Birds Certainly Gave Me
More Pleasure Than Other Animals, And This Too Is No Doubt Common With
Children, And I
Take the reason of it to be not only because birds
exceed in beauty, but also on account of the
Intensity of life they
exhibit - a life so vivid, so brilliant, as to make that of other
beings, such as reptiles and mammals, seem a rather poor thing by
comparison. But while birds were more than all other beings to me,
mammals too had a great attraction. I have already spoken of rats,
opossums, and armadillos; also of the vizcacha, the big burrowing
rodent that made his villages all over the plain. One of my early
experiences is of the tremendous outcry these animals would make at
night when suddenly startled by a very loud noise, as by a clap of
thunder. When we had visitors from town, especially persons new to the
country who did not know the vizcacha, they would be taken out after
supper, a little distance from the house, when the plain was all dark
and profoundly silent, and after standing still for a few minutes to
give them time to feel the silence, a gun would be discharged, and
after two or three seconds the report would be followed by an
extraordinary hullabaloo, a wild outcry of hundreds and thousands of
voices, from all over the plain for miles round, voices that seemed to
come from hundreds of different species of animals, so varied they
were, from the deepest booming sounds to the high shrieks and squeals
of shrill-voiced birds.
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