Part 41

The head and beak of the Clucking-hen bears an obvious resemblance to those of the following species, Rallus longirostris, except that the nasal grooves are nearly obliterated in the Aramus. The feet also are similar. The sternum is that of neither Rallus nor Ardea, but is closely like that of Psophia.

A female was brought me on the 1st of April, in the afternoon, which had been just shot as it was standing in shallow water at Bluefields river-head, fishing. The freshness of the subject enabled me to examine it carefully. The stomachic sac consisted of a gizzard separated by a narrow constriction from a long proventriculus, about twice as large as the gizzard, and of a sub-oval, flattened form. This was divided by the structure of the parietes into two very distinct parts, the upper portion being much thickened, and studded with small round glands, so as to look like shagreen. The lower and larger portion was muscular, the inner surface having longitudinal rugæ. The gizzard was comparatively smooth within, and thinner than the proventriculus. The latter was stuffed with small water-snails (Ampullaria), divested of the shells, but not, in all cases, of the opercula, which filled even the œsophagus almost to the fauces. In the upper part of the proventriculus, the snails were little changed; in the lower they were macerated and more slimy, but in the gizzard there was nothing but a hard mass of blackish, almost homogeneous matter, nearly dry by the expression of its moisture. The intestinal canal measured fifty inches; (in another specimen forty-two inches;) about an inch from the cloaca, the cæca branched off, the left longer by half an inch than the right. I could find no gall-bladder. The body, when divested of the integuments is compressed, but not so decidedly as in either Herons or Rails.

In the male bird the trachea at the distance of about two inches above the furcula, takes an immense convolution, forming a complicated knot; the form of the turnings is not always the same, nor is their extent; I have seen one much more complicated than in the specimen dissected by Mr. Eyton, and some less so. The volutions are connected by a mesentery. At the point where the bronchi divaricate, the trachea dilates into a large oval box. In the female the trachea is quite simple, having no trace of the convolution, nor of the bronchial box. I hence infer that the loud startling cries are uttered only by the male. As in the Rails, the abdominal viscera are very large; the cæca in particular, when distended, are enormous.

Ann. and Mag. of N.H., Jan. 1846.

Robinson states that the Aramus feeds upon snakes, toads, and lizards, as well as wood-snails, and gully-crabs, yet not on his own observation, but on the authority of “people of credit, who have seen junks of undigested snakes and lizards taken out of their craws.” This is not confirmed, however, by my own observation, gasteropod mollusca having been found in every specimen I have examined. Mr. Hill’s observation does not confirm the former statement. Of one which was sent to him in July 1842, he remarks, “Having opened the craw for the purpose of ascertaining the food it had been eating, I found nothing but a quantity of a dark pulverulent substance, very much resembling decayed wood; a substance which a bird with such a bill as the Clucking-hen has, might be supposed to pick up with the worms it might find in the decaying wood. There was no trace of any animal body, neither wings of beetles, nor vertebræ of lizards.” It may be added that this specimen when discovered, “flew from where a limb of rotten log-wood had been broken off; perhaps it was eating some of the large wood-worms.”

Mr. Eyton’s bird was sent from Honduras: if it had been a Jamaican specimen, I should have guessed that the zoophyte which seemed to resemble a sea-anemone, was a large species of Vaginulus common in the mountains.

From the general, though not total, absence of the shells of the snails which I have found, I judge that the shell is crushed with the beak, and shaken off before the snail is swallowed. The opercula, which are frequently found attached, have enabled me to recognise the genera Ampullaria, Cyclostoma, and Helicina; the latter two, terrestrial snails.

The piercing cries with which the Clucking-hen salutes the approach of night, are little heard at any other time: during the day it more commonly emits the deliberate clucking above mentioned, as it saunters hither and thither in the mountain-woods, or among the cocoes of the provision-grounds. We sometimes hear the harsh sounds proceeding from the forest, even after night has established its dominion, and hence, probably, it has been considered a nocturnal bird; I suspect, however, that these cries are not the accompaniments of activity, but the harbingers of repose, emitted while sitting on the roosting tree, or while flying to and fro in preparation for alighting; the cries which are heard at a rather later hour marking, probably, the awaking from the first sleep, as they soon relapse into silence.

In the woods of the parish of St. David’s these birds are said to be abundant, as also in the mountainous districts of St. Ann’s, St. Dorothy’s, and the Coona-coonas. Swift of foot, if not of wing, the Aramus does not confine itself, however, to one or two localities, but ranges, with rapid sidelong strides, the lonely woods from the mountain-tops to the mangrove morasses of the shore. Solitary and shy, it is a difficult bird to approach, but when obtained is esteemed by some as “the best wildfowl of the country.” “The flesh of this bird,” says Dr. Chamberlaine, “acquires, about the termination of the year, that plumpness, which gives it a claim to be placed in the catalogue of edible birds. It is then esteemed fit for the table, and may be dressed in two ways; viz., in fricassée, or roasted like the Guinea-birds, and smothered, after being cut up, in a rich salade.” Mr. Hill observes of the specimen which came into his possession; “I directed the whole of the muscles on either side of the sternum to be cut out and cooked. I found its flavour indescribably fine, a compound of hare, partridge, and pigeon. The flesh was of peculiarly close and compact texture, and as peculiarly tender.” I would add to these, my own testimony to its excellence.

Of its domestic economy, I know nothing, except that Robinson asserts, that “it lays nine eggs in December.” In February, I found eggs in the ovary of a female, as large as small peas: another, in June, had about half-a-dozen a little larger than peas, about a dozen as large as pigeon-shot, and many small.

Mr. Hill, in a letter written since my return to England, informs me, that “for the last month of the late drought, [summer of 1846] numbers of Clucking Aramuses made their appearance about the river-swamps and marshes in the Caymanas district of this parish. They were a bird almost unknown in these plains. As slugs and snails were very plentiful in these, the only moist places at that time, we perceive what the attraction to this locality was, that brought them so numerously together, beside the desire for water.”

The Clucking-hen was among the birds sent from Cuba by Mr. Mac Leay.

MANGROVE-HEN.

Rallus longirostris.—+Lath.+

Pl. enl. 849.

Length 15¹⁄₄ inches, expanse 20¹⁄₂, flexure 5¹⁄₄, tail 2⁴⁄₁₀, rictus 2⁶⁄₁₀, tarsus 2⁴⁄₁₀, middle toe 2³⁄₁₀. Irides hazel.

The reader shall be introduced to the bird before us, by the delightful pen of my friend, Mr. Hill.

“14th of March, 1842. I have visited Passage Fort at a season when Wild-ducks are stretching from one side of the Bay to the other in strings, and Plovers and Sandpipers are feeding in little flocks on the beach. The nights and the mornings are quiet, but the day is one uninterrupted bluster of the sea-breeze. The country is dry. Many of the large trees are leafless, and there is no verdure in the grass. Such a picture would seem to afford no great diversity for amusement: the sea, however, is always an interesting object. Whether calm or stirring it has a variety of features, all different at different hours of the day. The repose of morning; the slumbering ocean; the sleepy mountains kerchiefed in clouds; the awakened daylight peeping through the curtains of night; the birds just risen and moving; the little flocks wending about as if the day had its business to attend to; the Herons and Egrets shaking their wings by the mirrory waters, and making their toilet there. All this is a pleasant mixture of repose and activity; of the stir from sleeping to waking; in which nature is never seen to such advantage, as in the magnitude of a view that mingles the ocean with the earth.

“The day is gathering brighter and brighter; but the mountains rise between me and the sun, and are one dull blue mass, neither deeply nor faintly blue, but clear, and yet obscure. On the beach the fishermen are silently hauling their seine, sweeping, with its line of dotted corks, such a circuit on the waters, that it seems to take in half the bay. At a distance off, the flats loaded with grass are getting under weigh. Busy men and women are on the beach launching canoes and preparing for the market. The sails are hoisted, and the masses, that lay like logs upon the water, just stir, and glide out into the glaring bay. Amid all this hushed movement, there is one pervading sound, the murmurs of the distant breakers. This voice is seldom silent; in the stillest lull there will be heard this roll of the restless surge.——There is a sweet melancholy voice that comes from the bordering mangroves along the river: it is the morning call of the Pea-dove. It is responded to by a faint low cooing from the hill-side woods. It is repeated again and again; and again it is replied to far away. And now there are other sounds. The Crotophagas are trooping to the river-shallows, and calling to each other to settle among the sedges, where the receding tide has left them living food. There is a sound overhead like the hurtling of arrows. It is a flock of Wild-ducks flitting from the Salt Island ponds to the Lagoons on the other side the bay: and again there is another sound of gathered tribes moving through the air. It resembles bubbling waters. It is a flight of Tinklings shifting from their rookery to their feeding grounds in the morasses. Streams of smoke are curling up from various points of the mountains, like the morning sacrifices of hill-worshippers of old. A shower has scudded along the loftiest of the ridges and shown the deep indentings of the elevated country, by the different depths of the misty haze.—It has passed away, and the heights are now lighted by the full blaze of the uprisen sun. The clouds cast deep shadows on the mountain declivities, and the highest points of the chain pierce through the masses, rolling one upon the other, thick and accumulated.

“The sea-breeze is in. It comes as no other breeze comes, and feels as no other breeze feels. At first two or three whiffles make darkened tracks on the glassy waters. Then half the sea afar off is covered with ripples. The ripples come creeping on, and the wind has reached the shore. Two minutes pass, and a line of small breakers are chasing each other on the beach. From this time the constant wind never lulls, but sweeps with ‘a steady unrelenting force from the bright east.’

“Noon. In a small stretch of marsh land, through which the river has cut two or three channels, and left several smaller meandering dykes very clear and open, with pools and little lakes shut in from the sea by sand-banks, there is a good deal of rank grass (Digitaria stolonifera) growing, on which the village goats congregate to feed at mid-day, that being the time when the ground is least swampy. Among the sedge and bulrushes that cover the flooded parts, at the same noon-tide hours, the crek, crek, crek, of the Water-rail is heard, with that kind of impatient reiterated sound, with which Guinea-fowl call to each other. This call is a summons for the birds to quit the sedges, and seek the muddy shoals and half-dry ooze, to feed. Two or three birds nearly, if not quite, as large as half grown pullets, of a dingy ash-colour, come over a low intervening wall where I am, and feed in the open yard. The country people call this bird the Mangrove-hen, from its appearance, its habits, and its haunts. It greatly resembles the dappled grey variety of the common fowl; and in the breeding season it rambles about with its callow brood, like a hen and chickens. After one of these visits, I went and traced the footmarks in the mud, and found that the Mangrove-hens had been searching for small crabs. Worms, shell-fish, insects, and crustacea are its animal food, and the seeds and shoots of aquatic plants, its vegetable. As the rank-growing herbage is necessary for its concealment, and creative wisdom has adapted it, like the rest of its tribe, by an extraordinary expansion of the foot, for walking on weedy waters, and so compressed its body that it threads with alacrity reeds and rushes; the mangrove thickets, which it commonly haunts, are those that grow in tide-waters, and at the mouths of rivers, and in neighbourhoods luxuriant in aquatic herbage. These are the prevailing thickets at Passage Fort: I therefore find every body there familiar with the Mangrove-hen. As these birds have much of the character of the gallinaceæ, and are able to run and feed themselves as soon as they are hatched, they are, when half grown, as helpless on the wing as half-fledged poultry. At the pullet age, when feeding out on the mud and shoals, they are run down with great facility. At this time they are delicious eating. Persons, on whose taste I can depend, tell me, that, though a Plover be undoubtedly a fine bird for the table, and the Sanderling a great delicacy, the Mangrove-hen exceeds both; as it combines all their peculiarity of flavour with the fleshiness of the Quail. This is no small commendation.”

To this interesting note, I have little to add. At Crabpond, where rounded clumps of mangroves are scattered like islets in a lake, we have observed it frequently running quickly and timidly from one cover to another, exposing itself in the open pond as little as possible. As it walks under the arched roots, it holds its short tail nearly erect.

In a specimen dissected in December, I found fragments of crabs; and a large one, nearly whole, was in the craw: the stomach is a muscular gizzard. This individual was excessively fat.

One brought to me alive in May, taken in a springe, bit fiercely and pertinaciously at anything presented to it, shaking it like a dog. It uttered in rapid succession the most deafening screams.

The long beak, and the spurs upon the winglet, distinguish this species from our other Rails.

RED RAIL.

Water Partridge.

Rallus concolor.—+Mihi.+