Birds and Man

by W. H. Hudson

It saddened me a few months later to receive a letter from her mistress announcing Polly's death, on 2nd December 1909.

I have thought since that this bird, instead of being only five years old when bought, was probably aged twenty-five years or more. Naturally, the girl who had been sent into the market-place to dispose of the bird would tell a possible buyer that it was young; the parrots one wants to buy are generally stated to be five years old. However, it may be that the bird grew old before its time on account of its extraordinary dietary. The parrot may have an adaptive stomach, still, one is inclined to think that half a century of fried eggs and bacon, roast pork, boiled beef and carrots, steak and onions, and stewed rabbit must have put a rather heavy strain on its system.

Many parrots have lived longer than Polly in captivity, long as her life was; and here it strikes me as an odd circumstance that Polly's specific name was bestowed on the species, the double-fronted amazon, as a compliment to the distinguished French ornithologist, La Valainte, who has himself recorded the greatest age to which a captive parrot has been known to attain. This bird was the familiar African grey species. He says that it began to lose its memory at the age of sixty, to moult irregularly at sixty-five, that it became blind at ninety, and died aged ninety-three.

We may well believe that if parrots are able to exist for fifty years to a century in the unnatural conditions in which they are kept, caged or chained in houses, over-fed, without using their enormously-developed wing-muscles, the constant exercise of which must be necessary to perfect health and vigour, their life in a state of nature must be twice as long.

To return to parrots in general. This bird has perhaps more points of interest for us than any other of the entire class: his long life, unique form, and brilliant colouring, extreme sociability, intelligence beyond that of most birds, and, last, his faculty of imitating human speech more perfectly than the birds of other families.

The last is to most persons the parrot's greatest distinction; to me it is his least. I do not find it so wonderful as the imitative faculty of some mocking birds or even of our delightful little marsh-warbler, described in another book. This may be because I have never had the good fortune to meet with a shining example, for we know there is an extraordinary difference in the talking powers of parrots, even in those of the same species—differences as great, in fact, as we find in the reasoning faculty between dog and dog, and in the songs of different birds of the same species. Not once but on several occasions I have heard a song from some common bird which took my breath away with astonishment. I have described in another book certain blackbirds of genius I have encountered. And what a wonderful song that caged canary in a country inn must have had, which tempted the great Lord Peterborough, a man of some shining qualities, to get the bird from its mistress, an old woman who loved it and refused to sell it to him, by means of a dishonest and very mean trick. Denied the bird, he examined it minutely and went on his way. In due time he returned with a canary closely resembling the one he wanted in size, colour, and markings, concealed on his person. He ordered dinner, and when the good woman was gone from the room to prepare it, changed his bird for hers, then, having had his meal, went on his way rejoicing. Still he was curious to learn the effect of his trick, and whether or not she had noticed any difference in her loved bird; so, after a long interval, he came once more to the inn, and seeing the bird in its cage in the old place began to speak in praise of its beautiful singing as he had heard it and remembered it so well. She replied sadly that since he listened to and wanted to buy it an unaccountable change had come over her bird. It was silent for a spell, perhaps sick, but when it resumed singing its voice had changed and all the beautiful notes which everyone admired were lost. The great man expressed his regret, and went away chuckling at his deliciously funny joke.

The ordinary talking parrot is no more to me than the ordinary or average canary, piping his thin expressionless notes; he is a prodigy I am pleased not to know. On the other hand there are numerous authenticated cases of parrots possessed of really surprising powers, and it was doubtless the mimicking powers of such birds of genius which suggested such fictions as that of the Totá Kuhami in the East; and in Europe, Gresset's lively tale of Vert Vert and the convent nuns.

It was perhaps a parrot of this rare kind which played so important a part in the early history of South America. It is nothing but a legend of the Guarani nation, which inhabit Paraguay, nevertheless I do believe that we have here an account mainly true of an important event in the early history of the race or nation. This parrot is not the impossible bird of the fictitious Totá Kahami order we all know, who not only mimics our speech but knows the meaning of the words he utters. He was nothing but a mimic, exceptionally clever, and the moral of the story is the familiar one that great events may proceed from the most trivial causes, once the passions of men are inflamed.

The tradition was related centuries ago to the Jesuit Fathers in Paraguay, and I give it as they tell it, briefly.

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