoning of ‘Brother Longlegs’ of those misdeeds that figure heavily in the accounts of other robbers, such as the crane, the magpie, and all kinds of native birds of prey, and the hedgehog, marten, and polecat. These one and all carry off nestlings, and most of them attack young leverets also. Now if we are to go for the stork, it should of course be done when he is to be found together in too great numbers; and this is entirely the idea of the District Committee. The neighbourhood of Balz bei Vietz on the Eastern Railway has always been remarkable for the number of its storks’ nests. One finds two of them on nearly every one of the old barns, a nest at each end of the roof. It was so even thirty years ago, and so it is to this day. But the proprietors of the barns never agree to the nests of the storks being destroyed, or any opposition made to the settling there of these trustful and friendly birds. And for what reasons precisely has ‘Friend Adebar’ settled in such numbers in this district? Well, here the far-spreading meadows of the Warthe, with their full scope for extended flight, offer him all the food he wants and to spare, and here the frogs’ legs must be particularly good. It may be that now and again a young partridge or a leveret strays into Mother Stork’s kitchen, but that is the exception. Now if people keep strictly to the object indicated by the District Committee, namely to bring down the numbers of the storks where there are too many of them, one may let it pass. But how many will out of a mere shooting-mania take aim continually at the harmless birds!—though such are never genuine sportsmen. How can this be checked? And it should not be forgotten that in the first week of April our African guests are to be found in hundreds along the Warthe brook, whence they then disperse to various parts of the neighbouring districts. Now it is to be hoped that no one will assume that the stork is to be found here ‘in too great numbers,’ and that therefore ‘one may blaze away at him.’ In some years this may possibly be the case, but if he were scared out of the district our landscape would be the poorer by the loss of the bird’s welcome cry, as has happened in the case of the heron and the cormorant in our district. This last-named bird comes now only seldom, and then only one at a time, to the Netze, near Driesen. There was a heronry formerly near Waldowstrenk in the Neumark district, but it disappeared ten years ago. We must hope that this will not be the fate of the stork, whose appearance has so many links with the poetry of our childhood, and that we shall not be deprived of his presence. What a pleasing sight it is when ‘Brother Longlegs’ with dignified walk stalks beside the mower at haymaking time, looking so confiding and fearless! And what a joy it is to old and young when the first stork of the season wheels in circles over the homestead, when for the first time he comes down to his old nest, and announces his arrival with a joyful outcry! Must not every sympathetic and thoughtful lover of nature be filled with sorrow and indignation when, on the pretext of petty thefts, but probably out of mere wanton love of destruction, attempts are made to drive out of our country this friendly bird, which is so pleasing an ornament of the landscape? It would really be a crime against the out-door beauty of our native land, and against nature all around us, if out of narrow-minded selfishness we were to extirpate the stork, as happened in recent times to that most splendidly coloured of our birds, the kingfisher, on mere suspicion of its being a ‘great destroyer’ of fish. Love of nature, joy in nature, is a valuable element in German feeling, and therefore, dear fellow sportsman, let us maintain our good character!”
18 We are indebted to the English hunters of those days for all the information we possess as to the wild life of South Africa at that time. If there had not been amongst them men who knew also how to handle the pen, we should have been almost entirely without trustworthy information as to that period. I may take this opportunity of saying a word for the English “record-making sportsman,” who is not unfrequently the subject of false and unfounded invectives, which I can only describe as mostly full of fanciful fables. Other lands, other ways, and there are black sheep in every nation. In any case we may take English ideals of sport as our example, and also the regulations drawn up by English authorities for the protection of the animal world.
19 In a review of my book With Flashlight and Rifle (German edition).
20 Sir William Cornwallis Harris must be considered as a quite trustworthy authority. His works are indeed the most complete first-hand evidence we have as to the state of the fauna of South Africa at the time.
21 On the part of the Government and the local authorities everything that is possible is being done to settle this difficulty. But unfortunately their efforts seem to have little success.
22 Cf. my book With Flashlight and Rifle, p. 736, where a statement by Professor P. Matschie, the Custodian of the Royal Zoological Museum at Berlin, will be found, bearing out the truth of what is here remarked.
23 During the last few years handsome groups have also been set up in the museums of other places, such as Munich, Stuttgart, and Carlsruhe.
24 The ibex, which was once also common in Germany, has been found by Dr. G. Merzbacher in the central Tian-Shan region in the form of Ibex sibirica merzbacheri: and two years ago by G. Leisewitz in such great numbers that the appearance of flocks of hundreds of them was a daily experience.
25 The Hudson Bay Company put on the market in the year 1891 1,358 skins of the musk ox (Ovibos moschatus), but only 271 in the year 1901. In the year 1878 the same company sold 102,715 skins of the Canadian beaver, but only 44,200 in the year 1892. A striking example of the results of excessive exploitation of hunting grounds!
26 Besides other sources, I take these data from an interesting article by C. Brock, in the periodical Die Jagd. This writer estimates the area devoted to the chase in the German Empire at 54,000,000 hectares; the number of shots fired in a year at game at 16,000,000, besides some 6,000,000 shots fired at animals that are not game. He rightly notes that for the individual the whole business of sport is a losing or non-productive occupation, but one of productive value for the households of the country folk, as about 130,000,000 marks are annually spent upon it.
27 Professor Haberer lately found strychnine in use in various ways in many places in Eastern Asia.
28 See, amongst other writings of his, Outdoor Pastimes, by Theodore Roosevelt.
29 On the destruction of the turtle-dove (Turtur turtur, L.) during its migration to Greece, see Otmar Reiser, Curator of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Materialen zu einer Ornis Balcanica. At Syra one sportsman shoots as many as a hundred in a day; at Paxos, according to the Grand Duke Ludwig Salvator, they are killed in heaps. The lands of the Strophades Islands are completely equipped with huge falling snares and shooting-stands for the systematic massacre of the “Trigones.” Everywhere in Greece when the cry of “Trigones!” is heard, fire is opened upon the newcomers.
30 Expeditions in uninhabited districts have sometimes been entirely supplied by shooting wild animals.
31 Cf. Schlobach, Deutsch-Ostafrikan. Zeitg. 1 Beiblatt, 10 Februar, 1906.
32 Houston Stuart Chamberlain, Immanuel Kant.
33 According to the latest observations of Professor Yngwe Sjöstedt these nut-galls are inhabited by three different species of ants.
34 Cf. also Prof. Yngwe Sjöstedt on the destruction of wild animals by the Boers in the Kilimanjaro district, in the Täglichen Rundschau, Berlin, 1906. Professor Sjöstedt travelled through these districts for the purpose of making a collection of their fauna for the Copenhagen Museum, and visited the Merker Lakes with a view to securing a hippopotamus.
35 The destruction of wild animals by the Boers in the Kilimanjaro district was in every way opposed by the central and local authorities, but failing the possibility of strict control it does not seem to have been possible to make the regulations effective. Prof. Sjöstedt found the Boers in no way settled down, but roving about the country in pursuit of the wild animals.
36 It appears that the explorer completed some of these sketches after his return with the help of stuffed specimens, but he drew others entirely from nature on the African velt.
37 So too, for example, Wissmann never killed a lion. This is sufficient proof of the difficulty of observing animal life. The author may take this opportunity of calling attention to the remarkable work of this departed explorer, In den Wildnissen Afrikas, and thinks himself fortunate in the possession of a letter from his hand approving of his method of observing animals. This letter expresses in words that go to the heart the love for and understanding of the beauty of the African fauna that characterised this successful and distinguished explorer.
38 Take, for instance, his description of the Ugalla River in a letter to his grandfather, General von Meyerinck, in his work Von Sansibar zum Tanjanjika (published by Hermann Schalow, Leipzig, 1888).
39 Unfortunately such ridiculous and ugly names as gemsbock, hartebeest, wildebeest, etc., have gradually come into general use.
40 Pauw is Dutch for peacock.
41 Cf. Prof. P. Matschie, Die Säugetiere Deutsch-Ostafrikas (“The Mammalia of German East Africa”), p. 96, and my work With Flashlight and Rifle.
42 From the Cameroon district in West Africa Professor Yngwe Sjöstedt writes to me also of a nearly related species of cuckoo that has much the same cry.
43 Franz Hermann Meissner in his work, Arnold Böcklin, says “I have often found that I had to consider these pictures with the blue eyes of an old Ostrogoth seer of primitive days.” And I am of opinion that in order to take full delight in the charm of the tropics one must look on them with northern eyes.
44 Cf. Professor Dr. A. Reichenow, Die Vögel Afrikas.
Transcriber’s Note:
Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.