TAME DIVERS.
When an ideal home for the diving birds is constructed at the Zoo, we may hope to see them sitting in the sunlight on the flat rocks they love, and watch the guillemots and razorbills rearing their young, or swimming on the surface with their offspring sitting on their backs as they do off the cliffs of Freshwater and Flamborough Head. These rock-fowl, unlike the gulls and terns, are more easily tamed, and in a sense domesticated, than any other bird except the parrot. But unlike the parrots, they have so little fear of man in a wild state, that is when quite young, but able to fish for themselves at sea, that two or three days in human company are enough to attach them firmly to their new acquaintances. The tameness of the full-grown young razorbills when engaged in fishing in the narrow waters of the lochs on the west coast of Scotland has been more than once mentioned to the writer; they hardly care to move out of the way of a yacht’s boats, when these are rowing to and from the shore or rowing up the lochs. The young full-grown birds would allow the boats almost to row over them, and when a hand was stretched out to pick them up they would just dive below the keel, and rise as near on the other side. In the Irish Sea they kept so close to a yacht that the spray from the bow, or the parting waves under the stern, seemed often about to break over them. That this was due to a certain confidence in man is partly shown by the behaviour of a young bird which was found by some members of the same ship’s party, swimming by itself in a small lagoon left by the tide off the Norfolk coast. Razorbills are not common near this low shore, and this young bird had probably come in pursuit of a shoal of fish, and been unable to find its companions again. In any case it was quite alone, and in the absence of any of its own kind, made itself one of a bathing party of young people who frequented the part of the beach where it was first seen. It allowed itself to be caught and taken up to the house, where, on the arrival of the elders from a drive, it was found in the stableyard, sitting in the middle of a large preserving-pan which had been turned into a temporary stew-pond for a number of small eels which the children had amused themselves with catching when paddling in the stream the day before. “It has eaten all the fish!” was the first intelligence of the ways of the new arrival; as a fact, there were one or two eels left, at which the razorbill, looking like one who had greatly dined, now and then aimed an apathetic peck. To be carried inland by children, and then, surrounded by a whole family of humans, to catch and eat about twenty live eels in a stew-pan, is good evidence of the confidence which these birds have in man. From that day until its lamented death the bird was as much a member of the family as the fox-terrier or the cats. Next day it was carried down to the beach, and placed on the wet sand by the breakers. It waddled down to the water, took a swim round, and came back to the shore. This happened twice or thrice, and as it showed no disposition to return to the sea it was carried back once more to the house. Every day the bird was taken down to the beach and set free, while the whole party bathed from tents set on the shore. It would swim out sometimes as far as a quarter of a mile, until it was a mere black speck on the water. Then, just as it seemed about to leave its friends for good, the black speck turned into a white one as the bird turned its white breast towards the shore. It would swim steadily towards the bathing-tent, scramble out of the water, and walk up to the shingle bank on which the party were lying enjoying the sun after their bathe. The razorbill, having completely identified itself with the habits of its hosts would do the same, opening its wings and sunning itself beside them. One rather rough day, with a choppy sea, it was carried some way down the shore by a current, and landed at a considerable distance from its usual point; but it succeeded in landing at a place opposite to where some of the party were waiting for it. During these excursions it dived and fished in the small lagoons left by the tide, and the provision of a further supply was of course a delightful occupation to the children, to whom the razorbill’s unfailing appetite was a valid reason for being on the shore and in the water at all hours. This curious alliance lasted for some nine or ten days, when the bird was choked by its food in a rather odd way. One of the children was holding in one hand a flat-fish, which was about to be cut up into pieces of a size more suited to the size of the razorbill’s throat. The bird was sitting on her other hand at the time, and reaching across seized the fish by the head, jerked it from her hand, and swallowed it. But though not choked at the time, it never recovered the effects of its surfeit of flounder, and died greatly lamented on the following day.
The penguin can be tamed almost as easily, or rather are often tame from the first. The keeper of the diving birds, like many others at the Zoological Gardens, is an East Anglian, coming from one of the most secluded and least aquatic districts of Central Suffolk. But the instinct for the care of animals, from cart-horses down to geese and game-bantams, is innate in the intelligent Suffolk and Norfolk countryman; and Waterman usually has at least one penguin which is almost as companionable as a child. Prince, a rock-hopper penguin from New Zealand, was perhaps the most amusing and interesting of these amphibious pets. It was the owner of a smart red flannel jacket with yellow facings, which had been presented to it by an admirer, and dressed in this the penguin would hop, hop, hop, in the most ludicrous and serious fashion, after its keeper, or make an excursion on to the lawn outside, where the flight of the sparrows seemed a constant source of interest to this wingless bird. Poor Prince died a victim to influenza, and it will be long before his place is taken by a more friendly or amusing creature.
THE QUEST FOR THE WILD HORSE.
The sustaining hope of the discoverer of the unknown is seldom wholly vague or visionary. No man, as a rule, breaks into a new world by accident or hap-hazard. New worlds, or lands, or men, or beasts, have lived in the imagination, and been foreshadowed and foretold by a hundred minute and subtle inductions, grouping themselves round the central idea in minds so set on finding what they felt was to be found, that in the end their quest was gained, and they have been able to tell the world that what they felt must exist, did exist, and was found. Even though the nominal object of his search be prosaic and matter-of-fact, the explorer generally cherishes some dear ideal, some side-issue, some pet project of his own in the realm of discovery, which his efforts shall bring to light, and which will realize some reasoned result of his own sagacity and foresight. When Pythias, the first navigator of the Northern seas, was sent on a “commercial mission” by the colonists of Marseilles to find the tin-islands, he performed the practical part of his mission with all good faith and diligence; but to him, the man of science, the mathematician and astronomer, the bare discovery of new tribes of barbarians, new islands, and half-frozen seas, could have brought no such nights of triumph as that on which he tracked the Sun to his lair behind the Lapland mountain, and saw the brilliant creature slip again from his cavern, after his brief but necessary repose. Such must have been the triumph of Columbus when he fancied that he identified on the shores of America the plants and streams of India and Cathay; and such, in some sense, the feelings of Prejvalski, the latest traveller to seek the Eastern limits of the Old World through new and untried paths, when he realized his hope of discovering in the deserts of Mongolia the wild camel and the wild horse.
The experiences of this Russian soldier when he had penetrated into the regions behind the plateau of Tibet to the mysterious lake of Koko-Nor, lying 10,000 ft. above the sea, are more in the spirit and setting of the journals of Columbus than any tale of travel of modern times. The lake, blue as a sapphire, lay in a setting of dull salt sand, with an encircling rim of snowy mountains. Outside and beyond the mountains lay on one side the forbidden land of China; on another, Tibet, with its frozen and stereo-typed government of a priestly caste; and on the west, the broken tribes of Eastern Turkestan. As he passed towards the great Desert of Gobi, which divides the dwindling population on one side of the mountains from the decaying civilization on the other, he found himself almost alone among the primitive animals and birds of the centre of the Old World; and as the old Greeks imagined, and as Darwin found in Patagonia, and voyagers at either Pole, that at the ends of the world Nature was simplified, with fewer and more primitive forms, so, in the “centre of the world,” Prejvalski found that in these remote and solitary regions he was face to face with some of the early and original types of those animals which man enslaved and turned to his own uses, at such a distance of time that the original types were believed to have perished for ever. The hope of discovering the “undescended dark original” of some of our domesticated animals, especially of those ancient servants of Eastern mankind, the camel and the horse, seems to have been ever present to the mind of Prejvalski, and to have affected his imagination as the vision of the shining walls of El Dorado did the old adventurers, or the hope of finding the mother-rock of the gold, the gold-seekers of our day. From the sapphire lake of Koko-Nor he pushed towards the North-West across the plain of Tsaidam, a strange, unfinished region, once the bed of a huge lake, a waste of sand, salt-impregnated clay, and marshes, through clouds of mosquitoes and gadflies, towards another lake, called Lob-Nor, lying in an extension of the great Desert of Gobi. He had marked how, as he journeyed across Asia westward, all the elements of Nature grew more simple and severe, and that as the more complex landscape resolved itself into waterless mountains, salt lakes, and rude vegetation, so the types of animal life grew constantly more primitive. He had left behind him the semi-wild horses of the Don and Southern Russia, and seen the still wilder ponies of the Mongols, “under the average height, with thick necks, large heads, thick legs, and long, shaggy coats.” The camels of the Koko-Nor were smaller and rougher than those further West, and he rejoiced to think that he must now be approaching the original home of the wild camel, and even of the wild horse. “Such a journey,” he wrote, “must finally set at rest the question of the existence of wild camels and wild horses; the people have repeatedly told me of both, and described them fully.” The wild camels were said to live in North-West Tsaidam, and to have smaller humps and more pointed muzzles than the tame camels, and grey hair. They were hunted for food, and were exceedingly fleet, wary, and suspicious of man. These stories of the Mongols were found to be correct. Several skins of the wild camel were brought to the traveller, and he was at last rewarded by a sight of one of them, though the distance was too great to enable him to shoot it or compare it with the tame animals. Later, however, some have been taken alive, and the existence of the wild camel in the Desert of Gobi may be taken as established.[[3]]
[3]. The skins and skeletons of the wild camel are now on view at the Natural History Museum.
The Mongol accounts of the wild horses, though equally positive, were less satisfactory. They were certain that there did exist wild horses in the same districts as the wild camels; and they were also certain that these were distinct from the horselike kiang, the wild ass of Eastern Turkestan and Mongolia. The kiangs do, in fact, resemble a Mongol horse in many points. They have the same heavy head, square shoulder, chestnut colour, and short ears; but they differ in having their lower parts almost white, and a true ass’s tail. They neigh, but also bray, and, when going at full speed, have the characteristic appearance of an ass with “great ugly head stretched out straight before, and scanty tail straight behind,” as Prejvalski says. They are, in fact, probably only a variety of the wild ass of Persia and Western Turkestan. But the Mongol accounts of the wild horse were quite inconsistent with the description of the kiangs. “The wild horses,” they said, “were numerous near Lob-Nor, but were so shy that when frightened they continued their flight for days. They were of a uniform bay [? dun] colour, with black tails, and manes sweeping the ground; and were never hunted because they were too difficult of approach.” Prejvalski obtained the skin of one of these wild horses; but the evidence so obtained did not bear out the account given by the Mongols, who seem to have fallen into the usual error of imagining that in the “wild horse” they would find the species in a condition of original and primitive perfection. Of course nothing could be more contrary to probabilities. “Wild” animals, compared with domesticated descendants of the same species, occupy much the same position as “wild” plants do to their descendants in the garden; and the absence of fine legs and a flowing mane in the Equus Prejvalskii made the place assigned to it as the ancestor of the modern horse all the more probable. Now the news comes that the wild horse of Prejvalski has been seen, hunted, and captured by two Russian travellers, the brothers Grum-Grizimailo, and that four specimens have been brought to the Zoological Gardens of St. Petersburg from their Central Asian home. These creatures are said to correspond in all respects with the skin obtained by Prejvalski, and to represent the ancestors of all our modern horses. From a picture of the animal which appeared in the Graphic, there seems some reason to doubt whether they may not, after all, be only a variety of the kiang, or wild ass of Turkestan. They have the ass’s hog-mane, and a tail in which the long hairs, though not confined to the tip, do not begin to grow until some inches from the root. Neither has the animal any forelock. On the other hand, the ears are short, not long, as in all the ass tribe, and the square shoulder is not more characteristic of the asses than of all neglected breeds of horses. Moreover, it is a commonplace in natural history, that the primitive characteristics are shown in the young; and the thin tail, short neck, and head set on so as to make an angle with the throat instead of a curve, are as characteristic of a young colt as of the Equus Prejvalskii. But, apart from all external differences between the ass and the horse, lies the inexplicable fact that the latter adapts itself to changed conditions in almost all climates, while the former does not. Under human care and selection, the horse varies so rapidly, that we meet with all extremes, from the dray-horse to the Shetland, and all colours from black to white. But the ass in the last five thousand years has varied little. It will not thrive except in hot climates, and centuries of careful breeding have not caused it to change colour further than from grey to white,[[4]] and have done little to make it a pleasant animal to ride, or big enough for heavy draught. These facts give a starting-point from which we may judge whether or not the Equus Prejvalskii is of the true stock. Let those recently brought to Russia be made the nucleus of a herd, and the variations of successive generations be noted. Then if they are true horses, they will vary first in colour, then in shape, and human selection ought to be able to guide the varieties towards different types. If, on the other hand, they be asses, they will refuse to vary, and remain true to the type of the steppes of Dsungaria.
[4]. There are black donkeys, but most appear to be instances of “melanism” rather than of colour gradation.