King Solomon's Ring Read online

  Is it justifiable to create still another breed of dog in addition to the many that are already in existence? I think so. In these days, the value of the dog to man is purely a psychological one, except in the few cases where the animal has a utilitarian purpose, as for sportsmen or policemen. The pleasure which I derive from my dog is closely akin to the joy accorded to me by the raven, the greylag goose or other wild animals that enliven my walks through the countryside; it seems like a re-establishment of the immediate bond with that unconscious omniscience that we call nature. The price which man had to pay for his culture and civilization was the severing of this bond which had to be torn to give him his specific freedom of will. But our infinite longing for paradise lost is nothing else than a half-conscious yearning for our ruptured ties. Therefore, I need a dog that is no phantasy of fashion but a living animal, no product of science or triumph of form-breeding art but a natural being with an undistorted soul. And this, unfortunately, is what very few pedigree dogs possess, least of all such breeds as, at some time or other, have become “modern” and have been bred with exclusive consideration for a certain external appearance. So far, every breed of dog that has been exposed to this process has been damaged in mind and soul. I wish to achieve the opposite result: my purpose in breeding dogs is to bring about an ideal combination of the psychological qualities of Lupus and of Aureus dogs. I want to breed a dog which is specially capable of supplying that which poor, civilized, city-pent man is so badly in need of!

  Let us admit this and not lie to ourselves that we need the dog as a protection for our house. We do need him, but not as a watch-dog. I, at least in dreary foreign towns, have certainly stood in need of my dog’s company and I have derived, from the mere fact of his existence, a great sense of inward security, such as one finds in a childhood memory or in the prospect of the scenery of one’s own home country, for me the Blue Danube, for you the White Cliffs of Dover. In the almost film-like flitting-by of modern life, a man needs something to tell him, from time to time, that he is still himself, and nothing can give him this assurance in so comforting a manner as the “four feet trotting behind”.

  11

  THE PERENNIAL RETAINERS

  Enough, if something from our hands have power

  To live, and act, and serve the future hour.

  Wordsworth, After-Thought

  In the chimney the autumn wind sings the song of the elements, and the old firs before my study window wave excitedly with their arms and sing so loudly in chorus that I can hear their sighing melody through the double panes. Suddenly, from above, a dozen black, streamlined projectiles shoot across the piece of clouded sky for which my window forms a frame. Heavily as stones they fall, fall to the tops of the firs where they suddenly sprout wings, become birds and then light feather rags that the storm seizes and whirls out of my line of vision, more rapidly than they were borne into it.

  I walk to the window to watch this extraordinary game that the jackdaws are playing with the wind. A game? Yes, indeed, it is a game, in the most literal sense of the word: practised movements, indulged in and enjoyed for their own sake and not for the achievement of a special object. And rest assured, these are not merely inborn, purely instinctive actions, but movements that have been carefully learned. All these feats that the birds are performing, their wonderful exploitation of the wind, their amazingly exact assessment of distances and, above all, their understanding of local wind conditions, their knowledge of all the up-currents, air pockets and eddies—all this proficiency is no inheritance, but, for each bird, an individually acquired accomplishment.

  And look what they do with the wind! At first sight, you, poor human being, think that the storm is playing with the birds, like a cat with a mouse, but soon you see, with astonishment, that it is the fury of the elements that here plays the role of the mouse and that the jackdaws are treating the storm exactly as the cat its unfortunate victim. Nearly, but only nearly, do they give the storm its head, let it throw them high, high into the heavens, till they seem to fall upwards, then, with a casual flap of a wing, they turn themselves over, open their pinions for a fraction of a second from below against the wind, and dive—with an acceleration far greater than that of a falling stone—into the depths below. Another tiny jerk of the wing and they return to their normal position and, on close-reefed sails, shoot away with breathless speed into the teeth of the gale, hundreds of yards to the west: this all playfully and without effort, just to spite the stupid wind that tries to drive them towards the east. The sightless monster itself must perform the work of propelling the birds through the air at a rate of well over 8o miles an hour; the jackdaws do nothing to help beyond a few lazy adjustments of their black wings. Sovereign control over the power of the elements, intoxicating triumph of the living organism over the pitiless strength of the inorganic!

  Twenty-five years have passed since the first jackdaw flew round the gables of Altenberg, and I lost my heart to the bird with the silvery eyes. And, as so frequently happens with the great loves of our lives, I was not conscious of it at the time when I became acquainted with my first jackdaw. It sat in Rosalia Bongar’s pet shop, which still holds for me all the magic of early childhood memories. It sat in a rather dark cage and I bought it for exactly four shillings, not because I intended to use it for scientific observations, but because I suddenly felt a longing to cram that great, yellow-framed red throat with good food. I wished to let it fly as soon as it became independent and this I really did, but with the unexpected consequence that even to-day, after the terrible war, when all my other birds and animals are gone, the jackdaws are still nesting under our roof-tops. No bird or animal has ever rewarded me so handsomely for an act of pity.

  Few birds—indeed few of the higher animals (the colony-building insects come under a different heading)—possess so highly developed a social and family life as the jackdaws. Accordingly, few animal babies are so touchingly helpless and so charmingly dependent on their keeper as young jackdaws. Just as the quills of its primary feathers became hard and ready for flight, my young bird suddenly developed a really childlike affection for my person. It refused to remain by itself for a second, flew after me from one room to another and called in desperation if ever I was forced to leave it alone. I christened it “Jock” after its own call-note, and to this day we preserve the tradition that the first young bird of a new species reared in isolation is christened after the call note of its kind.

  Such a fully fledged young jackdaw, attached to its keeper by all its youthful affection, is one of the most wonderful objects for observation that you can imagine. You can go outside with the bird and, from the nearest viewpoint, watch its flight, its method of feeding, in short all its habits, in perfectly natural surroundings, unhampered by the bars of a cage. I do not think that I have ever learned so much about the essence of animal nature from any of my beasts or birds as from Jock in that summer of 1925.

  It must have been owing to my gift of imitating its call that it soon preferred me to any other person. I could take long walks and even bicycle rides with it and it flew after me, faithful as a dog. Although there was no doubt that it knew me personally and preferred me to anybody else, yet it would desert me and fly after some other person if he was walking much faster than me, particularly if he overtook me.

  The urge to fly after an object moving away from it is very strong in a young jackdaw and almost takes the form of a reflex action. As soon as he had left me, Jock would notice his error and correct it, coming back to me hurriedly. As he grew older, he learned to repress the impulse to pursue a stranger, even one walking very fast indeed. Yet even then I would often notice his giving a slight start or a movement indicative of flying after the faster traveller.

  Jock had to struggle with a still greater mental conflict when one or more hooded crows, common in this district, flew up in front of us. The sight of those beating black wings disappearing rapidly into the distance released in the jackdaw an irresistible urge to purs
ue which it never, in spite of bitter experience, learned to resist. It used to rush blindly after the crows which repeatedly lured it far away and it was only by good luck that it did not get lost altogether. Most peculiar was its reaction when the crows alighted: the moment that the magic of those flapping black wings ceased to work, Jock entirely lost interest! Though a flying crow had such an overwhelming attraction for him, a sitting one evidently did not, and as soon as the crows landed he had had enough of them, was seized with loneliness and began to call for me in that strange, complaining tone with which young, lost jackdaws call for their parents. As soon as he heard my answering call, he rose and flew towards me with such determination that he frequently drew the crows with him and came flying to my side as the leader of their troop. So blindly would the crows follow him in such cases that they were almost upon me before they noticed me at all. When finally they became conscious of my presence, they were struck with terror and darted away in such a panic that Jock—infected by the general consternation—once again flew away after them. When I had learned to recognize this danger, I was able to avoid complications by making myself as conspicuous as possible and thus warding off the approaching crows early enough to prevent a panic.

  Like the stones of a mosaic, the inherited and acquired elements of a young bird’s behaviour are pieced together to produce a perfect pattern. But, in a bird that has been reared by hand, the natural harmony of this design is necessarily somewhat disturbed. All those social actions and reactions whose object is not determined by inheritance, but acquired by individual experience, are apt to become unnaturally deflected. In other words, they are directed towards human beings, instead of fellow-members of the bird’s species. As Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli thought of himself as a wolf, so Jock, had he been able to speak, would certainly have called himself a human being. Only the sight of a pair of flapping black wings sounded a hereditary note: “Fly with us”. As long as he was walking, he considered himself a man, but the moment he took to wing, he saw himself as a hooded crow, because these birds were the first to awaken his flock instinct.

  When in Kipling’s Mowgli love is awakened, this all-powerful urge forces him to leave his wolf brothers and to return to the human family. This poetical assumption is scientifically correct. We have good reason to believe that in human beings—as in most mammals—the potential object of sexual love makes itself evident by characters which speak to the depth of age-old inheritance, and not by signs recognizable by experience—as evidently is the case in many birds. Birds reared in isolation from their kind do not generally know which species they belong to; that is to say, not only their social reactions but also their sexual desires are directed towards those beings with whom they have spent certain impressionable phases of their early youth. Consequently, birds raised singly by hand tend to regard human beings, and human beings only, as potential partners in all reproductive activities. And this is exactly what Jock did.

  This phenomenon can be observed regularly in hand-reared male house sparrows, who, for this reason, enjoyed great popularity among the loose-living ladies of Roman society, and whom Catullus has immortalized by his little poem “Passer mortuus est meae puellae”. But there is no limit to the queer errors that may arise in this connection. A female barnyard goose which I now possess was the only survivor of a brood of six, of which the remainder all succumbed to avian tuberculosis. Consequently she grew up in the company of chickens and, in spite of the fact that we bought for her, in good time, a beautiful gander, she fell head over heels in love with our handsome Rhode Island cock, inundated him with proposals, jealously prevented him from making love to his hens and remained absolutely insensible to the attentions of the gander. The hero of a similar tragi-comedy was a lovely white peacock of the Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna. He too was the last survivor of an early-hatched brood which perished in a period of cold weather, and to save him, the keeper put him in the warmest room to be found in the whole Zoo, which at that time, shortly after the first world war, was in the reptile house with the giant tortoises! For the rest of his life this unfortunate bird saw only in those huge reptiles the object of his desire and remained unresponsive to the charms of the prettiest peahens. It is typical of this extraordinary state of fixation of sexual desire on a particular and unnatural object that it cannot be reversed.

  When Jock reached maturity, he fell in love with our housemaid, who just then married and left our service. A few days later, Jock discovered her in the next village two miles away, and immediately moved into her cottage, returning only at night to his customary sleeping quarters. In the middle of June, when the mating season of jackdaws was over, he suddenly returned home to us and forthwith adopted one of the fourteen young jackdaws which I had reared that spring. Towards this protégé, Jock displayed exactly the same attitude as normal jackdaws show towards their young. The behaviour towards its offspring must, of necessity, be innate in any bird or animal, since its own young are the first with which it becomes acquainted. Did a jackdaw not respond to them with instinctively established, inherited reactions, it would not know how to take care of them and might even tear them to pieces and devour them, like any other living object of the same size.

  I must now dispel in the reader an illusion which I myself harboured up to the time when Jock reached sexual maturity; the kind of advances which Jock made to our housemaid, slowly but surely divulged the fact that “he” was a female! She reacted to this young lady exactly as a normal female jackdaw would to her mate. In birds, even in parrots, of which the opposite is often maintained, there is no law of attraction of opposites, by which female animals are drawn towards men and males towards women. Another tame adult male jackdaw fell in love with me and treated me exactly as a female of his own kind. By the hour, this bird tried to make me creep into the nesting cavity of his choice, a few inches in width, and in just the same way a tame male house sparrow tried to entice me into my own waistcoat pocket. The male jackdaw became most importunate in that he continually wanted to feed me with what he considered the choicest delicacies. Remarkably enough, he recognized the human mouth in an anatomically correct way as the orifice of ingestion and he was overjoyed if I opened my lips to him, uttering at the same time an adequate begging note. This must be considered as an act of self-sacrifice on my part, since even I cannot pretend to like the taste of finely minced worm, generously mixed with jackdaw saliva. You will understand that I found it difficult to co-operate with the bird in this manner every few minutes! But if I did not, I had to guard my ears against him, otherwise, before I knew what was happening, the passage of one of these organs would be filled right up to the drum with warm worm pulp, for jackdaws, when feeding their female or their young, push the food mass, with the aid of their tongue, deep down into the partner’s pharynx. However, this bird only made use of my ears when I refused him my mouth, on which the first attempt was always made.

  It was entirely due to Jock that, in 1927, I reared fourteen young jackdaws in Altenberg. Many of her remarkable instinctive actions and reactions towards human beings, as substitute objects for fellow-members of her species, not only seemed to fall short of their biological goal, but remained incomprehensible to me and therefore aroused my curiosity. This awakened in me the desire to raise a whole colony of free flying tame jackdaws, and then study the social and family behaviour of these remarkable birds.

  As it was out of the question that I should act as substitute for their parents and train each of these young jackdaws as I had done Jock the previous year, and as, through Jock, I was familiar with their poor sense of orientation, I had to think out some other method of confining the young birds to the place. After much careful consideration, I arrived at a solution which subsequently proved entirely satisfactory. In front of the little window of the loft where Jock had now dwelt for some time, I built a long and narrow aviary, consisting of two compartments which rested upon a stone-built gutter a yard in width, and stretched almost the entire breadth of the house.

/>   Jock was, at first, somewhat upset by the building alterations in the near neighbourhood of her home and it was some time before she became reconciled to them and flew in and out freely through the trap-door in the roof of the front compartment of the aviary. It was only then that I proceeded to install the young birds, each of which had been made recognizable by coloured rings on one or both legs. From these rings the young jackdaws also derived their names. When the birds were all well settled in their new quarters, I lured them into the rear compartment of the cage, leaving only Jock and the two tamest of the young birds, Blueblue and Redblue, in the front compartment, the one with the trap-door. Thus separated, the birds were again left to themselves for a few days. What I hoped to attain by these measures was that the birds destined for free flight should be held back by their social attachment to those who were still imprisoned in the hindmost part of the aviary. At this time, as I have already mentioned, Jock had begun to mother one of the young jackdaws, Leftgold, and this was very fortunate indeed as it brought about her return home at the right moment for the experiments I am about to describe. I did not choose Leftgold as one of the first subjects for release, because I hoped that, for his sake, Jock would remain in the precincts of our house, otherwise there was a risk of her flying off with Leftgold who was now fully fledged, to live with my previously mentioned housemaid in the next village.

  My hopes that the young jackdaws would fly after Jock as she had followed me, were only partly fulfilled. When I opened the trap-door, Jock was outside in a flash and, making one dive for liberty, within a few seconds had disappeared. It was a long time before the young jackdaws, mistrustful of the unaccustomed aspect of the open trap-door, dared to fly through it. At last, both of them did so simultaneously, just as Jock came whizzing past again outside. They tried to follow her but soon lost her as neither could imitate her sharply banked turns and her steep dives. This lack of consideration for the limited flying abilities of the young is not shown by good parent jackdaws, who meticulously avoid such flying stunts while guiding their offspring. Later, when Leftgold was freed, Jock also behaved in this manner, flying slowly and refraining from all difficult manoeuvring, looking back over her shoulder constantly to see whether the young bird was still following. Not only did Jock pay no attention to the other young jackdaws, but they, for their part, obviously did not realize that she was equipped with a most desirable local knowledge which they lacked and that she would have been a more reliable guide than one of their own companions. These silly children sought leadership among themselves, each one trying to fly after the other. In such cases, the wild, aimless circling of the birds impels them higher and higher into the sky, and as, at this age, they are quite incapable of descending in a bold dive, these antics invariably result in their getting lost, because the higher they mount, the farther they will be from home when they ultimately succeed in coming down again. Several of the fourteen young jackdaws went astray in this fashion. An old and experienced jackdaw, particularly an old male, would have prevented such a thing happening, as will be explained later on, but at this stage no such bird was present in the colony.