



Produced by Eric Eldred









THE NATURALIST IN LA PLATA

BY

W. H. HUDSON, C.M.Z.S.


JOINT AUTHOR OF "ARGENTINE ORNITHOLOGY"


WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY J. SMIT

THIRD EDITION.

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1895




PREFACE.


The plan I have followed in this work has been to sift and arrange the
facts I have gathered concerning the habits of the animals best known to
me, preserving those only, which, in my judgment, appeared worth
recording. In some instances a variety of subjects have linked
themselves together in my mind, and have been grouped under one heading;
consequently the scope of the book is not indicated by the list of
contents: this want is, however, made good by an index at the end.

It is seldom an easy matter to give a suitable name to a book of this
description. I am conscious that the one I have made choice of displays
a lack of originality; also, that this kind of title has been used
hitherto for works constructed more or less on the plan of the famous
_Naturalist on the Amazons._ After I have made this apology the reader,
on his part, will readily admit that, in treating of the Natural History
of a district so well known, and often described as the southern portion
of La Plata, which has a temperate climate, and where nature is neither
exuberant nor grand, a personal narrative would have seemed superfluous.

The greater portion of the matter contained in this volume has already
seen the light in the form of papers contributed to the _Field,_ with
other journals that treat of Natural History; and to the monthly
magazines:--_Longmans', The Nineteenth Century, The Gentleman's
Magazine,_ and others: I am indebted to the Editors and Proprietors of
these periodicals for kindly allowing me to make use of this material.

Of all animals, birds have perhaps afforded me most pleasure; but most
of the fresh knowledge I have collected in this department is contained
in a larger work _(Argentine Ornithology),_ of which Dr. P. L. Sclater
is part author. As I have not gone over any of the subjects dealt with
in that work, bird-life has not received more than a fair share of
attention in the present volume.




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER I. THE DESERT PAMPAS

CHAPTER II. CUB PUMA, OR LION OF AMERICA

CHAPTER III. WAVE OF LIFE

CHAPTER IV. SOME CURIOUS ANIMAL WEAPONS

CHAPTER V. FEAR IN BIRDS

CHAPTER VI. PARENTAL AND EARLY INSTINCTS

CHAPTER VII. THE MEPHITIC SKUNK

CHAPTER VIII. MIMICRY AND WARNING COLOURS IN GRASSHOPPERS

CHAPTER IX. DRAGON-FLY STORMS

CHAPTER X. MOSQUITOES AND PARASITE PROBLEMS

CHAPTER XI. HUMBLE-BEES AND OTHER MATTERS

CHAPTER XII. A NOBLE WASP

CHAPTER XIII. NATURE'S NIGHT-LIGHTS

CHAPTER XIV. FACTS AND THOUGHTS ABOUT SPIDERS

CHAPTER XV. THE DEATH-FEIGNING INSTINCT

CHAPTER XVI. HUMMING-BIRDS

CHAPTER XVII. THE CRESTED SCREAMER

CHAPTER XVIII. THE WOODHEWER FAMILY

CHAPTER XIX. MUSIC AND DANCING IN NATURE

CHAPTER XX. BIOGRAPHY OF THE VIZCACHA

CHAPTER XXI. THE DYING HUANACO

CHAPTER XXII. THE STRANGE INSTINCTS OF CATTLE

CHAPTER XXIII. HORSE AND MAN

CHAPTER XXIV. SEEN AND LOST

APPENDIX

INDEX




THE NATURALIST IN LA PLATA,


CHAPTER I.

THE DESERT PAMPAS.


During recent years we have heard much about the great and rapid changes
now going on in the plants and animals of all the temperate regions of
the globe colonized by Europeans. These changes, if taken merely as
evidence of material progress, must be a matter of rejoicing to those
who are satisfied, and more than satisfied, with our system of
civilization, or method of outwitting Nature by the removal of all
checks on the undue increase of our own species. To one who finds a
charm in things as they exist in the unconquered provinces of Nature's
dominions, and who, not being over-anxious to reach the end of his
journey, is content to perform it on horseback, or in a waggon drawn by
bullocks, it is permissible to lament the altered aspect of the earth's
surface, together with the disappearance of numberless noble and
beautiful forms, both of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. For he
cannot find it in his heart to love the forms by which they are
replaced; these are cultivated and domesticated, and have only become
useful to man at the cost of that grace and spirit which freedom and
wildness give. In numbers they are many--twenty-five millions of sheep
in this district, fifty millions in that, a hundred millions in a
third--but how few are the species in place of those destroyed? and when
the owner of many sheep and much wheat desires variety--for he possesses
this instinctive desire, albeit in conflict with and overborne by the
perverted instinct of destruction--what is there left to him, beyond his
very own, except the weeds that spring up in his fields under all skies,
ringing him round with old-world monotonous forms, as tenacious of their
undesired union with him as the rats and cockroaches that inhabit his
house?

We hear most frequently of North America, New Zealand, and Australia in
this connection; but nowhere on the globe has civilization "written
strange defeatures" more markedly than on that great area of level
country called by English writers _the pampas_, but by the Spanish more
appropriately _La Pampa_--from the Quichua word signifying open space or
country--since it forms in most part one continuous plain, extending on
its eastern border from the river Parana, in latitude 32 degrees, to the
Patagonian formation on the river Colorado, and comprising about two
hundred thousand square miles of humid, grassy country.

This district has been colonized by Europeans since the middle of the
sixteenth century; but down to within a very few years ago immigration
was on too limited a scale to make any very great change; and, speaking
only of the pampean country, the conquered territory was a long,
thinly-settled strip, purely pastoral, and the Indians, with their
primitive mode of warfare, were able to keep back the invaders from the
greater portion of their ancestral hunting-grounds. Not twenty years
ago a ride of two hundred miles, starting from the capital city,
Buenos Ayres, was enough to place one well beyond the furthest
south-western frontier outpost. In 1879 the Argentine Government
determined to rid the country of the aborigines, or, at all events, to
break their hostile and predatory spirit once for all; with the result
that the entire area of the grassy pampas, with a great portion of
the sterile pampas and Patagonia, has been made available to the
emigrant. There is no longer anything to deter the starvelings
of the Old World from possessing themselves of this new land of
promise, flowing, like Australia, with milk and tallow, if not with
honey; any emasculated migrant from a Genoese or Neapolitan
slum is now competent to "fight the wilderness" out there, with his
eight-shilling fowling-piece and the implements of his trade. The
barbarians no longer exist to frighten his soul with dreadful war cries;
they have moved away to another more remote and shadowy region, called
in their own language _Alhuemapu_, and not known to geographers. For
the results so long and ardently wished for have swiftly followed on
General Roca's military expedition; and the changes witnessed during the
last decade on the pampas exceed in magnitude those which had been
previously effected by three centuries of occupation.

In view of this wave of change now rapidly sweeping away the old
order, with whatever beauty and grace it possessed, it might not seem
inopportune at the present moment to give a rapid sketch, from the field
naturalist's point of view, of the great plain, as it existed before the
agencies introduced by European colonists had done their work, and as it
still exists in its remoter parts.

The humid, grassy, pampean country extends, roughly speaking, half-way
from the Atlantic Ocean and the Plata and Parana rivers to the Andes,
and passes gradually into the "Monte Formation," or _sterile pampa_--a
sandy, more or less barren district, producing a dry, harsh, ligneous
vegetation, principally thorny bushes and low trees, of which the chanar
(Gurliaca decorticans) is the most common; hence the name of
"Chanar-steppe" used by some writers: and this formation extends
southwards down into Patagonia. Scientists have not yet been able to
explain why the pampas, with a humid climate, and a soil exceedingly
rich, have produced nothing but grass, while the dry, sterile
territories on their north, west, and south borders have an arborescent
vegetation. Darwin's conjecture that the extreme violence of the
_pampero,_ or south-west wind, prevented trees from growing, is now
proved to have been ill-founded since the introduction of the Eucalyptus
globulus; for this noble tree attains to an extraordinary height on the
pampas, and exhibits there a luxuriance of foliage never seen in
Australia.

To this level area--my "parish of Selborne," or, at all events, a goodly
portion of it--with the sea on one hand, and on the other the
practically infinite expanse of grassy desert--another sea, not "in vast
fluctuations fixed," but in comparative calm--I should like to conduct
the reader in imagination: a country all the easier to be imagined on
account of the absence of mountains, woods, lakes, and rivers. There is,
indeed, little to be imagined--not even a sense of vastness; and Darwin,
touching on this point, in the _Journal of a Naturalist,_ aptly
says:--"At sea, a person's eye being six feet above the surface of the
water, his horizon is two miles and four-fifths distant. In like manner,
the more level the plain, the more nearly does the horizon approach
within these narrow limits; and this, in my opinion, entirely destroys
the grandeur which one would have imagined that a vast plain would have
possessed."

I remember my first experience of a hill, after having been always shut
within "these narrow limits." It was one of the range of sierras near
Cape Corrientes, and not above eight hundred feet high; yet, when I had
gained the summit, I was amazed at the vastness of the earth, as it
appeared to me from that modest elevation. Persons born and bred on the
pampas, when they first visit a mountainous district, frequently
experience a sensation as of "a ball in the throat" which seems to
prevent free respiration.

In most places the rich, dry soil is occupied by a coarse grass, three
or four feet high, growing in large tussocks, and all the year round of
a deep green; a few slender herbs and trefoils, with long, twining
stems, maintain a frail existence among the tussocks; but the strong
grass crowds out most plants, and scarcely a flower relieves its uniform
everlasting verdure. There are patches, sometimes large areas, where it
does not grow, and these are carpeted by small creeping herbs of a
livelier green