(SEPTEMBER)

FARMERS WHO WEAR FEATHERS

Sh! Go easy! Pretend you're a horse or a cow.[21] We've gone south with the swallows—it's September you see—and those queer birds over there are flamingoes. The flamingoes are a shy lot; I don't know why. I can't think it's on account of their looks; for there's the kiwi, the hornbill, and sakes alive—the puffins! They all have funny noses, too, but none of them are particularly shy, and you can walk right up to a Papa Puffin almost. Whatever the reason is, the flamingoes are very easily frightened and they're particularly suspicious of human beings. Yet we've simply got to meet them and have them in this chapter, for they are among the most interesting of the feathered workers of the soil. They just live in mud; build those tower-like nests out of it, walk about in it, and get their meals by scooping up mud and muddy water from the marshes where they live, on the borders of lakes and seas. They strain out the little creatures wiggling about in these scooped-up mouthfuls.

I. Feathered Farmers with Queer Noses

"What a funny nose! What happened to it?"

I knew you'd say that. Everybody does. But just watch now and see. That flamingo over there, stalking about on his stilt-like legs, sticks his long neck down to the muddy water, turns that funny nose upside down and——

"Why, of all things, is he going to stand on his head?"

WHY FLAMINGOES HAVE SUCH FUNNY NOSES

No, not that. Don't you see, he's getting his dinner? After that crooked scoop bill—for that's what it really is, a scoop—is filled, the water strains out through ridges along the edge of the bill and what's left is his food.

That picture looks as if it had a tremendous lot of flamingoes in it, doesn't it? It has. It's quite a town, Flamingoburg is. Although flamingoes are so wary about meeting two-legged people without feathers—that is, human beings—they're very sociable among themselves and there may be a thousand, even two thousand, pair in a single flamingo city, such as Doctor Chapman studied in the Bahama Islands some years ago.

Their nests are cupped-out hollows in little towers of dried mud raised a foot or so to keep high tides from swamping them. They scrape up the mud with that shovel-like bill. After the conical-tower nest is made, the mud piled up and patted into shape with her bill and feet, Mother Flamingo lays one or two eggs—and then she goes to setting. You notice there's just one little chick in the nest in the lower left-hand corner of the picture, and just one egg in the nest near by.

With such a low stool to sit on you wonder what the mother bird does with her long legs. In some pictures in children's nature books of not so many years ago you'll find her represented as sitting on the nest with her legs hanging down the sides—but you see that couldn't be; the nest isn't tall enough. What she really does is to fold her legs under her body; just once, of course, at the joint. But they're so long that, even when folded, they reach out beyond her tail. While setting, the lady birds reach around with their long necks shovelling up things to eat and gossiping, more or less, with the neighbors; for the nests, you notice, are very close together. Sometimes two of them will reach across the narrow alley that separates the residence of Mrs. Flamingo Smith from Mrs. Flamingo Jones, take each other playfully by the bill and hold together for a while. Maybe this is their way of saying "Good morning," or "How do you do?"

You'd hardly think it—with those long legs of theirs—but the flamingoes swim beautifully. With their long necks drawn back—the way swans do it, you know—they are very graceful, and a flock of them floating about is one of the loveliest sights in the world. They look like a big, fleecy, pink cloud resting right on the surface of the water. You can now find only a few flamingoes in Florida, where there used to be so many; but go on south into Central and South America and there are thousands of them. They are still fairly numerous in countries bordering the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. In Persia they are called "red geese." And the name isn't so far wrong as you'd think. You notice that, unlike those stilt-walkers, the herons, the flamingoes have webbed feet. Like geese and ducks, also, they have those rows of tooth-like ridges on the edges of their bills. It is these "teeth" that, coming together, act as strainers.

But a queer thing about their bills, besides the funny-way they have of crooking down all of a sudden, is that the upper bill is smaller and fits down into the lower. Stranger still, the birds can raise and lower this upper bill like the cover of a coffee-pot.

They can move the under bill a little, too, but not to amount to anything; so you see there was even more to the upside-downness of that bill than there seemed to be at first. The whole arrangement looks odd to us, but it works out beautifully for the birds. When they turn their heads upside down they can stir the ooze to various depths, as required, by using the upper bill as a ploughshare and setting it at different angles.

Although they've borrowed some ideas from both the goose and the heron families, the flamingoes are so different from either they are put into a family by themselves, the PhoenicopteridÆ. This family name is from two Greek words meaning "red-winged." If you want to be formal in speaking of or to a goose you must refer to her family as the AnserinÆ which is Latin for "geese."

A LATE BIRD, BUT HE GETS THE WORM

Another of the long-nosed earth workers, as curious in his make-up as the flamingoes, is the kiwi of New Zealand. Like the flamingo, the kiwi uses his queer bill to get his living out of the soil. You've heard the saying "it's the early bird that gets the worm"; but while this is true of most birds it doesn't apply to the kiwis. Although they live on worms, as does Mr. Early Bird of the proverb, they do their feeding by night.

And such a funny thing for a bird to do, the kiwis go about with their noses to the ground like a dog smelling after a rat. The reason they do this is that their nostrils are situated, not next to their heads, as in most birds, but at the end of the bill—and on purpose; for they locate their suppers, the worms in the earth, by the sense of smell, although most birds have a very poor sense of smell. Just after sunset, you'll see the kiwis moving about softly (as if they were afraid of scaring away the worms!), and with the tips of their bills against the ground.

"Sniff! Sniff!" (You actually can hear them sniff.)

There, he's found one! His bill is not only long, but bends rather easily and that's why, perhaps, he's able to follow up so closely the hints he gets from his nose as to the location of worms, for he usually brings the worm out whole, and not all pulled apart as the robins do it sometimes. He works in soft earth, where most worms are found, and generally drives his bill in up to his forehead. If all goes well he pulls it right out with the worm at the end; but if there is any likelihood of an accident, the kiwi gently moves his head and neck to and fro until he has the soil loosened up and so clears the way. Once the worm is fairly out of the ground, he throws up his head with a jerk and swallows it whole.

Because they roam about so much at night, the kiwis sleep much of the day. You'll find them in thickets or in among the forested hills, where they make their homes. Sometimes, however, you'll see one standing, leaning on his long bill, like a street-idler propping himself up with his cane. If you disturb him, he yawns, as if to say:

"Oh, these bores! Why can't they let a fellow alone?"

But don't you go too far and annoy him or he'll get real peevish and strike at you with his foot.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Kiwi drill the earth every day—or rather every night—in their search for worms, but Lady Kiwi does all the excavating when it comes to making the nest. This she does by digging a tunnel, generally under the roots of a tree fern. There she lays two eggs and then her family cares are practically over for the time being, since it is the male kiwi who does most of the setting.

Other long-nosed tunnel diggers you must have seen many a time when you've been fishing, for they are fishers, too—Mr. and Mrs. Kingfisher. Their home is at the end of a tunnel in the banks of the stream where they do their fishing.

While we're visiting them and making a study of their household arrangements, it's a good thing for us that we're not kingfishers ourselves; for if there's anything that makes the kingfishers mad it's to have other kingfishers fooling around their place or even coming into their front yard. Each pair of kingfishers lays claim to the part of the creek in the neighborhood of their nest, as their fishing preserve, and woe betide any other kingfisher that trespasses!

Human fishermen and hunters give it out sometimes that kingfishers eat big fish that might otherwise be caught with a hook or a seine, but the fact is these birds catch only minnows and little shallow-water fish.

In digging the tunnels for their nests the two birds work together, and these tunnels are sometimes fifteen feet long. So you see that with kingfishers scattered around the world as they are—some 200 species in all—they must have done an enormous amount of ploughing in the course of time; to say nothing of what they have done in the way of enriching the soil with fish-bones, one of the very best of all fertilizers.

The kingfisher's nest wouldn't be at all attractive to some birds—the swallows, for example, who are so particular about having feather-beds. It has just a hard-earth floor like the cabins of the American pioneers, but the little kingfishers are perfectly contented and happy; for their meals are very plentiful, fairly regular, and the fish are always fresh.

FISHING DAYS AND OTHER DAYS

But some days even the kingfishers don't have fish for dinner. Instead they serve crayfish and frogs. This is on cloudy days, or when the wind is stiff and the water rough. On such days even the keen eyes of the kingfisher can't see a fish or make out exactly where the fish is when he does see one. But on clear, quiet days, you should see him fish. He often dives from a perch fifty feet or more above the creek and strikes the water so hard you'd think it would knock the breath out of him. But up he comes with his fish, nearly every time!

Of course he misses occasionally, but just think of seeing a fish that far away—under the water, mind you; and not a big fish, but a little minnow, only two or three inches long.

II. Under the Oven-Bird's Friendly Roof

Another great little farmer is the oven-bird. We can't afford to miss him and his wife for anything; and although we have to go to South America to meet them, we'll do it. So here we are! The oven-birds build a nest of clay mixed with some hair or grass or real fine little roots. This nest, when it's all done—it takes a good while to build it—is so big you'd hardly believe it was the home of so small a bird. It's a dome-shaped affair, like a Dutch oven. In the United States we have what we call an "oven-bird," too—one of the water-thrushes; but as its dome-shaped nest is made of grass and leaves and has no clay in it, we will not include this bird among the feathered farmers. The oven-bird of South America knows how to build its dome of clay without any scaffolding, which isn't easy.

OVEN-BIRD DOORS AND THE FRIENDLY ROAD

While the big flamingoes are so shy, the little oven-birds don't care who sees them—provided they can see him first. This is possibly because they want to keep an eye on any suspicious movements; for they make it an invariable rule to build so that their front doors will face the road. But really I think they do this, not because they are suspicious, but because they want to be neighborly and arrange their homes so they can sit on their front stoop and watch the crowd go by. They not only have their doors where they can see what's going on, but they nearly always build near the country road or the village street, and in the most conspicuous place they can find, instead of staying off by themselves in those vast, lonesome woods of Brazil where they lived before man came.

When a nest is to be built the oven-bird picks up the first likely-looking root fibre, or a horsehair, or a hair from an old cow's tail, carries it to some pond or puddle and, with this binding material, works bits of mud into a little ball about the size of a filbert. Then he flies with this pellet to the place where the nest is going up. With clay balls like this laid down and then worked together, the two birds make the floor of their little house. On the outer edge of the floor they build up the walls. These walls they gradually incline inward, just as the Eskimos build their snow-block huts, until they form a dome with a little hole in it. The last little ball they bring goes to fill that little hole and then the house is done, so far as the walls and roof are concerned. Next, a front door is cut through the wall that faces the road.

From the front door a partition is built reaching nearly to the back of the house, shutting off the front room from the family bedroom. After the eggs are laid Papa Oven-bird stays in the front room—or thereabouts—while mamma sets in the back room. The object of the little partition seems to be to protect mother and the eggs and, when they come, the babies from wind and rain. When the four or five baby birds arrive both papa and mamma put in most of their time, of course, feeding them.

The nests of the oven-birds weigh eight or nine pounds. The work of these little feathered farmers and their wives reminds us in more ways than one of that of Mrs. Mason-Bee,[22] but they evidently have quite different notions about housekeeping; for, although their residences are so big, the oven-birds would evidently rather build than clean house, while with Mrs. Bee it's just the other way. The nests of the oven-birds are so thick and strong they often stand for two or three years in spite of the rains; but the birds build a new nest every year, nevertheless.

III. The Mound-Builders

Another class of birds that have a fancy for big dome-like nests are the mound-birds. We find them in Australia, the Philippines, and the islands of the South Seas. Their scientific nickname is Megapoddidae, the "big-footed." It's with their big feet that they pile immense heaps of leaves, twigs, and rotten wood over their eggs.

And what for, do you suppose?

To hatch them! This heap of material not only absorbs the heat of the sun, but, in decaying, makes heat of its own. These mounds, of course, contribute tons and tons of fertilizer to the soil, but what interests the birds is that these warm heaps hatch their eggs. It's a kind of an incubator system, you see. As it is with many tens of thousands of our own little chickens, these days, the baby megapodes are born orphans. That heap of dead sticks, leaves, and earth is all the mother they ever know. As soon as the mother birds have laid their eggs in the mounds and covered them up, they go off gossiping with other lady megapodes, and don't bother their heads any more about their babies.

WHY LITTLE BIG FOOT NEVER SAYS "MAMMA"

But it really doesn't seem to matter. It's more of a question of sentiment than anything else, for the babies get on very well by themselves. When the time comes they not only make their own way out of the shell, as all birds do, but they work their way up through the rubbish-heap and run off at once into the woods to hunt something to eat.

It's all right, after all, I suppose; but if I were a little mound-builder's baby, I'd rather have a mamma that would stay around and go places with me, wouldn't you?

There's one nice thing about these mamma mound-builders, though; they're so neighborly and sociable. It's like a regular old-fashioned quilting party to see them build a nest. The birds look like turkeys, and one of the species is called the "brush turkey," but they are no bigger than an ordinary chicken—than a rather small chicken, in fact. When I tell you, then, that these mounds of theirs are often six feet high and twelve feet across in the widest part, the middle, you can see it takes good team-work to put them up.

So a lot of the lady mound-builders get together in woodsy places, where there's plenty of leaves and twigs lying around and together build a mound. One will run forward a little way, rake up and grasp a handful of sticks and leaves—I mean to say a footful—and kick it backward. The motion is much like that of an old hen scratching. Then another bird gathers a footful; then another, and soon they are all throwing the rubbish toward the same pile; all as busy as a sewing-circle, but—curiously enough—nobody saying a word! Before the mounds are quite done, they all begin laying their eggs in them; as many as forty or fifty, before they are through.

Some species frequent scrubby jungles along the sea. These scratch a slanting hole in the sandy soil about three feet deep and lay their eggs on the bottom, loosely covering up the mouth of the hole with a collection of sticks, shells, and seaweed. The natives say these birds, before they leave, go carefully over the footprints leading to this treasure-house, scratch them out and make tracks leading in various directions away from the nest. And all species lay their eggs at night. You see why, don't you? They're just that cautious.

SUCH AN EGG FROM SUCH A BIRD

But if you should find one of their nests full of brick-red eggs you'd never guess who laid them, they're so big! Away back in 1673, an English missionary to China who had stopped off at the Philippines, on his way, wrote a little book when he got back home about where he had been and what he had seen, and he just couldn't get over the wonder of the mound-builders. Among other things he says, in one place in his book:

"There is a very singular bird called Tabon. What I and very many more admired[23] is that being in body no bigger than an ordinary chicken, it lays an egg larger than a goose's."

"So," he adds, "the egg is bigger than the bird itself!"

IV. THE SWALLOWS

To make the acquaintance of either the mound-builders or those dear little oven-birds—aren't they dear?—we must be travellers, of course, for with their short wings neither the mound-builders nor the oven-birds ever could come all the way up here to see us. But another feathered farmer—and, like the oven-bird, a clay-worker and most neighborly—everybody knows; the swallow. Like Kim, the swallow is the little friend of all the world.

Swallows of one kind and another are found everywhere—almost everywhere that people can live; usually where people do live. And if all the soil they've helped pulverize and mix—even since the days when the swallows built under the eaves and rafters of the ark—was spread out, it would easily make another Egypt, I do believe!

But, speaking of the way swallows take to human society, do you know where our barn-swallows came from? They were originally cliff-dwellers away out West. The early explorers found enormous collections of their nests plastered all over the perpendicular cliffs and along the bluffs. Just as soon, however, as the country settled up and men put up barns these little cliff-dwellers, deserting rocks and bluffs, began building their bottle-shaped nests under the eaves. The swallows live on insects—including squash-bugs, stink-bugs, shield-bugs, and jumping plant-lice; and that's supposed to be one of the reasons for the curious fact that they left their ancient family seats—they found so many more insects about the barns and the farmer's fields and the gardens and the orchards.

TINY SOIL MILLS OF THE BABY SWALLOW

Haven't you often watched them and listened to them, diving and chattering around the barn in their busy season; that is to say, in the spring and summer time? Then the air is full of insects and is fairly woven with their darting wings. Some keep busy picking up the insects that are always hovering about in a barnyard, while others dash away to some near-by marsh or to the meadow or to the creek. Over the grain-fields they go, over the meadows and back again straight to the nest where downy babies are cheeping for them. The parents feed them, stop and chatter a moment, and then off they go. Follow that one down to the marsh. See how she flies high, round and round in circles, and then swoops for an insect. She missed him! Then she wheels, darts up—darts down—to right—to left. There, she's got him! Then off like an arrow to the nest. The soft-bodied insects are chosen and chewed up for the babies, while the parents eat the tougher ones. And to help digestion they give the babies little bits of gravel, although they don't use it themselves. So, in grinding up this gravel the baby birds help make soil before they are old enough to do any nest-building.

THE SAND MARTIN AND HIS HOME IN THE BANK