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

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Winter in the Insect House is the time of incubation and sleep. All the beautiful forms of tropical moths and insects, which burst into life in the butterfly form in May, are sleeping in their pitcher-shaped cocoons, or buried in moss and mould. Only the great Goliath beetle, with a body like a well-blacked boot on which cream has been spilt, and immense stag-like horns, was alternately eating melon and sipping highly-sweetened tea, two indigestible forms of food on which it had made an almost uninterrupted meal for seven weeks.

From another point of view the demeanour of the semi-tropical birds in this sudden wave of cold was even more interesting than the power of adaptation to climate shown by so many quadrupeds. The whole pheasant tribe, perhaps the most beautiful, as a class, of any family of birds, are in the acme of plumage and condition. The Himalayas and China are the main homes of these gorgeous creatures, and we are not surprised to see in Regent’s Park the metallic lustre of the Monauls, or the scarlet, orange, and gold of the rarer Chinese varieties, in equal perfection with that attained in the glens of Nepaul, or the mountains of Pekin. But the Argus pheasant is a native of Sumatra and Borneo, the companion of the trogons and the ourang-outang; yet the cock-bird was displaying its beauties in the open air, among leaves and grass tipped with hoar-frost, and showed plumage so close and perfect, that it was impossible to doubt that the colder climate had, if possible, added a lustre to its unrivalled wealth of ornament. It is to be regretted that the eggs laid in the previous summer were not fertile, else the development of perhaps the most perfect instance of animal pattern might have received further explanation from the processes of growth in the plumage of the young. One tender nestling from the tropics was being reared at the Zoo, though not exposed to the rigour of December frost. In October 1893 a young king vulture arrived from South America—a round, fluffy ball of white down, with a smooth black head like a negro baby, and as helpless as a young pigeon. It grew rapidly, and at the time when this paper was written, was the most interesting and intelligent specimen of a young carnivorous bird that the writer has yet seen. As a rule nothing could well be more morose and forbidding than the eaglet or the young of any hawk or falcon. They are helpless, savage, and unresponsive to any form of kindness. But the young vulture is almost as tame and intelligent as a puppy. It follows its keeper in the warm house, which it shares with the tortoises, sitting down when he stops, and rising and running with a half-bird, half-quadruped gait which is irresistibly comic. When frightened or shy in the presence of strangers, it lays its head on the ground and “shams dead,” like a young plover, though almost as large as a turkey. But it soon loses all fear, and takes food or pulls at the garments of its visitors with amusing confidence. But the young vulture is an accidental visitor. The frosts of winter are mainly interesting at the Zoo as the time when the inmates exhibit the full beauty and vitality of vigorous maturity.