“Where the zebra wantonly tosses his mane,

With wild hoof scorning the desolate plain;

And the fleet-footed ostrich over the waste

Speeds like a horseman who travels in haste.”

Footnote 96. Struthio camelus.

There the soft pads under the two toes of each foot rebound from the yielding sand as his well-bent legs straighten with a jerk one after the other, making his body bound forward at full speed. Then he raises his wings, sometimes on one side, sometimes on both, to balance himself, and to serve as sails to help him; and with this help his stride is sometimes as great as twenty feet, and he dashes along at the rate of twenty-six miles an hour. He is not so heavy as he looks, for many, of his bones are hollow, his feathers are downy and soft, and his wing-bones are small; and it is to his featherless thighs that you must look for the strong muscles to which he trusts for all his speed, as with outstretched neck he bounds across the plain.

If we go back to long bygone times, before the lion, the leopard, and other ferocious animals found their way into Africa, we can imagine how this great running bird took possession of the land and became too heavy for flight; while as time rolled on, he gained that strength of body and leg which now is his great protection as he dashes along, his four or five wives following in his train. The ostriches can travel over wide distances from one oasis to another, feeding on seeds and fruit, beetles, locusts, and small animals, and fighting fiercely with legs and beak if attacked. And when the springtime comes the wives lay their eggs in a hole scooped in the sand, or often in some dry patch of ground surrounded by high grass, till sixteen or twenty are ready; and then they take their turn (the father among the rest) of sitting upon them, at least at night, even if they leave them to the heat of the sun by day. And when six weeks have passed the father grows impatient, and, pressing the large bare pad in front of his chest against each egg in turn, breaks it, pulls out the membranous bag with the young bird in it, shakes him out, and, swallowing the bag, goes on to another. In this way the whole downy brood are soon set free, and begin picking up small stones to prepare their gizzard or muscular second stomach for grinding, while their parents scrape the sand and find and break up food for them.

So the ostrich lives its life in Africa, from Algeria right down to Cape Colony; while its smaller and lighter-coloured relations, the Rheas, with their three-toed feet, course over the plains of Paraguay and Brazil, on the other side of the Atlantic, often swimming from island to island, in the bays or across the rivers, but quite unable to fly with their soft hair-like feathers, though their wings are larger than those of the ostrich. Then when we turn to the East we find other running birds; the Cassowary, with its three toes, its horny helmet, its five long single feathers, and its five naked pointed quills in the place of a wing, feeding on fruit and vegetables in New Guinea, or sharing the dreary scrubs of Australia with the almost wingless Emus wandering in pairs, the only constant married couples among the running birds.

Nor is New Zealand left without a representative of this family, for there we have the curious little Apteryx or Kiwi (Fig. 36), with its thick stumpy legs, its long beak, and its soft downy body, under which are hidden its aborted wings. Perhaps it is because he is small and insignificant that the apteryx has lived on till now, crouching under the bushes by day and creeping about in the twilight, thrusting his long nose-tipped beak into the damp ground to draw out the worms. For long ago, though in the memory of man, as we learn from the traditions of the Maories, other wingless birds called Moas,[97] which were six or seven feet high, lived in New Zealand, and had fierce fights with the natives. We find their bones now, often charred from having been cooked in the native ovens, and when they are put together they give us skeletons which show that these birds must have been as formidable as that great bird of Madagascar, the Æpyornis, whose gigantic bones and eggs, three times the size of ostrich eggs, have been found, though the bird itself has never been seen.

Fig. 36.

Wingless birds of New Zealand.

The giant Moa (Palapteryx) and the tiny Apteryx. The Moa is no longer to be found alive.

But these are gone now, and their relations the Emus are fast following them: for however well these

Footnote 97. Dinornidæ, of which Dinornis, a still more ancient form, must have been ten feet high.

flightless birds may flourish on the broad plains and deserts, where only their wild companions are around them, they are sadly at the mercy of man. The proud eagle can fly far beyond the reach of the hunter’s gun; the little lark, if she be only wary enough, may trill out her song in the blue vault above and leave the cruel destroyer far below; but the emu and the cassowary, the rhea and the ostrich, have lost the power to leave the earth; and if it were not that we prize the two last for their feathers, they, too, like their companions, might live to rue the day when they became runners instead of conquerors of the air.

* * * * *

It is very different, however, with the water-birds, for they have not only kept the power of flight, but have gained the double advantage of also floating safely on the water. Look at our common wild duck. We might have taken him just as well as the sparrow for our type of a bird, and yet while the sparrow leads a land life in the trees, the duck’s home is on the water, and many of his relations live cradled on the open ocean.

See his broad boat-like body which floats without any effort of his; notice how closely it is covered with short thickly-grown feathers, which protect him from the chilly water, while he keeps them well-oiled with his beak, from an oil-gland which all flying birds have at the base of the tail. Watch how he swims, drawing his webbed foot together as he brings it forward, and spreading it like a fan to strike the water as he drives it back. Then, as he feeds, watch him gobbling in the mud and then shaking his head as he throws his beak up in the air. For he, like all ducks and geese, has a set of thin horny plates inside his broad bill, and they sift the mud, while the tender tooth-like edges of his beak and tongue feel out the suitable morsels.

All this time he is a water animal, but when he rises and flies he is also master of the air, for his strong wings carry him stoutly, so that he can migrate from one pool to another; or in winter, when the pools are frozen, to the open sea. He is by no means the best flyer of his family, and yet he is spread over Europe and North America, and even as far east as Japan, while his ocean-loving cousin, the eider-duck, lines her nest and lays her eggs high up in Arctic latitudes, and dives and swims in the open ocean. So too his relations, the wild swans and geese which wander in the lakes and swamps of Lapland, Siberia, and Hudson’s Bay, feeding on water-weeds, worms, and slugs, build their nests in the summer in the far north, and then fly thousands of miles southwards to their winter homes, their strong wings whirring in the air as they go.

Yet these are scarcely as true sea-birds as the divers, the Guillemots and Puffins, the Auks and Grebes, which swim out all round our coasts, and dive deep down to feed on the fish below. How clumsy they are on land and how skilful in the water! You may see numbers of guillemots and puffins in summer on the high cliffs of the north of Scotland, or of Puffin Island in the Menai Straits; the guillemots laying their eggs on the bare ledges, and the puffins in holes which they burrow in the cliffs face; and they sit so doggedly upon their nests, and shuffle and hop along so awkwardly, that men climbing up, or let down by ropes from above, knock them over as they go. But wait till the eggs are hatched, and the little ones have broken out of their shelly prison, each one cracking his shell from inside by means of a little horny knob, which all baby birds have for this purpose at the end of their beak, and which falls off when they are fairly born. Then fathers, mothers, and young ones, able to take care of themselves as soon as hatched, launch out into the open sea in August, and there is a sight of diving and swimming and fishing grand to behold. The awkward legs, placed so far back on their body, now serve as powerful oars and rudders to drive their smooth satiny bodies through the water. Their thin narrow legs cut through the waves like knives, while their short stumpy wings, closely laid against their down-covered bodies, keep them from being chilled, and so do the air-bubbles which are entangled in their short thick feathers, and which give their backs the appearance of being covered with quicksilver when they dive[98] after the fish below.

And then when the winter comes, those which have bred in the north fly and swim southwards to our coasts, where they are joined by the true divers and grebes which have come from the rivers and estuaries, where they have made their nests on some reedy bank or floating upon the water, and lived till their young ones are strong. This is their seafaring time; and whether near the shore, or miles out at sea, they dive and swim and make the ocean their home till spring comes round again.

Footnote 98. This beautiful effect may be seen from below when the guillemots are fed in any of the public aquariums.

Fig. 37.

A Group of Sea-Birds.

1. Cormorant. 2. Black-winged Tern. 3. Gulls. 4. Puffins. 5. Guillemots.

Still all their roving is done chiefly by swimming, and they leave it to the Gulls and Petrels, the Terns and the powerful Cormorants and Gannets, to fly hither and thither over the wide sea. These birds

have indeed reached the climax of a seafaring life, with their powerful wings, their sharp and often hooked beaks, and their short legs. They, too, feed upon the water, coming up with a fish in their mouth, but they do not dive under and swim like the guillemots. On the contrary, flying is their forte; they swoop down, and scarcely have they gone a few feet under water than they are up again, skimming on the waves as they swallow their prey, which may be anything from dead floating creatures to living fish which have ventured too near the surface. Yet they swim well too, and though the common gulls rarely go more than twenty miles from the shore, they are quite at home on the open ocean, and there is no habitable part of the globe without them. Still more venturesome are the petrels:—

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