The winners in life's race

by Arabella B. Buckley

Wingless birds of New Zealand.

The giant Moa (Palapteryx) and the tiny Apteryx. The Moa is no longer to be found alive.

But these are gone now, and their relations the Emus are fast following them: for however well these flightless birds may flourish on the broad plains and deserts, where only their wild companions are around them, they are sadly at the mercy of man. The proud eagle can fly far beyond the reach of the hunter’s gun; the little lark, if she be only wary enough, may trill out her song in the blue vault above and leave the cruel destroyer far below; but the emu and the cassowary, the rhea and the ostrich, have lost the power to leave the earth; and if it were not that we prize the two last for their feathers, they, too, like their companions, might live to rue the day when they became runners instead of conquerors of the air.

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It is very different, however, with the water-birds, for they have not only kept the power of flight, but have gained the double advantage of also floating safely on the water. Look at our common wild duck. We might have taken him just as well as the sparrow for our type of a bird, and yet while the sparrow leads a land life in the trees, the duck’s home is on the water, and many of his relations live cradled on the open ocean.

See his broad boat-like body which floats without any effort of his; notice how closely it is covered with short thickly-grown feathers, which protect him from the chilly water, while he keeps them well-oiled with his beak, from an oil-gland which all flying birds have at the base of the tail. Watch how he swims, drawing his webbed foot together as he brings it forward, and spreading it like a fan to strike the water as he drives it back. Then, as he feeds, watch him gobbling in the mud and then shaking his head as he throws his beak up in the air. For he, like all ducks and geese, has a set of thin horny plates inside his broad bill, and they sift the mud, while the tender tooth-like edges of his beak and tongue feel out the suitable morsels.

All this time he is a water animal, but when he rises and flies he is also master of the air, for his strong wings carry him stoutly, so that he can migrate from one pool to another; or in winter, when the pools are frozen, to the open sea. He is by no means the best flyer of his family, and yet he is spread over Europe and North America, and even as far east as Japan, while his ocean-loving cousin, the eider-duck, lines her nest and lays her eggs high up in Arctic latitudes, and dives and swims in the open ocean. So too his relations, the wild swans and geese which wander in the lakes and swamps of Lapland, Siberia, and Hudson’s Bay, feeding on water-weeds, worms, and slugs, build their nests in the summer in the far north, and then fly thousands of miles southwards to their winter homes, their strong wings whirring in the air as they go.

Yet these are scarcely as true sea-birds as the divers, the Guillemots and Puffins, the Auks and Grebes, which swim out all round our coasts, and dive deep down to feed on the fish below. How clumsy they are on land and how skilful in the water! You may see numbers of guillemots and puffins in summer on the high cliffs of the north of Scotland, or of Puffin Island in the Menai Straits; the guillemots laying their eggs on the bare ledges, and the puffins in holes which they burrow in the cliffs face; and they sit so doggedly upon their nests, and shuffle and hop along so awkwardly, that men climbing up, or let down by ropes from above, knock them over as they go. But wait till the eggs are hatched, and the little ones have broken out of their shelly prison, each one cracking his shell from inside by means of a little horny knob, which all baby birds have for this purpose at the end of their beak, and which falls off when they are fairly born. Then fathers, mothers, and young ones, able to take care of themselves as soon as hatched, launch out into the open sea in August, and there is a sight of diving and swimming and fishing grand to behold. The awkward legs, placed so far back on their body, now serve as powerful oars and rudders to drive their smooth satiny bodies through the water. Their thin narrow legs cut through the waves like knives, while their short stumpy wings, closely laid against their down-covered bodies, keep them from being chilled, and so do the air-bubbles which are entangled in their short thick feathers, and which give their backs the appearance of being covered with quicksilver when they dive[98] after the fish below.

And then when the winter comes, those which have bred in the north fly and swim southwards to our coasts, where they are joined by the true divers and grebes which have come from the rivers and estuaries, where they have made their nests on some reedy bank or floating upon the water, and lived till their young ones are strong. This is their seafaring time; and whether near the shore, or miles out at sea, they dive and swim and make the ocean their home till spring comes round again.