Part 10 (1/2)
A YARD OF JUNGLE
Within five minutes the daily downpour of tropical rain would drench the jungle. At this moment the air was tense with electricity, absolutely motionless, and saturated with odorous moisture. The voices of all the wild creatures were hushed. The sense of mystery which is always so dominant in a tropical jungle seemed nearer, more vital, but more than ever a mystery. Its insistency made one oblivious of the great heat. The beating of one's heart became a perceptible sound, absurdly loud. All the swamp and jungle seemed listening to it.
Suddenly a voice came out of the heart of this mystery, and fittingly enough, the voice seemed something a little more or less than human, and also fittingly it uttered but a single word, and that word a question.
And the listener realized that the answer to the question was the only thing which made life and work worth while. The throb of the blood in his veins was forgotten, and all his senses reached out to the sights and sounds and scents about him. And again the great black frog called from its slimy seat hidden in the still blacker water of the jungle swamp. Its voice was deep, guttural, and a little inhuman, but it asked as plainly as any honest man could ask, _Wh--y?_ And after a minute, _Wh--y?_
I squatted in the center of a trail. Within walking distance behind me flowed the yellow waters of the Amazon, and the igarape from which the frog had called was even now feeling the tidal heave of the ocean.
Ahead, the jungle stretched without a break for three thousand miles or more. And here for a week I had suffered bodily torture, twisting into unhappy positions for hours at a time, watching the birds which crowded the berry-laden foliage of a single jungle tree. In the cool of early morning, throughout the terrible breathless heat of mid-day and the drenching downpour of afternoon, the frog and I put our questions. There was hope in our interrogation. And my five senses all gave aid, and my hand wrote down facts, and my mind pondered them.
In the very suburbs of Para, at the mouth of the great Amazon and within a hundred miles of the equator, I found a Mecca of bird-life. It was a gastronomic Mecca to be sure, a tall, slender, wild cinnamon tree,--_canella do matto_ the natives called it. For a full week I invited torture by attempting to study the bird-life of this single tree. This thing had not been done before; it might not be worth the doing. But testing such possibilities are as important to a naturalist's work as following along the more conventional and consequently more certain lines of investigation. I had no time for exploration of the surrounding country; so I had determined to risk all my precious hours upon intensive observation in one spot.
The century before, a plantling had pushed up through the jungle mold and had won success in the terrible compet.i.tion of the tropics--the helpless, motionless, silent strife of the vegetable folk. Year by year the lichen-sculptured trunk had pushed its way upward toward light and air, miraculously saved from the deadly embraces of the lianas which crawled forever through the jungle. Today it had gained an accepted place. Although no forest giant, with no great b.u.t.tresses or ma.s.ses of parasitic growths, it held up its branches and twigs in full sunlight a hundred feet or more above the ground. And its twiggy fingers were laden with a wonderful harvest of fruit, uncounted berries which attracted the birds from distant roosts and drinking places.
Here, then, a thousand combinations of fate had led me, and here I suffered day by day. Bound to the earth like other normal men, my eyes should have been directed forward. Now I forced them upward for hours at a time, and all the muscles of neck and shoulders revolted. Then eyestrain and headache and a touch of fever followed, and I cast about for means to ameliorate my bodily ills. I dragged a canvas steamer chair to my place of vigil and all my body was grateful.
In memory, there now remain only the highlights of new discoveries, the colorful moments of unalloyed realization of success. Nevertheless this new method of tropical work brought its own new delights and trials. One joy lay in the very difficulties to be overcome. Every sense came into play. Sight, first and foremost, had been put to the most severe of tests in attempting to record the happenings against the glare of the sky high up among the foliage of this bit of jungle. I strained through my high-power gla.s.ses, until, when I looked without them, the world seemed withdrawn, dwarfed, as in the horrid imaginings of fever. The gla.s.ses gained in weight as I held them pointing vertically until they fairly dropped from my aching arms. My ears strove to catch every song, every note which might prove a character of worth. The jungle scents played upon my emotions and sometimes dominated my work; the faint aroma from some invisible orchid overhead, the telltale musk from a pa.s.sing mammal, the healthful scent of clean jungle mold. As for taste, I had tested the aromatic berries and fruit of my canella tree, and for science' sake had proved two warningly colored insects. My sense of feeling had operated involuntarily and wholly aside from my scientific desires. Whether stimulated by dozens of mosquitoes, scores of ants, or hundreds of _betes rouges_ or ”mucuims,” the insistency of discomfort never discouraged a primary desire to delve as deeply as possible into the secrets of this small area of tropical jungle.
As I walked slowly about beneath the tree or lay back resting in the chair, I seemed to be watching creatures of another world. Whether I ogled them with gla.s.ses or now and then brought one down with a charge of small shot, I was a thing of no account to the berry-eating flocks high overhead. A vulture soaring lower than usual pa.s.sed over the tree, and the shadow of his partial eclipse of the sun froze every bird to instant silence and complete immobility. But my terrestrial activities wrought no excitement. The shot whistled through the foliage, one of their number dropped from sight, and life for the rest went on without a tremor. To ancestral generations, danger had come always from above, not below.
The very difficulty of observation rendered this mode of research full of excitement, and at the same time made my method of work very simple.
Against the sky, green, blue, or black feathers all appear black, and the first two days my gla.s.ses helped but little. For several minutes I would watch some tiny bird which might have been a yellow warbler had I been three thousand miles farther north. After memorizing personal characters, scrutinizing its flight and method of feeding, striving to fix its individuality, I would secure the bird, and find in all probability that it was a calliste, or tanager of brilliant plumage.
Tomorrow, if I were lucky, I might be able to tell off the numbers of this species, to watch them and to know that I was watching them. But recognition would not be by way of the cerulean or topaz or amethystine hues of plumage, but by the slight idiosyncrasies of flirting tail or wing or of general carriage.
Day by day, as I came to know better the jungle about me, I began to perceive a phase which did not change. Even when the sun shone most brightly, when the coolness of early morning had not yet pa.s.sed, the mood of the Amazon jungle remained. It was consistent, this low swampy jungle, in its uniform, somber mystery. In spite of wholesale exaggeration it was the dangers which came to mind. Of all places in the world this was probably fullest of life, both in numbers and diversity.
Yet it was death--or the danger of death--which seemed in waiting, always just concealed from view.
Beneath my tree I squatted silently. Just overhead the foliage might have been almost northern. The finely cut leaves were like willow, and at one side an oak, unusual but still an oak, reached out a thousand thousand motionless leaves, breaking the glare into innumerable patches.
But ahead, the terrible interlacing of vines and th.o.r.n.y ropes, the strangle-hold of serpentine lianas on every available trunk--all this could be only tropic.
The ground glistened here and there with a film of black water which revealed the swamp. Everywhere the mold and leaves of a hundred years lay scattered, the last fallen still green. Many feet above, great fans dangled, rayed fronds dry and crackling, fallen from high overhead, and suspended, waiting for the interfering twigs and foliage to die in turn and permit them to seek dissolution in the mold.
The jungle was bright with flowers, but it was a sinister brightness--a poisonous, threatening flash of pigment, set off by the blackness of the shadows. Heliconia spikes gleamed like fixed scarlet lightning, zigzagging through the pungent air. Now and then a bunch of pleasing, warm-hued berries reminded one of innocuous currants, but a second glance showed them ripening into swollen, liver-hued globes which offered no temptation to taste. One tree dangled hideous purple cups filled with vermilion fruits, and not far away the color sequence was reversed. A low-growing, pleasant-leaved plant lifted bursting ma.s.ses of purple-black, all dripping like wounds upon the foliage below. Many flowers were unrecognizable save by their fragrance and naked stamens, advertised neither by color nor form of blossom. I despaired of flowers worthy of the name, until close by my foot I saw a tiny plant with a comely, sweet-scented blossom, grateful to the eye and beautiful as our northern blooms are beautiful. The leaf was like scores lying about, and I realized that this was a sproutling of the giant tree. Nothing but the death of this monster could give the light and air which the little plant needed. It was doomed, but it had performed its destiny. It had hinted that much of the beauty of the jungle lay far above the mold and stagnant water. And then I remembered the orchids high overhead. And the realization came that the low-growing blooms needed their glaring colors to outs.h.i.+ne the dim, shadowy under-jungle, and their nauseous fumes to outscent the musky vapors of decay.
The plants of the jungle won success either by elbowing their neighbors and fighting their path up to sunlight, or else by adapting their needs to the starvation meed of air and light allotted to the lowly growths.
The big-leaved churacas had found another means of existence. They lived like permanent rockets, bursting in mid-air. A long, curved stem shot up and reached far out into s.p.a.ce. It was so slender as to be almost invisible in the dim light. At its tip radiated a great burst of foliage, leaves springing out in all directions, and absorbing nutrition which a sapling growing amid the undergrowth could not possibly do.
From daybreak to dark the canella tree was seldom deserted. Usually a score or more birds fluttered and fed among its branches, and true to tropic laws, there were comparatively few individuals but a mult.i.tude of species. In the few hours I was able to devote to its study, I identified seventy-six different kinds, and together with those which I saw but could not name, I judge that more than a hundred species must have come to the berries during that week in early May. The first day I secured sixteen specimens, all different; and the following day yielded fourteen more, only one of which was a duplicate of the first day's results.
The bird visitors to the tree arrived in one of two characteristic ways.
Many came direct and swiftly, singly or in pairs, flying straight and with decision. These came from a distance, with full knowledge of the berries. They fed quietly, and when satiated flew off. The second method of arrival was wholly casual,--loose flocks drifting slowly from the neighboring jungle, sifting into the tree, and feeding for a time before pa.s.sing on. When these left it was rather hastily, and in answer to the chirps and calls of the members of their flock who had not been beguiled by the berries and hence had forged steadily ahead.
These more or less well-defined flocks are very characteristic of all tropical jungles. Little a.s.semblages of flycatchers, callistes, tanagers, antbirds, manakins, woodhewers, and woodp.e.c.k.e.rs are drawn together by some intangible but very social instinct. Day after day they unite in these fragile fraternities which drift along, gleaning from leaves, flowers, branches, trunks, or ground, each bird according to its structure and way of life. They are so held together by an intangible gregarious instinct that day after day the same heterogeneous flock may be observed, identifiable by peculiarities of one or several of its members. The only recognizable bond is vocal--a constant low calling; half unconscious, absent-minded little signals which keep the members in touch with one another, spurring on the laggards, r.e.t.a.r.ding the overswift.
While I watched, there came to my tree a single species of pigeon, two hawks, and two parrots, four hummingbirds, and an equal number of toucans and woodp.e.c.k.e.rs. The remaining fifty-nine were all pa.s.serine birds, of which there were eight each of the families of flycatchers, manakins, and cotingas. Eleven were tanagers.
The greedy, noisy parrakeets were always the center of commotion, wasting more berries than they ate. The toucans, those bizarre birds of whose lives we know so little, yelped and called and bathed in the water caught in the stubs of branches, and fed to repletion. All the flycatchers forgot their usual diet and took to berrying as ardently as the tanagers themselves. Not all the birds came to feed on the berries.
A wren hunted insects among the branches, and a hawk found a giant snail crawling up the trunk and devoured it. The insect-eaters of the trunk numbered nine and showed no interest in the berries. Two were woodp.e.c.k.e.rs and seven woodhewers.