“14th of March, 1842. I have visited Passage Fort at a season when Wild-ducks are stretching from one side of the Bay to the other in strings, and Plovers and Sandpipers are feeding in little flocks on the beach. The nights and the mornings are quiet, but the day is one uninterrupted bluster of the sea-breeze. The country is dry. Many of the large trees are leafless, and there is no verdure in the grass. Such a picture would seem to afford no great diversity for amusement: the sea, however, is always an interesting object. Whether calm or stirring it has a variety of features, all different at different hours of the day. The repose of morning; the slumbering ocean; the sleepy mountains kerchiefed in clouds; the awakened daylight peeping through the curtains of night; the birds just risen and moving; the little flocks wending about as if the day had its business to attend to; the Herons and Egrets shaking their wings by the mirrory waters, and making their toilet there. All this is a pleasant mixture of repose and activity; of the stir from sleeping to waking; in which nature is never seen to such advantage, as in the magnitude of a view that mingles the ocean with the earth.
“The day is gathering brighter and brighter; but the mountains rise between me and the sun, and are one dull blue mass, neither deeply nor faintly blue, but clear, and yet obscure. On the beach the fishermen are silently hauling their seine, sweeping, with its line of dotted corks, such a circuit on the waters, that it seems to take in half the bay. At a distance off, the flats loaded with grass are getting under weigh. Busy men and women are on the beach launching canoes and preparing for the market. The sails are hoisted, and the masses, that lay like logs upon the water, just stir, and glide out into the glaring bay. Amid all this hushed movement, there is one pervading sound, the murmurs of the distant breakers. This voice is seldom silent; in the stillest lull there will be heard this roll of the restless surge.——There is a sweet melancholy voice that comes from the bordering mangroves along the river: it is the morning call of the Pea-dove. It is responded to by a faint low cooing from the hill-side woods. It is repeated again and again; and again it is replied to far away. And now there are other sounds. The Crotophagas are trooping to the river-shallows, and calling to each other to settle among the sedges, where the receding tide has left them living food. There is a sound overhead like the hurtling of arrows. It is a flock of Wild-ducks flitting from the Salt Island ponds to the Lagoons on the other side the bay: and again there is another sound of gathered tribes moving through the air. It resembles bubbling waters. It is a flight of Tinklings shifting from their rookery to their feeding grounds in the morasses. Streams of smoke are curling up from various points of the mountains, like the morning sacrifices of hill-worshippers of old. A shower has scudded along the loftiest of the ridges and shown the deep indentings of the elevated country, by the different depths of the misty haze.—It has passed away, and the heights are now lighted by the full blaze of the uprisen sun. The clouds cast deep shadows on the mountain declivities, and the highest points of the chain pierce through the masses, rolling one upon the other, thick and accumulated.
“The sea-breeze is in. It comes as no other breeze comes, and feels as no other breeze feels. At first two or three whiffles make darkened tracks on the glassy waters. Then half the sea afar off is covered with ripples. The ripples come creeping on, and the wind has reached the shore. Two minutes pass, and a line of small breakers are chasing each other on the beach. From this time the constant wind never lulls, but sweeps with ‘a steady unrelenting force from the bright east.’
“Noon. In a small stretch of marsh land, through which the river has cut two or three channels, and left several smaller meandering dykes very clear and open, with pools and little lakes shut in from the sea by sand-banks, there is a good deal of rank grass (Digitaria stolonifera) growing, on which the village goats congregate to feed at mid-day, that being the time when the ground is least swampy. Among the sedge and bulrushes that cover the flooded parts, at the same noon-tide hours, the crek, crek, crek, of the Water-rail is heard, with that kind of impatient reiterated sound, with which Guinea-fowl call to each other. This call is a summons for the birds to quit the sedges, and seek the muddy shoals and half-dry ooze, to feed. Two or three birds nearly, if not quite, as large as half grown pullets, of a dingy ash-colour, come over a low intervening wall where I am, and feed in the open yard. The country people call this bird the Mangrove-hen, from its appearance, its habits, and its haunts. It greatly resembles the dappled grey variety of the common fowl; and in the breeding season it rambles about with its callow brood, like a hen and chickens. After one of these visits, I went and traced the footmarks in the mud, and found that the Mangrove-hens had been searching for small crabs. Worms, shell-fish, insects, and crustacea are its animal food, and the seeds and shoots of aquatic plants, its vegetable. As the rank-growing herbage is necessary for its concealment, and creative wisdom has adapted it, like the rest of its tribe, by an extraordinary expansion of the foot, for walking on weedy waters, and so compressed its body that it threads with alacrity reeds and rushes; the mangrove thickets, which it commonly haunts, are those that grow in tide-waters, and at the mouths of rivers, and in neighbourhoods luxuriant in aquatic herbage. These are the prevailing thickets at Passage Fort: I therefore find every body there familiar with the Mangrove-hen. As these birds have much of the character of the gallinaceæ, and are able to run and feed themselves as soon as they are hatched, they are, when half grown, as helpless on the wing as half-fledged poultry. At the pullet age, when feeding out on the mud and shoals, they are run down with great facility. At this time they are delicious eating. Persons, on whose taste I can depend, tell me, that, though a Plover be undoubtedly a fine bird for the table, and the Sanderling a great delicacy, the Mangrove-hen exceeds both; as it combines all their peculiarity of flavour with the fleshiness of the Quail. This is no small commendation.”
To this interesting note, I have little to add. At Crabpond, where rounded clumps of mangroves are scattered like islets in a lake, we have observed it frequently running quickly and timidly from one cover to another, exposing itself in the open pond as little as possible. As it walks under the arched roots, it holds its short tail nearly erect.
In a specimen dissected in December, I found fragments of crabs; and a large one, nearly whole, was in the craw: the stomach is a muscular gizzard. This individual was excessively fat.
One brought to me alive in May, taken in a springe, bit fiercely and pertinaciously at anything presented to it, shaking it like a dog. It uttered in rapid succession the most deafening screams.
The long beak, and the spurs upon the winglet, distinguish this species from our other Rails.