It is singular that Alexander Wilson, and, in fact, all the naturalists, except Audubon, who have written about this interesting bird, have failed to examine its nest and eggs. By the unsatisfactory manner in which Audubon refers to the nidification of this parakeet, one is led to believe that even he did not become personally acquainted with its breeding habits.
The offer by Mr. Maynard of one dollar for every parrot's egg delivered to him, induced a Florida cracker to cut a path into a dense cypress swamp at Dunn's Lake, about the middle of the month of June. The hunter was occupied three days in the enterprise, and returned much disgusted with the job. He had found the nests of the parakeets in the hollow cypress-trees of the swamp, but he was too late to secure the eggs, as they were hatched, and the nests filled with young birds. The number of young in each nest seemed to leave no doubt of the fact of several adults nesting in one hole. Probably the eggs are laid about the last of May.
These birds are extremely gregarious, and have been seen at sunset to cluster upon the trunk of a gigantic cypress like a swarm of bees. One after another slowly crawls through a hole into the cavity until it is filled up, while those who are not so fortunate as to obtain entrance, or reserved seats, cling to the outside of the trunk with their claws, and keep their position through the night chiefly by hooking the tip of the upper mandible of the beak into the bark of the tree. The backwoodsmen confidently assert that they have found as many as twenty eggs of a greenish white in a single hollow of a cypress-tree; and as it is generally supposed, judging from the known habits of other species of this genus, that the Carolina Parrot lays only two eggs, but few naturalists doubt that these birds nest in companies. It is a very difficult task to find the nests of parrots in the West Indies, some of them building in the hollowed top of the dead trunk of a royal palm which has been denuded of its branches; and there, upon the unprotected summit of a single column eighty feet in height, without any shelter from tropical storms, the Cuban Parrot rears its young.
The Carolina Parrot is the only one of this species which may truly be said to be a permanent resident of our country. The Mexican species are sometimes met with along the southwestern boundaries of the United States, but they emigrate only a few miles northward of their own regions. The salt-licks in the great button-wood bottoms along the Mississippi were once the favorite resorts of these birds, and they delighted to drink the saline water. It is to be regretted that so interesting a bird should have been so ruthlessly slaughtered where they were once so numerous. Only the young birds are fit to eat, but we read in the accounts of our pioneer naturalists that from eight to twenty birds were often killed by the single discharge of a gun, and that as the survivors would again and again return to the lurking- place of their destroyer, attracted by the distressing cries of their wounded comrades, the unfeeling sportsman would continue his work of destruction until more than half of a large flock would be exterminated. This interesting parakeet may, during the next century, pass out of existence, and be known to our descendants as the Great Auk (Alca impennis) is now known to us, as a very rare specimen in the museums of natural history.
On Monday, January 3, I rowed out of the Bayou du Chien, and soon reached the town of Hickman, Kentucky, where I invested in a basketful of mince-pies, that deleterious compound so dear to every American heart. A large flatboat, built upon the most primitive principles, and without cabin of any kind, was leaving the landing, evidently bound on a fishing-cruise, for her hold was filled with long nets and barrels of provisions. A large roll of canvas, to be used as a protection against rain, was stowed in one end of the odd craft, while at the other end was a large and very rusty cooking-stove, with a joint of pipe rising above it. The crew of fishermen labored at a pair of long sweeps until the flat reached the strong current, when they took in their oars, and, clustering about the stove, filled their pipes, and were soon reclining at their ease on the pile of nets, apparently as well satisfied with their tub as Diogenes was with his. As I rowed past them, they roused themselves into some semblance of interest, and gazed upon the little white boat, so like a pumpkin-seed in shape, which soon passed from their view as it disappeared down the wide Mississippi.
There was something in the appearance of that rough flatboat that made me wish I had hailed her quiet crew; for, strange to say, they did not send after me a shower of slang phrases and uncouth criticisms, the usual prelude to conversation among flatboat-men when they desire to cultivate the acquaintance of a fellow-voyager. In fact, it was rather startling not to have the usual greeting, and I wondered why I heard no friendly expressions, such as, "Here, you river thief, haul alongside and report yourself! Whar did you come from? Come and take a pull at the bottle! It's prime stuff, I tell ye; will kill a man at forty paces," &c. The rusty stove was as strong an attraction as the quiet crew, as I thought how convenient it would be to run alongside of the old boat and utilize it for my culinary purposes. The unwonted silence, however, proved conclusively that some refined instinct, unknown to the usual crews of such boats, governed these voyagers, and I feared to intrude upon so dignified a party.
Descending a long straight reach, after making a run of twenty-three miles, I crossed the limits of Kentucky, and, entering Tennessee, saw on its shore, in a deep bend of the river, the site of a fortification, while opposite to it lay the low Island No. 10. Both of these places were full of interest, being the scenes of conflict in our civil war. The little white sneak-box glided down another long bend, over the wrecks of seven steamboats, and passed New Madrid, on the Missouri shore. The mouth of Reelfoot Bayou then opened before me, a creek which conducts the waters from the weird recesses of one of the most interesting lakes in America,—a lake which was the immediate result of a disastrous series of disturbances generally referred to as the New Madrid earthquakes, and which took place in 1811-13. Much of the country in the vicinity of New Madrid and Fort Donaldson was involved in these serious shocks. Swamps were upheaved and converted into dry uplands, while cultivated uplands were depressed below the average water level, and became swamps or ponds of water. 'The inhabitants, deprived of their little farms, were reduced to such a stage of suffering as to call for aid from government, and new lands were granted them in place of their fields which had sunk out of sight. Hundreds of square miles of territory were lost during the two years of terrestrial convulsions.
The most interesting effect of the subsidence of the land was the creation of Reelfoot Lake, the fluvial entrance to which is from the tortuous Mississippi some forty-five miles below Hickman, Kentucky. The northern portion of the lake is west of and a short distance from Fort Donaldson, about twenty miles from Hickman, by the river route. As Reelfoot Lake possesses the peculiar flora and characteristics of a multitude of other swamp-lakes throughout the wilderness of the lower Mississippi valley, I cannot better describe them all than by giving to the reader a description of that lake, written by an intelligent observer who visited the locality in 1874.
"Nothing," he says, "could well exceed the singularity of the view that meets the eye as one comes out of the shadows of the forest on to the border of this sheet of water. From the marshy shore spreads out the vast extent of the seemingly level carpet of vegetation,—a mat of plants, studded over with a host of beautiful flowers; through this green prairie runs a maze of water-ways, some just wide enough for a pirogue, some widening into pools of darkened water. All over this expanse rise the trunks of gigantic cypresses, shorn of all their limbs, and left like great obelisks, scattered so thickly that the distance is lost in the forest of spires. Some are whitened and some blackened by decay and fire; many rise to a hundred feet or more above the lake. The branches are all gone, save in a few more gigantic forms, whose fantastic remnants of the old forest arches add to the illusion of monumental ruin which forces itself on the mind. The singularity of the general effect is quite matched by the wonder of the detail.
"Taking the solitary dug-out canoe, or pirogue, as it is called in the vernacular, we paddled out into the tangle of water-paths. The green carpet, studded with yellow and white, that we saw from the shores, resolved itself into a marvellously beautiful and varied vegetation. From the tangle of curious forms the eye selects two noble flowers: our familiar northern water-lily, grown to a royal form, its flowers ten inches broad, and its floating pads near a foot across; and another grander flower, the Wampapin lily, the queen of American flowers. It is worth a long journey to see this shy denizen of our swamps in its full beauty. From the midst of its great floating leaves, which are two feet or more in diameter, rise two large leaves borne upon stout foot-stalks that bring them a yard above the water; from between these elevated leaves rises to a still greater height the stem of the flower. The corolla itself is a gold-colored cup a foot in diameter, lily-like in a general way, but with a large pestle-shaped ovary rising in the centre of the flower, in which are planted a number of large seeds, the 'pins' of Wampapin. These huge golden cups are poised on their stems, and wave in the breeze above great wheel- like leaves, while the innumerable white lilies fill in the spaces between, and enrich the air with their perfume.