In this life of ours it is the striking and startling things which attract our attention and the inexplicable which focus and hold it. A tinamou fulfills all these requirements, but thrills only one person in a hundred thousand, because that is about the proportion of human beings which ever sees or hears or eats him. Nevertheless, tinamous range over forests and pampas of such extent that the whole United States could be laid down twice upon them without overlapping.

Quail, partridges and pheasants are birds of the north and temperate regions, and we are all familiar with the part they play in the life of mankind—æsthetic, recreational, and commercial. The stress of competition or some innate constitutional barrier hinders the dominance of these terrestrial birds in the jungles of the tropics. In the area of research at my British Guiana laboratory, only a single small partridge has found and retained a foothold, and this is a very uncommon bird. In its low call-note, its arched-over nest and its dead leaf plumage, it seems thoroughly affected by the great, lonely dimness of its unusual haunts, and an observant traveller could remain for months ignorant of its very existence.

Another group of fowl-like birds has solved life in these great jungles by taking to the trees, even nesting high up among the branches. These guans and curassows have retained the whiteness of egg-shell but have reduced the number of eggs in a single laying to two.

In the abhorrence of the well-known vacuum accredited to Nature, the absence of terrestrial gallinaceous birds is compensated by the presence of tinamous, bob-tailed, sturdy running chaps, who defy all the dangers of the tropics and carry on their lives in the face of innumerable foes. To those few fortunates like myself, who have had opportunity to admire, watch, study, listen to, shoot and eat these birds, the substitution is eminently satisfactory.

Five o’clock in the afternoon of a newcomer’s first day in the jungle apprises him of the proximity of tinamous—although if unaided by Indian or ornithological lore, it may be months before he knows to what he is listening. From its sweetness, his guess will never be far from some song bird, perhaps of beautiful plumage, and from its ventriloquial character he will have no idea whether it comes from high overhead or from right or left on the ground.

Little by little, year after year, I have gleaned a habit here, a peculiarity there, until at last it is possible to piece them together into a mosaic of sorts, a shadowy palimpsest of life history which gives us more or less of an idea of the voice and fears, the food and courtship, and the strange domestic relationship of the sexes. The most familiar of the three species occurring in the quarter of a square mile of jungle at Kartabo is the variegated tinamou. My Akawai Indian hunters know him as orri-orri or maam, rolling the r’s like any Spaniard, and when referring to him technically I call him Crypturus variegatus variegatus (Gmelin). This, for a wonder, is appropriate when translated, and the variegated hiddentail is an excellent and distinctive name.

My first problem was to discover whether the birds which I heard calling every evening were the same individuals or whether these tinamous wandered casually through the jungle except when actually nesting.

By means of slight peculiarities in the call-notes, I was able in two instances to locate with certainty the home range of the variegated tinamou. One bird, a female as it ultimately proved, was always to be found in one of two small snarls of lianas and underbrush. Any time during the night the bird could be flushed from this spot. In the morning about 5:30 she began calling, timidly at first, then with more assurance. As it grew light she left her retreat and moved slowly west across one of our trails and then turned south to several trees with fallen fruit. Here the calling ceased for about half an hour and then recommenced as she retraced her steps, turned west again and went on until I lost her in the maze of thick jungle. Her last call was given about seven o’clock. During the period of a full month she followed this identical routine every one of the eighteen mornings on which I trailed her, with a single change to a new feeding ground when the supply from the first gave out. On five evenings I found her back in the brush pile, when she began a new period of calling, usually beginning about 5:15 and continuing intermittently until nearly seven o’clock.

Before the beginning of the regular silvery, staccato trill, a single high, sweet, long-drawn-out note is uttered, of about two seconds’ duration, followed by an interval of three or four seconds, when the call proper is given. Rarely, when the bird becomes suddenly suspicious, the first note is given alone, but almost invariably it is the precursor of the call. When the birds rise they are always silent, unlike pheasants, no matter how terrified they may be. On moonlit nights I have heard their usual call at intervals throughout the night, on cloudy days it is sometimes uttered at noon, while during no month of the year is the variegated tinamou wholly silent. The call is, of course, always given from the ground, and probably nine-tenths of the utterances occur between 5:00 and 7:00 P.M. and 5:30 and 6:30 A.M.

The first note is usually on F natural, and is very sweet and penetrating, with considerable carrying power, being audible for long distances through the jungle. Several times I have heard these birds across the Cuyuni River, almost a mile away. It is a characteristic vocal utterance of solitary birds which inhabit deep woods, taking the place of motion, elaborate plumage, pattern and color of birds which have more of a chance to communicate by sight.

I have, as regards the enemies of the tinamou, three times found the feathers or other remains of this species in the jungle, once accompanied by the tracks of a margay cat or ocelot, and again by the pugs of some smaller carnivore; another record is of feathers of a tinamou in juvenile plumage in the stomach of a spectacled owl.

Variegated tinamous are naturally timid birds with a regular system of escape. When flushed in deep jungle they rise with a sudden rush of wings and scale off for twenty or thirty yards. They then come to earth and freeze for ten or fifteen minutes. If, as rarely happens, their landing place is accurately located, either by actually seeing the bird descend or the leaves moving, it is an easy matter to approach quite close and watch the bird for some time. It never moves while under surveillance but stands like a bit of mottled jungle débris with its eye full upon the disturber of its peace. Nine times out of ten, the individual flushed evades all scrutiny or search. Even more than in the great tinamou, the plumage of this species merges with the jungle floor. There is no doubt that the birds unconsciously trust to their protective coloring, both at first in permitting a close approach and in freezing after the escape dash. When one is crashing through dense undergrowth, the birds escape by creeping silently to one side, as I have now and then observed when crouching and watching the progress of one of my party near-by.

Once I saw a bird collide with a tree-trunk and fall stunned, although it ultimately recovered. But I believe that such accidents, due to imperfect steering ability, occur more frequently with the large tinamou than with either of the small ones.

These solitary birds seem to have no especial association with any other creatures of the jungle; more than once I have seen them stop feeding and look up in alarm at the warning rattle of an ant-bird which had discovered me, but this recognition of the quality of alarm in other birds’ notes is common to most of the jungle fraternity.

Small berries or fruits form almost the whole vegetable diet, many cherry-like with round pits, wild plums with oblong stones, hard acorn-like seeds and occasionally fleshy fruits without pits or seeds. All the food is procured on the ground, and the birds in company with agoutis have favorite berry trees, under which, at the season of falling fruit, they may be found evening after evening.

They are as solitary in their roosting as in other ways; they roost on the ground, or, as in two cases at least, on fallen logs a few inches up. Usually the choice of place is deep within a tangle of lianas and vines, from which the bird could not possibly take immediate flight. I have kept close watch on a bird, which eventually proved to be a female, through a brief period of intensive vocal courtship, and neither then nor afterwards did the tinamou fail each night to roost by herself in her solitary tangle.

There are only three months during which I have no record of breeding and these would undoubtedly be filled up if I had more thorough knowledge of the field under observation. The calling of the females during every month would indicate that there is no absolute cessation of breeding, as there is in the case of the large Tinamus. The males of these tinamous take full charge of the single egg and the subsequent rearing of the chick, and I have found a male, attended by a three-quarters grown chick, incubating a newly laid egg.

I should not like to make any assertion as to a single male taking charge of more than three eggs in succession, but from two-month-period reawakenings of vocal calling in the vicinity of a single nesting area, and the number of young secured or reported from that place, I am quite sure that three eggs, one after another, were incubated. It is interesting to note that the same female, judging from the break in a preliminary note of its call, in the time under consideration, underwent at least three other periods of song development in an area somewhat to the northward, and although I could never locate a nest or a brooding male there, it is probable that she was courting if not actually laying eggs for another male bird.

In addition to this instance, at the end of March I have secured a male variegated tinamou with one-third of the juvenile plumage still on the body, incubating an egg with a week-old embryo, and twice I have seen half-grown young birds in company with a single adult, presumably the male parent. My earlier experience with these birds indicated the remarkable proportion of sexes of eight males to one female. I now have a much larger series for comparison, and of forty birds secured within the area under observation, thirty-two are males and eight females, a very exact proportion of four to one. This is probably the correct percentage.

Almost all of the usual calling is done by the females, while the more excited vocal courtship is wholly feminine. Only once have I ever heard two birds directly answering each other, and on this same occasion I had my first glimpse of tinamou courtship. The male (presumably) was perched on a fallen log near my hiding place, while an approaching bird (later proven a female) came slowly, by short quick runs, from a bit of open jungle farther west. In the intervals between runs she gave utterance to a veritable ecstasy of calling—the usual dignified, deliberate scale being run and jumbled together in an excited, high-pitched flood of tone. The male answered from time to time with the usual call, quite unexcitedly. With perhaps several months of brooding cares behind him, and more to come, we can hardly blame him for a restrained, philosophical exhibition of emotion. As the female approached, her runs became shorter and more irregular, her body plumage flattened, the head and neck were raised almost straight, and with rapid, mincing steps, her body vibrating with the effort of the continuous notes, she zigzagged toward the calm recipient of her attention. An abominable ant-bird discovered me at this moment, and rattled and screamed his loudest. Both tinamous seemed to perceive me at once, the male slipped off his log, and the female rose in a sharp, twisting spiral and I shot her as she turned, to make certain of the presumed fact that it was indeed the females which did the courting.

A few weeks later I was hidden between two fallen logs waiting for a quadrille bird to return to its nest, when a tinamou walked into view,—jigged, I might have said, for the bird was stiff-legged, and taking little mincing steps which shook her whole body and scuffed up the fallen leaves. It was exactly the tremulous heel-walk of an East Indian dancer when, with motionless body, he moves, or almost floats across the floor with short, rigid, almost imperceptible jerks. The tinamou revolved slowly, and when her tail came around into view I could hardly believe it was the usual dull-hued species. The tail, or rather, the ten, loose-vaned feathers which represent this almost obsolete organ, were upright, thereby pushing up all the elongated feathers of the lower back and rump. Closely applied behind were the under tail-coverts and even the feathers of the flanks, which now, flattened and with much of their surface exposed, proved to be really brilliant in color. With a shaft of sunlight striking them they fairly glowed; the tips of the tail feathers were buffy brown, then came a row of rich chestnut, then two rows of pale creamy buff with semi-circular narrow bands, then a beautiful patch of variegated feathers, white-tipped, with broad black and russet-red bars, and finally the softer, black-banded flank feathers. The wings drooped, the tips nearly touching the ground, the beak pointed upward, and the rich cinamon breast feathers were puffed out.

Three and a half turns did the courting bird make before she pirouetted behind the second log. What followed I did not see. I knew that the least movement on my part would send the bird headlong. My quadrille bird subsequently returned, I learned what I wished about her, and then, stiff from a prolonged squat, I arose painfully. Like a shot, the two tinamous were up and bludgeoned off. Not a sound had they uttered, and after the faint scuffling of leaves which continued for a few moments after the birds disappeared, I had no knowledge that any tinamous remained in the vicinity.

The proportion of the sexes makes it almost certain that these birds are polyandrous, although judging by the slender spatial and temporal bond between them, promiscuous would probably be the more appropriate term. The lack of spurs and the insistence of vocality indicates that courtship and rivalry are carried on in ladylike fashion.

Of six nests found within the quarter mile of jungle under observation, three were in dry, moderately flat jungle, two in somewhat swampy places, and one on a trail half-way up the slope of a low hill. They are apparently chosen without any thought of escape, for in three instances when the bird got up, it either struck against intervening lianas, or had some difficulty in getting away clear. There is little doubt but that the site is chosen by the male; the hen tinamou sticks too closely to her calling place, her feeding and roosting areas to do more than court the male and lay her single egg. Once I was sure of a second site being near a former one. I took an egg in a damp low bit of jungle and a week later flushed the bird from a new, well-formed, but as yet eggless hollow eight feet distant from the first. He did not, however, return after this second alarm.

No attempt is made to form a nest. Attracted by some unknown choice, a spot is selected, and is made into a home literally by squatting. If leaves and twigs and other jungle litter are beneath the breast of the bird, they are pressed down and form the sole lining; if not, the mold alone receives the pressure and is gradually rounded into a shallow form.

A single egg is laid at one time and incubated. There is little variation in the color, the surface showing an exquisitely delicate tint which is but poorly expressed in our English term of light purple-vinaceous. There are sometimes zones of lighter tint about the larger or smaller end, due to some physiological cause in the lower portion of the oviduct. I consider the color of Crypturus eggs as distinctly protective, much more so than those of Tinamus, whose turquoise sheen is readily seen against the jungle débris. As such it is at least one ameliorative factor in the risk of the small number, and the danger of the continuously breeding male bird. The birds always sit close however, and only when almost stepped on do they boom up and away. Many an egg would go undetected if, instead, the sitting tinamou would creep stealthily off at the first hint of danger. The gloss of the egg is not quite as high as in Tinamus, but it is still far ahead of any other bird’s egg with which I am familiar,—one of the most beautiful shells in the world.

Out of the observation area I have known three eggs of the variegated tinamou to disappear suddenly long before incubation was completed, but only in one case do I know the cause, when a herd of peccaries trod heavily over the nest and all the neighborhood, a few fragments of yolk-stained shell showing how a single crunch had provided some wild pig with a delicious mouthful.

Incubation lasts about twenty-one days, and I have two notes, one of my own and the other by an assistant, of nests being deserted twelve hours and twenty-four hours after hatching. The parent therefore has at least the precocity of his offspring to lighten his labors. We have secured two young birds of about two and five weeks respectively, feeding by themselves at a distance from the parent, so the precocity extends to the independent juvenile life, thus allowing the male to take up, unhampered, a new round of domestic duties.

The position of the chick in the egg is very obviously an adaptation to facilitate shell-breaking. The neck and head are folded close to the breast and abdomen, while the right leg is raised far forward and sideways until the beak rests directly on the under side of the flexed tarsus. Pressure is thus brought to bear on the shell not only by movements of the head but the slightest effort at extension of the foot and leg automatically forces the beak in general and the egg-tooth in particular against the inner wall of the egg-shell.

On June 9, 1922, a single egg of the variegated tinamou was taken from a nest on the ground in the jungle. It was light purple-vinaceous with the usual highly polished sheen, and as well as I could determine through the dense pigmentation, the embryo was five or six days old. The egg was placed in the incubator in a temperature of 100 to 103 degrees and dampened and turned regularly.

Sixteen days later the egg was pipped at ten o’clock in the morning. Within two hours the chick was out, partially dried and creeping about all over the incubator shelf. The down dried well, but not on the back and head until I put in a circular band of flannel, into which the chick crept and by rubbing around as it would under its parent’s plumage, the dorsal down dried fluffily. There is no doubt that the young bird would never dry well without the constant friction of the old bird’s feathers during the first twelve hours after hatching. This condition of the down is apparently a rather serious thing, for when the down dries flat and matted together, it causes such irritation that the little chick wastes much time and strength in trying to preen the bad places. Even a slight thing like this might very well be a matter of life or death, at a time when every moment of learning to correlate eye and beak is of the utmost importance.

I observed that the banging of the incubator door caused instant fear reaction—the chick squatting at once, but no other observations were made until the following day at ten in the morning when it was taken into the compound in a vivarium.

Placed on the ground the tinamou chick twice showed fear reactions, then pecked of its own accord. I worked with it off and on all day, and at last it took four small pieces of worms. On the whole it was far less apt in learning to calculate distances than Tinamus major of equal age. This was so marked that I believe it to be another example of very delicate balance between necessity and practice. In Tinamus there is a single adult to look after a brood of six to ten, while the solitary Crypturus chick has the whole attention of its parent, so there is far less need for extreme precocity in this case than in the former. With only a single chick to look after, greater care will be taken, and more time devoted to feeding and guiding the offspring. In Tinamus the young are compelled to forage more on their own, having the disadvantage of only a fraction of parental solicitude.

Another characteristic peculiar to this species in comparison with the larger tinamou is its relative silence. The other chicks, or even one by itself, were always cheeping and calling, whereas this one uttered only very low calls and at infrequent intervals. Even these are given only when the bird is quiet and undisturbed, and seem to be more in the nature of content calls then otherwise. It is readily seen that it is important for a covey of chicks to keep in touch with each other by frequent calls, whereas a single chick following its parent could with safety do so in comparative silence.

The Crypturus chick learned the use of its legs and by two o’clock could make its quick, short spurts without falling over at the end. It never walked slowly more than a step or two, but usually after several futile pecks at the bit of worm which I proffered, if it heard a sudden noise, it darted swiftly one or two feet away and squatted flat. I tested it with various sounds and found I could cry out loudly or clap my hands together near it without effect, but the least deep or hollow sound such as striking the glass side of the empty vivarium, caused it to jump and flatten. Its pecking, as in Tinamus, was always forward and downward at the ground, and its constant fault was to strike beyond the object aimed at. The chick was uncomfortable on a white handkerchief and scuttled to bare ground as quickly as possible. It pecked at worms and spiders much more readily on the ground, even when they were of the same color as their surroundings, than when they were laid conspicuously on light bamboo leaves or when held in the forceps.

I tried calls and whistles with no apparent effect, until I imitated the note of Crypturus itself. Like a flash the chick turned in my direction, ran six feet toward me, and crouched beside my foot. I tried it again and again, then summoned the members of my staff to watch. The shrillest whistle brought no response, but the very first note on F natural above middle C, attracted and held the little bird’s attention, and the following notes brought it headlong. After such a reaction it was much more alert and willing to attempt another bit of food, and not only this, but its sense of direction was almost perfect. When I held my face close to the ground and called, the chick ran, not only toward me, but stopped at my mouth, although I had finished calling before it reached me.

This instinctive and perfect reaction to the call of the species, together with its disregard of the call of Tinamus and other terrestrial jungle birds, was wholly unexpected. I have known chicks of other groups to crouch instinctively at the cry of a hawk, or the alarm note of their own or other birds, but to recognize among many other imitations, the exact summons call, was very interesting and threw a new light on the instinct reactions of this very generalized type of bird.

It did not enjoy being in the hot sun, but ran with quick darts toward the shade. Like the other tinamou chicks it never showed the slightest fear of our enormously tall figures stalking about. In fact, if anyone passed while I was attempting to induce it to eat, it invariably rushed off and followed, and had to be brought back and started over again in food interest. Unlike the large Tinamus chicks no shuffling of hands or feet in scratching motions and sounds had any effect.

Like so many of the small creatures I have watched in the laboratory compound, the chick persisted invariably in working toward the east or northeast. Again and again I turned it about and always it changed direction and started back. I place no special significance at present upon this, but present it as an interesting fact as applying to mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and even to armored catfish. When, however, I gave the parent’s call the chick never failed to turn and run toward me regardless of direction.

While it learned to peck and swallow bits of food and quartz with fair accuracy, I could not give it the constant attention and encouragement which it needed, and it died on the third day.

For many years the tinamou was a glorious anticipation—a hope engendered by the accounts of travelers in the tropical wilderness. It is now not only a memory but a stimulation, for when the city presses too closely, when four walls suffocate as well as enclose, when people oppress as well as associate, then I go to the bird house at the Zoological Park and at five o’clock there seldom fails me a sweet, clear staccato of silvery tones. Body and soul, I am back in the Guiana jungle, with the cool night settling down, a distant howler clearing his throat, and a bass chorus of giant tree frogs rumbling across the river. Then the tinamou calls again and the world is reorientated.