Trochilus Alexandri (Black-throated Hummingbird).—Male: tails lightly forked, the chin and upper part of the throat velvety black without metallic reflections, which are confined to the posterior border of the black, and are violet, changing to steel-blue. Length, 3·30 inches. Female, without the metallic markings; tail-feathers tipped with white. Both have the same northern and southern range as Selasphorus rufus.
Urotrichus Gibsii, Baird (Western slope of Cascade Mountains); Urotrichus Talpoides, Temminck.—This singular little animal, that appears to be an intermediate link between the shrew and the mole, at present is only known as an inhabitant of two parts of the world, widely removed from each other—the one spot being the western slope of the Cascade Mountains, in North-west America, the other Japan. There are, as far as I know, but two specimens extant from the Cascade Mountains—one in the Smithsonian Museum at Washington, the other a very fine specimen that I have recently brought home, and now in the British Museum.[5] I have carefully compared the Japanese gentleman with his brother from the Western wilds, and can find no difference whatever, either generically or specifically. In size, colour, shape, and anatomical structure they are precisely alike.
The habits of the little fellow from Japan I know nothing about, but with my friend from the North-west I am much more familiar; and I shall endeavour to introduce him to you as lifelike as I can, from what I have jotted down in my notebook. First, then, the Urotrichus is an insectivorous mammal, its size that of a large shrew, about two-and-a-quarter inches in length, exclusive of tail, which is about an inch and a half. This tail is covered thickly with long hairs, which at the tip end in a tuft like a fine camel’s-hair pencil, and from this hairy tail it gets the name, Urotrichus.
THE UROTRICHUS
(Urotrichus Gibsii).
Its colour is bluish-black when alive, but in the dried specimens changes to sooty-brown. The hair is lustrous, and, where it reflects the light, has a hoary appearance, and, as with the mole, it can be smoothed in either direction; this is a wise and admirable arrangement, as it enables the animal to back through its underground roads, as well as to go through them head-first. Its nose or snout is very curious, and much like that of a pig—only that it is lengthened out into a cylindrical tube, covered with short thick hairs, and terminated in a naked fleshy kind of bulb or gland; and this gland is pierced by two minute holes, which are the nostrils. Each nostril has a little fold of membrane hanging down over it like a shutter, effectually preventing sand and minute particles of dust from getting into the nose whilst digging.
Now this curious nasal appendage is to this miner not only an organ of smell, but also serves the purpose of hands and eyes. His forefeet, as I shall by-and-by show you, are wholly digging implements, and, from their peculiar horny character, not in any way adapted to convey the sense of touch. Eyes he has none, and but a very rudimentary form of ear; his highly sensitive moveable nose serves him admirably in the dark tunnels, in which his time is passed, to feel his way and scent out the lower forms of insect life, on which he principally feeds. Had he eyes he could not see, for the sunlight never peeps in to cheer his subterranean home, and sound reaches not down to him. The busy hum of insect life, and the song of feathered choristers, he hears not, so that highly-developed hearing appendages would have been useless and superfluous.
But his nose in every way compensates for all these apparent deficiencies, and shows us how to be admired is Creative Goodness in shaping and adapting the meanest and humblest of His creatures to its habits and modes of life. His forefeet are, like the mole’s, converted into diggers; the strong scoop-shaped nail, like a small garden-trowel at the end of each toe, enables him to dig with wonderful ease and celerity. The hind-feet are shaped into a kind of scraper by the toe being curiously bent, and the length of the hind-foot is about two-thirds more than the fore or digging hand. When I come to his habits, as differing from the mole, I shall be able to point out the use of this strange scraper-like form of hind-foot.
So far I have endeavoured to give you an outline of his general personal appearance, differing from the shrew in the peculiar arrangement of his feet, and from the mole in having a long hairy tail. His nearest relative (if at all related) is the Condylura, or Star-nosed Mole, whose nose has a fringe of star-shaped processes round its outer edge, about twenty-two in number. The first and only place in which I ever met this strange little fellow was on the Chilukweyuk prairies. These large grassy openings, or prairies, are situated near the Fraser river, on the western side of the Cascade Mountains. Small streams wind and twist through these prairies like huge water-snakes, widening out here and there into large glassy pools.
The scenery is romantic and beautiful beyond description. Towering up into the very clouds, as a background, are the mighty hills of the Cascade range, their misty summits capped with perpetual snow—their craggy sides rent into chasms and ravines, whose depths and solitudes no man’s foot has ever trodden, and clad up to the very snow-line with mighty pine and cedar-trees. The Chilukweyuk river already referred to washes one side of the prairie. Silvery-green and ever-trembling cottonwood trees, ruddy black-birch, and hawthorn, like a girdle, encircle the prairie, and form a border, of Nature’s own weaving, to the brilliant carpet of emerald grass, patterned with wild flowers of every hue and tint,—all shading pleasantly away, and losing their brilliancy in the dark green pine-trees.