The Falkland Islands Offer A Second Instance Of Birds
With A Similar Disposition.
The extraordinary tameness of
the little Opetiorhynchus has been remarked by Pernety,
Lesson, and other voyagers.
It is not, however, peculiar to
that bird: the Polyborus, snipe, upland and lowland goose,
thrush, bunting, and even some true hawks, are all more or
less tame. As the birds are so tame there, where foxes,
hawks, and owls occur, we may infer that the absence of all
rapacious animals at the Galapagos, is not the cause of their
tameness here. The upland geese at the Falklands show, by
the precaution they take in building on the islets, that they
are aware of their danger from the foxes; but they are not
by this rendered wild towards man. This tameness of the
birds, especially of the water-fowl, is strongly contrasted with
the habits of the same species in Tierra del Fuego, where for
ages past they have been persecuted by the wild inhabitants.
In the Falklands, the sportsman may sometimes kill more
of the upland geese in one day than he can carry home;
whereas in Tierra del Fuego it is nearly as difficult to kill
one, as it is in England to shoot the common wild goose.
In the time of Pernety (1763), all the birds there appear
to have been much tamer than at present; he states that the
Opetiorhynchus would almost perch on his finger; and that
with a wand he killed ten in half an hour. At that period
the birds must have been about as tame as they now are at
the Galapagos. They appear to have learnt caution more
slowly at these latter islands than at the Falklands, where
they have had proportionate means of experience; for besides
frequent visits from vessels, those islands have been at
intervals colonized during the entire period. Even formerly,
when all the birds were so tame, it was impossible by Pernety's
account to kill the black-necked swan - a bird of
passage, which probably brought with it the wisdom learnt
in foreign countries.
I may add that, according to Du Bois, all the birds at
Bourbon in 1571-72, with the exception of the flamingoes
and geese, were so extremely tame, that they could be caught
by the hand, or killed in any number with a stick. Again,
at Tristan d'Acunha in the Atlantic, Carmichael [6] states that
the only two land-birds, a thrush and a bunting, were "so
tame as to suffer themselves to be caught with a hand-net."
From these several facts we may, I think, conclude, first, that
the wildness of birds with regard to man, is a particular
instinct directed against _him_, and not dependent upon any
general degree of caution arising from other sources of
danger; secondly, that it is not acquired by individual birds
in a short time, even when much persecuted; but that in the
course of successive generations it becomes hereditary. With
domesticated animals we are accustomed to see new mental
habits or instincts acquired or rendered hereditary; but with
animals in a state of nature, it must always be most difficult
to discover instances of acquired hereditary knowledge.
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