In Wildest Africa, Vol. 1

by C. G. Schillings

The Queen of England has lately expressed the wish that no lady shall come into her presence wearing osprey plumes in her hat. This act of hers should be most heartily welcomed, for the bird world is being destroyed in a way of which only a few experts have any idea. If our ladies only knew that whole species of birds have become extinct, thanks to the fashion of wearing hats trimmed with birds’ feathers, doubtless they would no longer pay allegiance to this destructive fashion. The massacre of birds is carried on in some such way as this. The leading firms agree to make this or that bird fashionable. It is thus that the death-sentence of many rare species of birds is pronounced. The traders scattered all over the world give the hunters who engage in this kind of business directions, for instance, to bring in osprey feathers. And how are they obtained? The royal heron, a timid and beautiful bird, is not easy to stalk. But the businesslike hunter knows what to do. He simply kills the herons in thousands and thousands at their nesting-places. Love for its offspring brings the beautiful creature within range of the gun-barrel of the lurking hunter, who kills thousands of the birds in cold blood when they are gathered together in the breeding season. Countless thousands must be killed, countless thousands more of young helpless nestlings, bereft of the parent birds, must starve to death before enough of these little plumes has been collected to make a load heavy enough to be put on the bearers’ shoulders. And now the dealers of the whole civilised world lay in a stock, so that full provision may be made for a form of fashion-mania that may probably last only a few months. Even in the farthest swamps of America, in the lands beyond the Caspian, and wherever the royal heron breeds, one can follow the bird hunter, and see him at his horrible and murderous work. The end is everlasting silence. A rare species is soon utterly destroyed. In the last century alone about two dozen species of birds became extinct. And in these days nearly a dozen more species of birds are threatened with extinction! According to the Reports of the Smithsonian Institute this is notably the case in America with regard to quite as many species. The wonderful birds of paradise are going; the latest “trimming” for the hats of American ladies, these dwellers in remote islands of the Southern Seas are to be threatened in a more serious degree, and probably to a great extent exterminated. Everywhere we have the same lamentable facts! It is certainly high time to interfere effectively. I myself think that the best results would follow from appeal to all noble-minded women.

In Africa I have already observed an example of the disappearance of one species of bird[17]—every European takes a lot of trouble to get possession of some of the much-prized marabou feathers. Now, as long ago as the year 1900, at London, as a member of the International Conference for the Protection of Wild Animals, I did my best to obtain, at least on paper, some measure of protection for the marabou. This bird had not only quite won my heart by its extraordinary sagacity, but for the same reason it was a general favourite even in the times of classical antiquity. My efforts were in vain. And this will mean nothing more or less than the extermination of a large and handsome bird, which is comparatively easy to hunt down, and the rate of increase of which is exceptionally small.

From all these points of view the support of the “League for the Protection of Bird Life in Germany” is to be warmly recommended. In England these reasons have brought about the formation of the “Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire,” which devotes itself to the protection of animal life in general throughout the world-wide British dominions.

XXIX. FELIS LEO, THE LION.

ONE OF CORNWALLIS HARRIS’S SKETCHES, SHOWING HOW HALF A CENTURY AGO NUMBERS OF LIONS WERE TO BE FOUND TOGETHER IN BROAD DAYLIGHT IN SOUTH AFRICA. I HAVE SEEN SIMILAR GATHERINGS IN EAST AFRICA, NOTABLY ON JANUARY 25, 1897. HARRIS’S SKETCH SHOWS THE GREAT DEVELOPMENT OF THE MANE IN THE NOW NEARLY EXTINCT SOUTH AFRICAN LION, A CONTRAST TO THE ALL BUT MANELESS LIONS OF EAST AFRICA.

Let us now follow a little more closely, under the guidance of English writers, the process of the extermination of the South African animal world. This lamentable work was completed very rapidly in the course of only something like a hundred years. From numerous English authorities, as well as from the publications of the Society already named, I have been able to ascertain that the last “blaauwbok” was killed by the Boers in Cape Colony about the year 1800. From extant sketches of this wild animal, it appears that it was a smaller species of the splendid horse-antelopes still to be found in other parts of Africa. During the following seventy-five years the extermination of several other kinds of animals was systematically carried out; and exactly eighty years later the last quagga, a kind of zebra (Equus quagga) was killed by the Boers. In England there is only one single specimen preserved, and that in a very poor condition. It is to be found in the British Museum. A further sacrifice to the advancing Europeans was the giant, wide-mouthed, “white” rhinoceros (Rhinoceros simus, Burch.), a mighty creature, that formerly ranged in thousands over the grassy plains of South Africa. The length of a horn taken from one of them is given as 6 ft. 9 in., English measurement! Even as late as the year 1884, a single trader was able to pile up huge masses, small hills, of these rhinoceros horns by equipping some four hundred tribesmen of the Matabele race with guns and ammunition and sending them out rhinoceros-hunting. Now it is difficult to get even a few specimens of this animal for the museums, and they are almost worth their weight in gold. Information lately obtained seems to indicate that a very small number of these mighty beasts, probably not more than thirty-five in all, are still living their life in the midst of inaccessible swamps in Zululand and Mashonaland, in a district that, on account of its deadly climate, is almost closed to Europeans. However, the Government of Natal has, I am pleased to say, made the killing any animal of this species, without legal permission, a crime to be punished by a fine of £300.

An English officer, Captain (afterwards Sir) William Cornwallis Harris, is an authoritative witness as to the extermination of wild animals in South Africa in 1836, though it must have been going on for a long time before that without any written record. The Boers must have slaughtered hecatombs of wild animals, though up to that date we have no first-hand written evidence on the subject.[18] Their proceedings were precisely of the same character as the events that have occurred in our own day in connection with the destruction of the elephant, the rhinoceros, and other animals throughout Africa. This destruction goes on silently, and only a few men who have a special knowledge of the circumstances bring some information about it to the world at large. The rest keep silence, and mostly have good grounds for so doing.

The descriptions given by Harris, Oswell, Vardon, C. J. Anderson and their contemporaries give some idea of what enormous multitudes of wild creatures then wandered over the plains of South Africa. We are inclined to underestimate the abundance of the fauna of earlier epochs. The process of animal-destruction by the hand of man has been going on from immemorial times. For thousands of years man has been continually pressing the animal world back more and more, and it has had to give way in the unequal struggle. This process has been going on so slowly and so imperceptibly that it is only by the scanty remnants left from earlier times that we can form some estimate of the wealth that has disappeared. These are no empty fancies. All the lonely far-off islands of the world’s seas, the little visited Polar lands, and all the uninhabited steppes and wildernesses give us evidence of this. Not only from the lips of Cornwallis Harris, but also from some of his contemporaries, we have descriptions of the former abundance of wild life in the Cape districts of South Africa. At that time the country was, in the literal sense of the word, covered with countless herds of Cape buffaloes, white-tailed gnus, blessbock, bontebock, zebras, quaggas, hill-zebras, hartebeests, eland-antelopes, horse-antelopes, oryx-antelopes, waterbuck, impallah-antelopes, springbocks, and ostriches. Herds of hundreds of elephants were to be seen. Every marsh, every river-bed, was literally overcrowded with hippopotami. All other kinds of animals that are now so scarce, such as the large and handsome kudu, and all the different kinds of small wild animals, were to be met with in vast numbers. Although since the year 1652 South Africa had been to a continually increasing extent occupied by the Boers, all these wonderful things had managed to survive in rich profusion up to the moment when, about a hundred years ago, the great war of extermination began. Various causes contributed to bring this about: the increasing numbers of the settlers, their continual penetration farther and farther into the interior, and, above all things, the improvement of firearms.

The natives, although very numerous in South Africa, had, as happens everywhere, left the animal life of the country in its abundance to the Europeans, who were overrunning the land in increasing numbers. It was reserved for these to bring the war of extermination to an end in a short time. Truly a melancholy spectacle!