Eccentricities of the Animal Creation.

by John Timbs

A word or two about the nests of such gigantic birds. Captain Cook found, on an island near the north-east coast of New Holland, a nest "of a most enormous size. It was built with sticks upon the ground, and was no less than six-and-twenty feet in circumference, and two feet eight inches high." (Kerr's "Collection of Voyages and Travels," xiii., 318.) Captain Flinders found two similar nests on the south coast of New Holland, in King George's Bay. In his "Voyage," &c., London, 1818, he says, "They were built upon the ground, from which they rose above two feet, and were of vast circumference and great interior capacity; the branches of trees and other matter of which each nest was composed being enough to fill a cart."

Among the varieties of Birds'-nests are some very curious homes, of which we have but space to notice a few. The pendulous nest of the Indian Baya-bird is usually formed of the fibres of the palmyra, the cocoa-nut palm, and wild date of India, sometimes mixed with grass, neatly interlaced, and very strongly made. It consists of only one circular chamber, with a long tubular passage leading to it, and is suspended from a tree, preferred if overhanging water. The natives of India say the Baya lights up its nest with fire-flies. The bird lays from four to six white eggs. Bayas are of a very social disposition: numbers build on the same tree, or neighbouring trees, and singing in concert during the breeding season. The Baya is very docile, and taught to fly off the finger and return again; to dart after a ring or small coin, dropped into a deep well, and catch it before it reaches the water; to fetch and carry, and perform similar tricks.

The nest of the brilliant Golden-banded Oriole is a hammock of twisted fibrous substances, and is suspended in a low shrub, so as to swing to the breeze. The twine-like fibres of which it is woven are the filaments of the gigantic palm. The threads break away from the leaf, and hang like fringe to the magnificent foliage.

The Tailor-birds are the best nest-builders of all the feathered tribes. They interweave their nests between the twigs and branches of shrubs, or suspend the nests from them; and some of these birds have exercised arts from the creation which man has found of the greatest benefit to him since he discovered them. These birds, indeed, may be called the inventors of the several arts of the weaver, the sempstress, and the tailor; whence some of them have been denominated Weaver and Tailor Birds. The nests of the latter are, however, most remarkable. India produces several species of Tailor-birds that sew together leaves for the protection of their eggs and nestlings from the voracity of serpents and apes. They generally select the end of a branch or twig, and sew with cotton, thread, and fibres. Colonel Sykes has seen some in which the thread was literally knotted at the end. The inside of these nests is lined usually with down and cotton.

Tailor-birds are not confined to India or tropical countries. Italy can boast a species which exercises the same art. Mr. Gould has a specimen of this bird in his possession, and the Zoological Society have a nest in their Museum. This little bird, a species of the genus sylvia, in summer and autumn frequents marshes; but in the spring it seeks the meadows and corn-fields, in which, at that season, the marshes being bare of the sedges which cover them in summer, it is compelled to construct its nest in tussocks of grass on the brinks of ditches; but the leaves of these being weak, easily split, so that it is difficult for our little sempstresses to unite them, and so form the skeleton of the fabric. From this and other circumstances, the spring nests of these birds differ so widely from those made in the autumn that it seems next to impossible that both should be the work of the same artisan. The latter are constructed in a thick bunch of sedge or reed: they are shaped like a pear, being dilated below and narrow above, so as to leave an aperture sufficient for the ingress and egress of the bird. The greatest horizontal diameter of the nest is about two inches and a half, and the vertical is five inches.

The most wonderful thing in the construction of these nests is the method to which the little bird has recourse to keep united the living leaves of which it is composed. The sole in the weaving, more or less delicate, of the materials, forms the principle adopted by other birds to bind together the walls of their nests; but this sylvia is no weaver, for the leaves of the sedges or reeds are united by real stitches. In the edge of each leaf she makes, probably with her beak, minute apertures, through which she contrives to pass, perhaps by means of the same organ, one or more cords formed of spiders' web, particularly that of their egg-pouches. Those threads are not very long, and are sufficient to pass two or three times from one leaf to another. They are of unequal thickness, and have knots here and there, which, in some places, divide into two or three branches.

This is the manner in which the exterior of the nest is formed: the interior consists mainly of down, chiefly from plants, a little spiders' web being intermixed, which helps to keep the other substances together. The upper part and sides of the nest, that is, the external and internal, are in immediate contact; but in the lower part a greater space intervenes, filled with the slender foliage of grasses, and other materials, which render soft and warm the bed on which the eggs are to repose. This little bird feeds on insects. Its flight is rectilinear, but consists of many curves, with the concavity upwards. These curves equal in number the strokes of the wing, and at every stroke its whistle is heard, the intervals of which correspond with the rapidity of its flight.

The Australian Bower-bird, as its name implies, builds its nest like an arbour or bower, with twigs: in the British Museum are two specimens, each decorated—one with bones and fresh-water shells, and the other with feathers and land-shells; remarkable instances of taste for ornament already referred to in a preceding page. The Satin or Bower-bird is described by settlers in Australia as "a very troublesome rascal," which besets gardens; if once allowed to make a lodgment there it is very troublesome to get rid of him; he signalizes his arrival by pulling up, in his restless fussy way, everything in the garden that he can tug out of the ground, even to the little sticks to mark the site of seeds. A settler had formed a garden in the bush; there was no enclosure of the kind for miles in any direction: a flock of Bower-birds came; he got his gun and shot two or three; the flock went off, and he never saw another bird of the kind.

The Cape Swallows build nests which show extraordinary instinct allied to reason. A pair of these built their nest on the outside of a house at Cape Town against the angle formed by the wall and the board which supported the eaves. The whole of this nest was covered in, and it was furnished with a long neck or passage, through which the birds passed in and out. It resembled a longitudinal section of a Florence oil flask. This nest having crumbled away after the young birds had quitted it, the same pair, or another of the same species, built on the old foundation again. But this time an improvement was observable in the plan of it that can hardly be referred to the dictates of mere instinct. The body of the nest was of the same shape as before, but instead of a single passage it was furnished with one at each side, running along the angle of the roof; and on watching the birds, they were seen invariably to go in at one passage and come out at the other. Besides saving themselves the trouble of turning in the nest and disturbing, perhaps, its interior arrangement, they were guarded by this contrivance against a surprise by serpents, which frequently creep up along the wall, or descend from the thatch, and devour both the mother and her brood.