Читать книгу Life at the Zoo: Notes and Traditions of the Regent's Park Gardens онлайн

10 страница из 49

Note.—Since the above notes were written, the young king vulture has grown to full maturity, and is an even more interesting bird than its early promise indicated. At the end of July 1894 it was full-grown and in perfect plumage, every feather being distinct and unbroken. It is black from the crown to the legs, without a single white feather, and has none of the unpleasant appearance of the less noble vultures. So devoted is it to its keeper, that when some of the gigantic Seychelles tortoises were introduced into the large house in which it lives, it rushed at them to drive them away the moment he entered the house to feed it, and stood between him and the horny monsters, its wings wide stretched and its beak open and hissing. It still lies down to be caressed, and is in every way a very handsome and interesting bird.

ssss1

Perhaps the rarest, certainly the least known to man of all the creatures which, by a strange chance, find their way to the Gardens of the Zoological Society in Regent’s Park, are the denizens of the Tropical Forest. We say forest, because, though divided by the dissociable ocean, there is only one great forest which belts the globe. The notion of the physical symmetry of the world, which fascinated the old geographers, and led Herodotus to surmise that the course of the great river of Africa must of necessity conform in the main to that of the Danube in the opposite continent, was wrong in theory and application. But shifting the guiding forces from the control of original and plastic design to the influence of the dominant Sun, the theory still holds good; and while the tropical heats remain constant and undisturbed, so must the tropical forest flourish and endure, with its inseparable concomitants of vegetable growth overpowering and replacing the marvellous rapidity of vegetable decay.