The American blue jay, a most brilliant creature, with lines of emerald and turquoise, is an admirable mimic of many sounds, even of the human voice. Wilson writes of one “which had all the tricks and loquacity of a parrot; pilfered all it could conveniently carry off, answered to its name with great sociability when called upon, and could articulate a number of words pretty distinctly.” Our English jays can also talk, and magpies, especially if kept in good health and spirits by being allowed partial freedom, soon pick up words. Jackdaws and the American crow can also be made to talk. But in all the crow tribe, except the piping crow, the reproduction of human speech seems to be more a trick of mimicry than an effort to acquire a substitute for song. Parrots, mynahs, and some cockatoos take infinite pains to learn correctly and increase their stock of phrases. But the magpie or jay learns what is easy, and takes no further trouble. Even the raven seldom has many words at command, though, owing to its deep, resonant voice and imposing size, it attracts more attention than a chattering jay.
The raven is the largest creature, except man, that can “talk,” and fancy and superstition have naturally exaggerated its powers. Still the speech of the raven has a depth and solemnity which that of no other bird possesses, and whether in boding utterances, like those attributed to the raven in Barnaby Rudge, or by Edgar Allen Poe, or in plain business, like the raven in Guildford Street, which used to say “Ostler, here’s a gentleman,” when a customer arrived, its powers are generally marked and recorded. A fine bird, belonging to a “statesman” in Northumberland, used to say “Poor old Ralph,” or call the collie dog in the exact tones used by its master. “It’s my very own voice,” its owner used to say, laughing, as the dog came running in from the garden. But the crow tribe, though as clever as some parrots, are not so easily domesticated, and their beaks and tongues are less well suited for the musical sounds of human speech. Most of the parrots, and some cockatoos and macaws, have both the mental and physical gifts necessary to make them excel in talking. Parrots of all classes have fleshy tongues, moistened with saliva, and the arched beak provides a substitute for our palate and teeth. They have also wide nostrils, and their natural voices are loud enough and strong enough to equal the volume of human speech. In disposition they are highly imitative. Cockatoos are almost like monkeys in mimicking men. For instance, if you bow to them, they will make elaborate bows. If you put your head on one side, they will often do so too. But with many parrots the desire to learn new sounds is not, we think, a mere trick of mimicry, but the desire to possess a song—an accomplishment with which to please, identical in kind with the motive which prompts the young of singing-birds to learn their parents’ notes, or, in the case of the canary, to learn and improve upon a song, not their own, which they have transmitted to their posterity.
The following account of the development of the talking power in a young parrot of which we have seen much lately, is, we submit, a strong confirmation of this view. Our informant is a lady whose sympathies are by no means limited to parrots, as the context will show, and her observations are wholly reliable. “We bought ‘Barry,’” she writes, “when he was quite young before his feathers were fully grown; and we had him about a year before he began to talk. Then he began to make very odd noises, as if he were trying to say words, but could not quite do it. Now he constantly learns new words and sentences, and early in the morning I hear him practising them over to himself, exactly as our babies used to do in the early morning hours in bed. If he improves as much in the next ten years as he has in the last, he should be able to recite a poem if we teach him.” There is no reason why a parrot should not continue to increase his stock of phrases as he grows older, if the supposition that he looks upon it as an accomplishment for which he is in some way the better is correct. The butcher-bird, for instance, and the sedge-warbler do not rest satisfied with learning their own notes, but often learn and reproduce the notes of other birds in great perfection. The mockingbird, which, like the sedge-warbler, has a fine song of its own, does the same. But the parrot has an advantage in being very long-lived and constantly in human company. The young parrot mentioned before gave an excellent instance of the association in its mind of words with things. Before it could talk, it was friendly with a kitten which used to enter its cage. This kitten was sent away, and for a year there was not another in the house. Then a grey Persian kitten was bought, and when introduced to the parrot was at once addressed as “Kitty,” a word he had hardly heard since the departure of the other. The correctness of parrots’ imitation, the result, no doubt, of their careful practice, is remarkable. A lady of the Dutch Court, visiting the palace in the wood at the Hague soon after the death of the late Queen of Holland, was startled by hearing the Queen’s voice exactly reproduced. It was a white cockatoo that had been a great pet of hers, which was in a corner of the room.
Parrots have no exclusive liking for the English language. They learn German, French, and Dutch quite easily. Another parrot at the Hague went through part of the Lord’s Prayer in Dutch at an afternoon party, with other fragments of its mistress’s devotions, which it had heard when in her room. All small white and sulphur cockatoos seem to say, “Küpper crou” when they want their heads scratched. We have translated it, “Scratch a poll;” but it is probably pure parrot language. Go up to any cockatoo and say this to him, at the same time holding the hand well above his head, and he will probably answer, and gradually lower his head and crest to allow you to gently ruffle the feathers the wrong way. Macaws do not seem to understand cockatoo language; but the grey parrots often use much the same sound. It seems to be a call-note expressing their willingness to make friends and be petted.
“Is the talking of birds due to mental or physical causes?” is a question often asked. In the first place, no doubt, it is due to the disposition of the bird. Some parrots and cockatoos never learn to talk, though their organs of speech differ in no way from those of others that do. They seem to be without the imitative bias, like the hawks which have curved beaks and thick tongues, but are equally silent. But where the disposition to mimic is present, physical causes limit or widen the bird’s powers. Parrots and the crow tribe are both imitative, but the parrots’ beaks and tongues are more suited for imitating human speech, just as the raven, with his high-arched beak and big throat excels the jay. Other birds with still less suitable organs, such as the sedge-warbler, though excellent mimics, cannot reproduce human speech at all. There seems no reason why parrots, if they would breed in confinement, should not teach their accomplishments to their young ones, as the canaries have done theirs. Perhaps in time the experiment may be made.
ELEPHANT LIFE IN ENGLAND
The strangely artificial revival of elephant life in the countries north of the Mediterranean, and in districts where the bones of the fossil species show that they once lived and flourished naturally, is yearly more remarkable. The European elephant herd in the present year numbers one hundred and thirteen, or about thirty less than the annual catch in the keddahs of the Indian Government. Their health seems quite independent of climate, to judge from the countries in which they are kept, often with very rough provision against the chances and changes of weather. Russia owns eighteen, Sweden and Norway four, France and Belgium ten each, seven of which are in the great travelling menagerie of the Lockharts, which migrates to and fro across the Franco-Belgian frontier; Germany has thirty-four, and England about the same number; Holland has eight, and Italy two.
The British stock is at present supplied almost entirely from Burmah. There only in the East elephants are bred in a half-wild state and not caught in the heddahs. They are brought over to Europe when quite young, and are now so cheap that any one who pleases may become the owner of a sober, well-behaved little elephant from four to five feet high, delivered at the docks, for from £105 to £120, or not more than the average price paid for first-class shire-horses. Their subsequent development depends mainly upon their daily treatment. In those which spend their lives at ease in the elephant palaces at the Zoological Gardens the rate of growth is surprising, and they soon develop into magnificent animals, not surpassed in size by the finest creatures in the stables of Indian rajahs. The pair of Indian elephants now in the Gardens are already nine feet and ten feet high at the shoulder respectively, though when they reached the Gardens in 1876 they were hardly bigger than a Shetland pony. But the greater number of English elephants spend their time as hard-working members of the large circuses and travelling menageries, and lead a wandering, homeless life, in curious contrast to the comfort which surrounds the fortunate inmates of the gardens of learned societies. Their deliberate movements mask a wakeful self-possession which hardly ever deserts them, and whether marching by the cornfields on the open downs, or through the streets of a manufacturing town, the elephant never misses a chance of levying contributions of food on the road. “Where didst thou teach thy elephant that trick?” says Petersen Sahib, in Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s charming tale of the elephant dance, when the animal holds the mahout’s son aloft in its trunk. “Was it to help thee to steal green corn from the roof when the ears are put out to dry?” “Not green corn, Protector of the Poor-melons,” says little Toomai.
In England the elephant is not an accomplice, but helps himself freely in the back streets of the towns, up which he is usually taken, to avoid difficulties with the urban police. He has ever a sharp eye for an open window or door, and many a batch of new loaves smoking on the dresser or bunch of vegetables intended for the mid-day dinner, is extracted through the window, before the good woman, who is admiring the procession at the door, has time to rush back to the rescue. At Sanger’s repository last year a fine gilded car came back for repairs. The body of the car had been filled with loaves of bread on Saturday night and then locked up. An elephant smelt the bread, and not being able to open the lock, turned the whole car over to see if it would open in that way, to the serious damage of the ornamental upper works. The clever picture of the “Disputed Toll,” by Charlton Adams, in which an elephant is painted breaking open a turnpike-gate, records an amusing incident of elephant travel which occurred many years ago outside the pretty little town of Sidmouth in South Devon. Van Ambrugh’s show was expected, and the turnpike keeper locked the gate and demanded toll, not only for the cars but for the animals. The elephant was leading the way, and after much fruitless argument, its keeper, slipping through the turnstile for foot-passengers, said to the elephant, “Come along, Fido,” and the animal at once lifted the gate off its hinges and walked through. Cool and sagacious on the march, they seem also thoroughly to enjoy the tinsel and trappings, the music of the brass band, the lights, noise, and crowd of an evening show. Perhaps there is something in this which recalls to them memories of the “gorgeous East.” Take for instance the annual “World’s Fair” at the Agricultural Hall, which a Hindoo would describe as a very fine tumasha, and in which no one but an Oriental, a British working-man, or an elephant, could keep his brains clear for half-an-hour. Two large steam “round-abouts” at either end of the hall, grinding a different tune with an engine of ten-horse power, form only a portion of the bewildering attractions of this Palace of Delight. Opposite each of these machines, at the time of the writer’s last visit, was stalled a small Indian elephant, cool, collected, and sagacious, his business mind wholly intent on raising contributions from the public. One occupied a compartment in the centre of what was magnificently described as the “Mammoth Wild Animal Congregation.” He was a very little mammoth, not five feet high, black and bristly, supported on one side by a Persian goat and a kangaroo, and on the other by a couple of llamas. In front stood a stall of cakes, and to every visitor who came past the elephant pointed out the biscuit pile, his trunk maintaining a line true as the needle to the Pole, while his head and eye followed the movements of the passer-by. When quite neglected and alone, he tried to attract attention by dancing a kind of double-shuffle to the tune of the “round-about.”