But if Yucatan has to share her cardinal bird with the more southern States of America, she can claim to have all to herself, and the Central American countries neighbouring her, perhaps one of the most beautiful birds in the world, the Meleagris ocellata, the ocellated turkey, so called in allusion to the ocelli or eyes, much like those of a peacock, marking its plumage, which is of blue, brown, and gold. Its bare head is a deep blue studded with caruncles of an orange colour, and it has no ugly dewlap as has the common turkey, than which it is much smaller. This wonderful bird is fairly common in Yucatan, but is very shy and keeps to the woods. A bird far more common, and a vivid contrast in the sobriety of its feathering to this glorious fowl, is a species of guan (Ortalis vetula maccalli), known in Spanish America as the chachalaca in allusion to its astoundingly loud cry. They are about the size of a hen pheasant, the wings and body of a brown shading to a greeny grey with a lighter grey-brown belly. They may be said to be the great game birds of Yucatan as far as eating goes, and their flesh tastes much like pheasant. They are pretty birds until they speak, and one often sees them tame in the Indian villages. Of the same family of gallinaceous birds (Cracidæ) to which the chachalaca belongs, the curassows and hoccos found in Yucatan are members. Both the red curassow and the globose curassow are fairly common; the natives call them kambūl. Another type of curassow is the latter-mentioned hocco, a name said to be a native word in Guiana. This bird we shot on the east coast. It is a magnificent creature as big as a large turkey, feathered in gold and brown, its head crested. Partridge and quail are said to be plentiful, but we did not come across them.
One of the commonest yet one of the prettiest birds in the Peninsula is a jay (Cyanocitta yucatanica) which goes about in small flocks. They are about the size of a large blackbird, but with a longer tail. The head and the belly are black and the back, wings, and tail are of a beautiful electric blue. The legs are yellow, and, like the English blackbird, the male has a yellow beak and the female a black one. The Mayans call them tchel and are always keen to kill them, for they are very destructive to the crops; but nothing could well exceed the beauty of a dozen of them darting from treetop to treetop in the early morning sunshine.
Of hawks there are many species. One large black one found in Cozumel is rare, but a common one which we specially noticed in that island is a beautifully marked bird of black and brown which is said to belong to the same division of hawks as the hobby-falcon of Europe. It is about a foot long with a fairly long tail. The curious point about it was its astounding boldness. It would sit on a tree a few yards ahead of you, and when you came up and stood beneath it, refuse to be scared away. On the eastern beach of Cozumel one of these birds settled on a fallen tree near us, and refused to go although, of course without any desire to actually hurt it, we pelted it with small pebbles. This hawk has a curiously insistent and weirdly plaintive cry, with which the woods of Cozumel echo all day. We never saw it actually strike at small birds, and certainly its warning scream was calculated to give the most careless finch a good chance of escape.
Of owls there was one of the large wood variety, and there are said to be two peculiar to the country, neither of them much more than six inches long, of a generally tawny colour and lighter on the bellies. In parrots Yucatan is rich, the finest being the white-crowned parrot, its plumage being green, blue, red, white, and yellow. The red-and-blue macaw is known, though rare; but the woods are everywhere full of the green parrot or parakeet, dainty little creatures who usually go about in pairs, but sometimes are seen flocking and are for ever screaming and chattering as they fly.
You see the common American kingfisher, some twelve inches long with plumage of blue, white, spotted and barred, the head crested, sitting sometimes above the cenotes. Of woodpeckers there are several varieties, the commonest appearing to be the red-headed or crested woodpecker. If you have luck (we did not have it), you can see in the Yucatecan woodland the wonderful Trogon resplendens, scientifically associated with the family of woodpeckers. There are some fifty species of Trogons, but the most remarkable is the Yucatecan one, the Quetzal, a sacred bird in Central America, the plumage of which is a gorgeous golden green, its tail being in the male nearly three feet long, though the bird is about the size of a pigeon. This Trogon in the sheen of its plumage almost rivals the beauty of the humming-birds. Of the latter there are many to be seen in Yucatan, but it really needs a poet to describe these winged jewels of the woodland. As we sat on the verandah at Chichen prosaically eating breakfast, amid the pink San Diego blossoms which clustered round the house was a perpetual whirr of
"Pinions of pale green, melting to black
By bronze and russet passages."
One really is obliged to fall back upon quotation in speaking of these tiny creatures, which seem veritably "plumaged from rainbows."
We have spoken of the sleek little piches which chattered in the trees of the plaza at Vera Cruz. There were any number of these in Yucatan, and a much larger black bird, probably akin, infesting gardens and distinguished by the most liquid and mellifluous note it is possible to imagine. Swallows, too, though they seemed somewhat larger than the ordinary swallow, were common everywhere; while a bird, which we think belonged to the cuckoo family, often startled us when at work on the ruins by a reiterated whistle which sounded like mocking laughter dying away in a choking spasm of mirth.
The coasts of the Peninsula are rich with seafowl, so many and so varied that it would need a skilled ornithologist and many pages to chronicle them accurately. There are duck of all kinds, mallard, teal, widgeon; wild geese, bitterns, herons, snipe, sandpipers, plovers, curlews, and gulls galore. The bays and inlets are beautified by the stately ibis, snowy white or slate-grey. Flamingoes are rarer; and indeed a flamingo standing is not an object of beauty, for he is altogether too long in the legs. Moreover his beautiful pink plumage is seen at its best when he is in flight. As hideous as they are common are the brown pelicans. In their way they are as detestable as the zopilotes which we were at pains to describe in our first chapter, though their habits are not so filthy.
We really have no space to say much of the fishes (pelicans naturally suggest fishiness); but we ought to say that the brightest jewel in the fishy crown of the Gulf of Mexico, at least from the gastronomic point of view, is that fish which rejoices in the name of Red Snapper. At all times and in all places you can get it. It appears to have no close season, and whether in the smart restaurants of Mexico or Merida or in the little coast cabins of the fishing Indians, you eat it, or try to till nauseated. The Indians are clever fishermen, and catch with both hook and net, but their most picturesque method is spearing. They paddle their dug-out into shallow waters, stand on the end of the canoe, and thrust a spear at the fish. This spear has a detachable point to which a cord is fastened. They scarcely ever miss, and the struggling prey is hauled in by the string. We saw a man land half a dozen big fish in little more than as many minutes. The natives of Chiapas shoot the fish from the end of the canoe with bow and arrow.