Two years ago the Hon. Marshall McDonald, whose duty as United States Fish Commissioner it is to look after the fishes wherever they may be, sent me to this country to see what could be done for his wards. It was a proud day when I set out from Mammoth Hot Springs astride a black cayuse, or Indian pony, which answered to the name of Jump, followed by a long train of sixteen other cayuses of every variety of color and character, the most notable of all being a white pony called Tinker. At some remote and unidentified period of her life she had bucked and killed a tradesman who bestrode her against her will, and thereby, as in the old Norse legends, she has inherited his strength, his wickedness, and his name. And when, after many adventures, I came back from this strange land and told the story of its fishes other men were sent out from Washington with nets and buckets. They gathered up the trout and carried them to the rivers above the falls, and now all the brooks and pools of the old lava-bed, the fairest streams in the world, are full of their natural inhabitants.
THE COLORS OF ANIMALS
(From Chapters in Popular Natural History.)
By SIR JOHN LUBBOCK, BART., M.P., F.B.S., etc.
The color of animals is by no means a matter of chance; it depends on many considerations, but in the majority of cases tends to protect the animal from danger by rendering it less conspicuous. Perhaps it may be said that if coloring is mainly protective, there ought to be but few brightly colored animals. There are, however, not a few cases in which vivid colors are themselves protective. The kingfisher itself, though so brightly colored, is by no means easy to see. The blue harmonizes with the water, and the bird as it darts along the stream looks almost like a flash of sunlight; besides which, protection is not the only consideration. Let us now consider the prevalent colors of animals and see how far they support the rule.
Desert animals are generally the color of the desert. Thus, for instance, the lion, the antelope, and the wild ass are all sand-colored. “Indeed,” says Canon Tristram, “in the desert, where neither trees, brushwood, nor even undulation of the surface afford the slightest protection to its foes, a modification of color which shall be assimilated to that of the surrounding country is absolutely necessary. Hence, without exception, the upper plumage of every bird, whether lark, chat, sylvain, or sand grouse, and also the fur of all the smaller mammals and the skin of all the snakes and lizards, is of one uniform sand color.”
It is interesting to note that, while the lion is sand-colored like the desert, the long, upright, yellow stripes of the tiger make it very difficult to see the animal among the long dry grasses of the Indian jungles in which it lives. The leopard, again, and other tree cats are generally marked with spots which resemble gleams of light glancing through the leaves.
The colors of birds are in many cases perhaps connected with the position and mode of construction of their nests. Thus, we know that hen birds are generally less brightly colored than the cocks, and this is partly, perhaps, because bright colors would be a danger to the hens while sitting on their eggs. When the nest is placed underground or in the hole of a tree, etc., we find it no longer to be such an invariable rule that the hen bird is dull-colored; but, on the contrary, she is then often as gaily colored as the male. Such, for instance, is the case with the hen kingfisher, which is one of the brightest of British birds and one of the very few which make their nests underground; the hen woodpecker, which is also gaily colored and builds in hollow trees, forms a second instance.