The African
bird is quite inclined to be didactic. He believes you need
advice, and he means to give it. To this end he repeats the same
thing over and over until he thinks you surely cannot
misunderstand. One chap especially whom we called the lawyer
bird, and who lived in the treetops, had four phrases to impart.
He said them very deliberately, with due pause between each; then
he repeated them rapidly; finally he said them all over again
with an exasperated bearing-down emphasis. The joke of it is I
cannot now remember just how they went! Another feathered
pedagogue was continually warning us to go slow; very good advice
near an African jungle. "Poley-poley! Poley-poley!" he warned
again and again; which is good Swahili for "slowly! slowly!" We
always minded him. There were many others, equally impressed with
their own wisdom, but the one I remember with most amusement was
a dilatory person who apparently never got around to his job
until near sunset. Evidently he had contracted to deliver just so
many warnings per diem; and invariably he got so busy chasing
insects, enjoying the sun, gossiping with a friend and generally
footling about that the late afternoon caught him unawares with
never a chirp accomplished. So he sat in a bush and said his say
over and over just as fast as he could without pause for breath
or recreation. It was really quite a feat. Just at dusk, after
two hours of gabbling, he would reach the end of his contracted
number. With final relieved chirp he ended.
It has been said that African birds are "songless." This is a
careless statement that can easily be read to mean that African
birds are silent. The writer evidently must have had in mind as a
criterion some of our own or the English great feathered
soloists. Certainly the African jungle seems to produce no
individual performers as sustained as our own bob-o-link, our
hermit thrush, or even our common robin. But the African birds
are vocal enough, for all that. Some of them have a richness and
depth of timbre perhaps unequalled elsewhere. Of such is the
chime-bird with his deep double note; or the bell-bird tolling
like a cathedral in the blackness of the forest; or the bottle
bird that apparently pours gurgling liquid gold from a silver
jug. As the jungle is exceedingly populous of these feathered
specialists, it follows that the early morning chorus is
wonderful. Africa may not possess the soloists, but its full
orchestrial effects are superb.
Naturally under the equator one expects and demands the "gorgeous
tropical plumage" of the books. He is not disappointed. The
sun-birds of fifty odd species, the brilliant blue starlings, the
various parrots, the variegated hornbills, the widower-birds, and
dozens of others whose names would mean nothing flash here and
there in the shadow and in the open.
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