The birds of Jamaica

by Philip Henry Gosse

The ordinary spring-rains were distressingly deficient in 1846; and hence I presume it was, that, through the month of April, several birds of this species were in the habit of frequenting the morasses on each side of the swiftly-flowing Paradise River. Where the bridle-path called the Short Cut crosses the stream, there grow many bushes of Black-Withe, about as large as an ordinary apple-tree; many of these are clothed with a dense and matted drapery of convolvolus so thick as to hide the bush completely. On the very summit of these bushes, the Clucking-hens might often be seen at early day, the tangled creepers affording a support for their broad feet, where they stood and turned without sinking and without embarrassment. They stood boldly erect, as if watching, their dark figures relieved against the sky, in an attitude exactly like that of an Ibis, though they flirted the tail in the manner of a Rail. At brief intervals they uttered a short sharp sound, and sometimes the loud harsh scream, krēaow. On being alarmed, they flew heavily and slowly, with the long legs hanging down, and the neck stretched forward, having a very awkward appearance in the air.

About June, they had again retired to the loftier elevations: at the middle of that month, I used to hear their loud cries at an early hour, on the mountains of Grand Vale and Hampstead, above Content. There was a large pond just within the woods, to which they resorted; for the drought still prevailed. My young friend, who had often seen them there, informed me that they scratch and pick like a fowl.

The head and beak of the Clucking-hen bears an obvious resemblance to those of the following species, Rallus longirostris, except that the nasal grooves are nearly obliterated in the Aramus. The feet also are similar. The sternum is that of neither Rallus nor Ardea, but is closely like that of Psophia.

A female was brought me on the 1st of April, in the afternoon, which had been just shot as it was standing in shallow water at Bluefields river-head, fishing. The freshness of the subject enabled me to examine it carefully. The stomachic sac consisted of a gizzard separated by a narrow constriction from a long proventriculus, about twice as large as the gizzard, and of a sub-oval, flattened form. This was divided by the structure of the parietes into two very distinct parts, the upper portion being much thickened, and studded with small round glands, so as to look like shagreen. The lower and larger portion was muscular, the inner surface having longitudinal rugæ. The gizzard was comparatively smooth within, and thinner than the proventriculus. The latter was stuffed with small water-snails (Ampullaria), divested of the shells, but not, in all cases, of the opercula, which filled even the œsophagus almost to the fauces. In the upper part of the proventriculus, the snails were little changed; in the lower they were macerated and more slimy, but in the gizzard there was nothing but a hard mass of blackish, almost homogeneous matter, nearly dry by the expression of its moisture. The intestinal canal measured fifty inches; (in another specimen forty-two inches;) about an inch from the cloaca, the cæca branched off, the left longer by half an inch than the right. I could find no gall-bladder. The body, when divested of the integuments is compressed, but not so decidedly as in either Herons or Rails.

In the male bird the trachea at the distance of about two inches above the furcula, takes an immense convolution, forming a complicated knot; the form of the turnings is not always the same, nor is their extent; I have seen one much more complicated than in the specimen dissected by Mr. Eyton,[112] and some less so. The volutions are connected by a mesentery. At the point where the bronchi divaricate, the trachea dilates into a large oval box. In the female the trachea is quite simple, having no trace of the convolution, nor of the bronchial box. I hence infer that the loud startling cries are uttered only by the male. As in the Rails, the abdominal viscera are very large; the cæca in particular, when distended, are enormous.

[112] Ann. and Mag. of N.H., Jan. 1846.

Robinson states that the Aramus feeds upon snakes, toads, and lizards, as well as wood-snails, and gully-crabs, yet not on his own observation, but on the authority of “people of credit, who have seen junks of undigested snakes and lizards taken out of their craws.” This is not confirmed, however, by my own observation, gasteropod mollusca having been found in every specimen I have examined. Mr. Hill’s observation does not confirm the former statement. Of one which was sent to him in July 1842, he remarks, “Having opened the craw for the purpose of ascertaining the food it had been eating, I found nothing but a quantity of a dark pulverulent substance, very much resembling decayed wood; a substance which a bird with such a bill as the Clucking-hen has, might be supposed to pick up with the worms it might find in the decaying wood. There was no trace of any animal body, neither wings of beetles, nor vertebræ of lizards.” It may be added that this specimen when discovered, “flew from where a limb of rotten log-wood had been broken off; perhaps it was eating some of the large wood-worms.”

Mr. Eyton’s bird was sent from Honduras: if it had been a Jamaican specimen, I should have guessed that the zoophyte which seemed to resemble a sea-anemone, was a large species of Vaginulus common in the mountains.

From the general, though not total, absence of the shells of the snails which I have found, I judge that the shell is crushed with the beak, and shaken off before the snail is swallowed. The opercula, which are frequently found attached, have enabled me to recognise the genera Ampullaria, Cyclostoma, and Helicina; the latter two, terrestrial snails.

The piercing cries with which the Clucking-hen salutes the approach of night, are little heard at any other time: during the day it more commonly emits the deliberate clucking above mentioned, as it saunters hither and thither in the mountain-woods, or among the cocoes of the provision-grounds. We sometimes hear the harsh sounds proceeding from the forest, even after night has established its dominion, and hence, probably, it has been considered a nocturnal bird; I suspect, however, that these cries are not the accompaniments of activity, but the harbingers of repose, emitted while sitting on the roosting tree, or while flying to and fro in preparation for alighting; the cries which are heard at a rather later hour marking, probably, the awaking from the first sleep, as they soon relapse into silence.