Part 10

Natives report that the coelacanth is extremely oily. Its flesh drips oil. When boiled it quickly turns to jelly. This fact may have a bearing on the origin of some of the earth’s great oil deposits. Man today may be running his automobiles or heating his homes on the fuel produced by vast hordes of these head-armored, hollow-spined fish in the ancient warm seas.

The Ever Faithful Hornbills

Lady hornbills are trusting wives and gentlemen hornbills are unbelievably faithful husbands.

The hornbills are birds with enormous beaks. They have the size of small turkeys and are usually found in pairs in the forests of East Africa. They are perhaps best known from the curious instinctive behavior of the female. Before laying her annual quota of two eggs she walls herself with mud, collected by the male, into a hole near the top of some high jungle tree. There one of the eggs—apparently seldom both—is hatched and the chick reared. The female continues this voluntary imprisonment for two months or more.

There is always a small aperture in the wall. Through this the foraging male passes food to his imprisoned mate, once an hour or less. Food consists mostly of fruits. Sometimes he brings her what apparently are playthings to relieve the monotony of hatching and chick-rearing.

A comprehensive report on the behavior of these grotesque birds in the Mpanga Research Forest of Uganda, by Dr. Lawrence Kilham of Bethesda, Maryland, is a classic on bird-watching.

Hornbills mate for life and apparently their conjugal life is a model of high morality for the whole animal kingdom. Walled into the tree-holes, the females obviously are helpless to protect themselves against any infidelity, and, sad to say, there are vampire female hornbills in the jungle whose only thought is to steal some imprisoned lady’s spouse.

In the case observed by Dr. Kilham, however, the male preserved his virtue to the end. “By November 8,” he records, “the female was walled in, and a more serious attempt at interference was now made by a foreign female.... She was following the male and lighted in the next tree when he lighted above his nest hole. On November 23 the same course of events took place, except that the male was less tolerant. He fed his own mate, then drove the intruder away. A week later I saw her fly in close behind the male and light 25 feet from the nest hole. The male gave his mate a piece of bark followed by some fruit, and then bounced from one branch to another toward the foreign female.”

The poor fellow was falling, falling, but “the female within the nest screamed a number of times. I wondered whether the interloper could seduce the male, but from subsequent observations it seemed unlikely that she would. The male returned again to the nest hole, and a few minutes later was in the upper part of the tree knocking about on dead branches until he dislodged a piece of bark. He clamped his bill on the bark until it was largely fragmented. Then he moved toward the foreign female. If he presented the bark [a cherished play object among hornbills] one would suppose that she had some attraction for him. After a moment, however, he changed his direction, flew down to the big limb below, bent over the nest hole, and gave the token to his mate, accompanied by a feeding chuckle. Subsequently he returned to perch quietly within eight feet of the intruding female. At 7:30 a.m. the two of them flew away together. As the nesting season progressed, he became less tolerant of her intrusions...On February 3 I again watched her fly in behind the male and alight on the nest tree, making considerable noise. The male stopped feeding his mate, swooped at the interloper and drove her down toward the ground. However, when he flew away, she followed a short distance behind.”

The vampire was hard to discourage. A few days later she was observed at the entrance to the nest, trying to break the wall with her beak. Probably there was a sex murder case in the making. But “After five minutes the male arrived and...drove the foreign female to another tree, flying at her so hard that he knocked leaves from intervening branches. He returned to his nest with a small stick held like a cigar. His mate, who had remained silent, now began her wailing screeches.... The intruding female, persistent as usual...had followed the male back to the nest tree. In a few minutes he flew at her again, flying faster than hornbills usually do as he chased her from one tree to another.”

But his ordeal of bachelorhood was nearly over. Five days later mother and young emerged from the nest: “The pair of hornbills were perched side by side on their tree. Not long after I heard a great flutter of wings. I looked back to see both members of the pair pursuing a foreign female.... When the parents later came to our garden, she did not follow.”

Ants With Tailor Skills

Ants developed the craft of sewing long before humans. There are species of tailor ants in Australia, Africa and India that have distinctly ingenious habits. They make nests of leaves sewed together with silken threads, secreted by their own larvae, which they use both as needles and shuttles.

When the nest is torn in any way certain soldiers and workers, apparently specialized for this particular job, rush to the scene. The soldiers arrange themselves to protect the workers. These first try to pull the two edges of the rent together. If the gap is too wide for a single insect to reach the other side and secure it with her mandibles a living chain is formed, sometimes as much as six ants long. One holds another in front of her with her mandibles, the second similarly holds a third, and so on until the other side is reached. Hours sometimes are required before the edges of the tear can be brought together and held in contact.

Then several other workers appear, each carrying a larva head upwards. These little worms are carried back and forth like a shuttle, spinning the threads which are pushed through needle holes made by the workers until the rent is securely patched.

Fiend Symphonies of the Jungle

Out of green jungle depths at sunrise rises the choral hymn of the damned. It is a symphony of earth’s evil, of ancient dinosaurs and flying reptiles, of vampires and witches. It comes from the throats of jet-black, long-bearded, fiend-like creatures wearing red shawls. They are the howler monkeys.

The world’s loudest-mouthed bluffers and braggarts are these dwellers in the high treetops. They swear in an ancient tongue evolved over centuries for the effective cursing of hovering white hawks, black vultures and lurking wild cats. Now they curse, loudly and most profanely, airplanes which sweep low over Panama and Costa Rican jungles. They have not found it necessary to invent any new expressions to convey their contempt for the new monsters of the skies.

Their voices are their only weapons. These have proved quite effective throughout the lifetime of the race. The howlers have been able to threaten their enemies with perdition so convincingly that these enemies have believed the threats. Largely as a result, the big black monkeys have been left alone as the dominant animals of the weird, perilous green world at the top of the jungle. They never have had to fight with fists, claws or teeth. All they have done—all it has been necessary to do—is talk about it.

The scream of the howler, hurled defiantly at a possible enemy or raised in a diapason to the sunrise or in a ritual of worship to the full moon, is the most fearsome sound of the jungle. As one zoologist has said: “It’s a combination of the bark of a dog and the bray of a mule magnified a thousand-fold.” It can be heard, and clearly discriminated, eight or ten miles away. Some say that the howl not only sounds like the voices of fiends let loose from the pits of Hades, but that the appearance of the animals themselves is just about what one would picture for the infernal beings. The loudness and carrying power is due to the monkey’s peculiar throat structure, which enables the sound to reverberate. This throat structure is the weapon which nature has provided for the animal and it has enabled him to more than hold his own in the endless struggle for survival of the fittest. Even more, it has made him supremely contemptuous of all lesser-voiced creatures, such as men on foot or men in airplanes at whom he howls defiantly.

Of all apes or monkeys, the howler probably looks the least like his distant cousin, man. He is at very best a grotesque caricature of a chimpanzee or a gorilla. Attempts have been made to oust him from the monkey race altogether and to degrade him to the pseudo-monkeys, the lemurs. But in biology there is nothing to justify this.

Fortunately for students of animal behavior the howler is a daylight animal. He usually goes to bed at sundown and stays there until sunrise, except on occasions when the full moon awakens him and arouses some uncontrollable frenzy which finds expression in the weird howling. So about everything he does is open to observation.

The creatures remain about the least acceptable of the monkey and ape race in human company. The feeling apparently is reciprocal. The howler is an almost untamable wild animal. He never will dance at the end of a hurdy-gurdy grinder’s leash, and seldom will be on exhibit in zoos. He dies quickly in captivity, but only after becoming such a nuisance with the howling of a broken heart that zoo keepers are glad to be rid of him. Only one specimen has been kept in captivity at Barro, Colorado—a baby rescued by one of the Indian guides after she had fallen out of a tree. This happens not infrequently to the little howlers before they have mastered the acrobatics of the forest canopy. They are not climbers at birth, any more than seals are able to swim.

In the strange treetop realm among his own the howler is a much more engaging personality than he appears down below. He is the “man” of the green canopy 100 feet above the earth. He is the dominant creature, intellectually if not always physically, and he appears to have evolved a complex form of social organization.

From two to three hundred of the big black monkeys inhabit Barro, Colorado. They are split into groups of from ten to twenty individuals. These groups are probably extended families, each consisting of two or three adult males, a few younger males, and the remainder females and babies. Each clan possesses an area of from 250 to 500 acres. This is the “home town” and few of the monkeys ever stray across its borders.

Within such an area are “roads,” path of long branches and heavy vines by which a troop can pass easily from one treetop to another. These same ways are maintained year after year. The howler requires solid footing. Despite his lofty, wind-tossed habitat he is not much of a gymnast. For one reason, his body is too heavy. He appears quite clumsy compared with his lighter, more volatile relatives, the spider monkeys of the same high realm. Howlers, for example, very seldom have been observed leaping from tree to tree. Occasionally, probably only in cases of dire necessity, a swinging vine may be used as a trapeze. Any aerial acrobatics, however, appear far from this monkey’s ideas of good sport.

Through its allotted area a group usually moves in single file, the adult males leading the way and the females with young clinging to their backs or breasts bringing up the rear. The treetop roads seldom are wide enough to permit two monkeys to move abreast. When any of the troop drops behind, the procession is held up to wait for him. If he does not appear in a few minutes scouts are sent back to find out what has happened. About the worst to be anticipated is that a mother has dropped her baby. She immediately will descend to retrieve it from the ground or, as is more likely, from some of the lower branches which have broken its fall.

The animals appear to maintain a communistic family life. A family never seems to increase or decrease in numbers. Probably new groups are formed if the birth rate becomes greater than is necessary for replacements. In the absence of epidemics death rates are not heavy, for the animal has no very formidable natural enemies. Its hellish howl is enough to scare away even the strongest, fiercest invaders of its high country.