The birds of Jamaica

by Philip Henry Gosse

[28] Length 9½ inches, expanse 14½, flexure 5, tail 3¾, rictus 1¼, tarsus 1½, middle toe 1¹⁄₁₀. Irides doll orange; beak bright orange, blackish at tip; feet deep fulvous. Whole upper parts greyish-black; crown and tail deep black; wing-quills brownish-black; the innermost two of the greater coverts have the edge of the outer web pure white. Under parts ashy-grey, silky; darkest on throat; chin usually white; medial line of belly white: under tail-coverts black, tipped with white. Sexes exactly alike.

The birds on which the peasantry in any country have conferred homely abbreviations of human names, are, I think, only such as have something lively and entertaining in their manners. Examples of familiar birds will at once occur to an English reader, and the subject of the present note is by no means an exception to the rule. He is one of the liveliest of our Jamaican birds: in woody places his clear whistle perpetually strikes the ear of the passenger, as he sits among the close foliage, or darts across the glade. Not unfrequently we are startled by a shrill scream in some lonely place, and out rushes the Hopping Dick, jumping with rapidity across the road, almost close to our horse’s feet. He greatly reminds me of the English Blackbird, in his sable plumage, and bright yellow beak, but especially when hopping along the branches of some pimento tree, or upon the sward beneath, in those beautiful park-like estates called pens. The keen glancing of his eye, his quick turns and odd gesticulations, the elevation of his long tail almost erect, his nods and jerks, have in them an uncommon vivacity, which is not belied by his loud voice, as he repeats a high mellow note four or five times in rapid succession, just preparatory to, or during, his sudden flights from tree to tree. His notes are various: sometimes we hear him in the lone wood, uttering, click, click, click, without variation of tone or intermission, for many minutes together. His song which I have heard only in spring, is rich and mellow, much like the English Blackbird’s: he sits in some thick tree, or wood, particularly at earliest dawn, and pours forth his clear notes in a broken strain, and often in a subdued tone, as if singing only to please himself.

I happened to wound slightly two of these birds on the same day, which I placed in a cage. They were free and easy from the first, very clamorous, lively and even headlong in their sudden movements. I found that they would seize and devour with eagerness cockroaches, hard beetles, worms, and even small lizards. I gave them a bunch of the ripe, but dry and insipid, berries of a species of ficus, which they readily picked off and ate. The fruit of this fig they are fond of in a state of freedom; and such is their impudence that they prevent the Baldpate Pigeons, though so much bigger, from partaking. The Baldpates would willingly eat the little figs also, but the Hopping Dicks scream and fly at them, and peck their backs, so as to keep them fluttering from branch to branch, reluctant to depart, yet unable to eat in comfort.

At the break of day, if we pass along a wooded mountain road, such as that lonely one at Basin-spring, in Westmoreland, particularly when the parching winds called norths have set in, in December and January,—we see the Hopping Dicks bounding singly along the ground in every part; but during the day they resort in numbers to the diminished springs and ponds which yet remain, where, after quenching their thirst, they enjoy the luxury of a bathe.

In the high mountains behind Spanish Town, this bird is called the Twopenny chick; but in the parishes of Westmoreland and St. Elizabeth, I have heard him distinguished only by the homely appellation which I have adopted. He is not confined to any particular locality. Dr. Chamberlaine (Jam. Alm.) has “never seen him in the lowlands.” But around Bluefields he is abundant, especially in the little belt of wood that girds the sandy sea-beach at Belmont, where one may meet with him at all times. In the pastures of Mount Edgecumbe he is no less common. In the highest districts, as Bluefields Peaks, though I have sometimes seen him, he is chiefly represented by his congener, the Glass-eye: in the solitudes of Basin-spring, a lower elevation, both species are numerous.

In some “Contributions to Ornithology,” by Dr. Richard Chamberlaine, published in the Companion to the Jamaica Almanack for 1842, this bird is described. The following observations are there quoted from a letter of Mr. Hill’s to the Doctor:—“I paid a visit the other day to the Highgate mountains, a district in which our native Ouzel, the Hopping Dick, is exceedingly abundant. On asking one morning the name of the bird, whose clear, mellow-toned whistle I was then listening to, a negro told me it was the Hopping Dick, and that they ‘always hear him when the long days begin.’ The long days had not yet begun; but at early dawn, while the distant horizon was seen but faintly gleaming through the dull grey break of daylight, and many of these Merles were gliding from one thicket to another, and dashing across the road with that bounding run from which they derive their sobriquet of Hopping Dick, one bird anticipated the season of song, by repeatedly sounding two or three cadences of that full deep whistle with which he salutes the lengthening year.

“The forests skirting the mountain are his favourite haunt. If he frequents the open slopes and crests of the hills, he glides from tree to tree, just above the surface of the grass. If he rises above the lower branches of the pimento, or into some of the loftier shrubs, it is to visit the Tillandsias, or parasitical wild-pines, to drink from within the heart-leaves at those reservoirs of collected dews which are the only resource of the birds in these high mountains. His dark sooty plumage, his brilliant orange bill, and his habit, when surprised or disturbed, of escaping by running or flying low, and sounding all the while his alarm scream till he gets away into the thicket, completely identify him with the European Blackbird.

“It was in the month of July, in 1834, that I first heard the song of this Ouzel, which I would call Merula Saltator, as this name preserves his distinctive sobriquet of Hopping Dick, and refers to his characteristic length of legs, both at the tarsus and the thighs. The shock of an earthquake had wakened all the living tenants of the plantation at which I was staying, when the voice of this bird, as the alarm lulled into silence, was heard from a small coppice of cedar-trees, clear and mellow. Though it was less varied than the song of the European Blackbird, it was very much like its tones when it is heard over distant fields in a summer’s morning. I had been apprised that I should hear it there, for it had sung in that grove daily at that season for three or four years; and though under the disadvantage of being an anticipated song, it was a very agreeable recognition of the melody of the European bird.

“The next time I heard his music was in the month of May, 1836, in the same mountains. The rains of the season had terminated, or only mid-day showers fell, the mornings and evenings being refreshing and brilliant It was now not a single one of these birds that I heard singing lonely in a sequestered cluster of trees, but a hundred of them far and near, blending their voices together, or vying with each other in rivalry of song. My frequent weekly journeys in these districts, from this period to the end of August, were always cheered by this simultaneous outburst of melody from the Merula saltator.”

I found a nest of this bird one day in the middle of August; it was affixed to the highest perpendicular limb of a rather tall pimento in Mount Edgecumbe, and consisted of a rude cup formed of the slender roots of pimento, and placed on a platform of leaves and small twigs. It contained two young, almost fledged, which flew to the ground before they could be seized,—and one abortive egg. The young displayed the plumage of the adult, even to the white webs on the two coverts; but the eyes were dark greyish-brown, the beak blackish, and the feet, dull, horny yellow. The egg measures 1⁴⁄₁₀ inch: by ⁹⁄₁₀: it is white, thickly splashed with dark and pale reddish-brown. Sometimes, as I have been informed, a decaying stump is selected, or any other convenient hollow, into which the bird carries “plantain trash,” or similar materials, and forms a rude nest, laying three or four eggs. And Mr. Hill gives me a statement of a locality which is intermediate between these; observing, “A friend of mine found the nest of a Hopping Dick. It was built amid the dry leaves that had lodged within the forks of a low branch of a mango-tree. It was a structure of small sticks, loosely woven, in the centre of which the young birds nestled among dried foliage.”