King Solomon's Ring Page 9

  The enormous sensitivity of many animals to certain minute movements of expression, as, for example, the above described capacity of the dog to perceive the friendly or hostile feelings which his master harbours for another person, is a wonderful thing. It is therefore not surprising that the naïve observer, seeking to assign to the animal human qualities, may believe that a being which can guess even such inward unspoken thoughts, must, still more, understand every word that the beloved master utters; now an intelligent dog does understand a considerable number of words, but, on the other hand, it must not be forgotten that the ability to understand the minutest expressional movements is thus acute in animals for the very reason that they lack true speech.

  As I have already explained, all the innate expressions of emotion, such as the whole complicated “signal code” of the jackdaw, are far removed from human language. When your dog nuzzles you, whines, runs to the door and scratches it, or puts his paws on the wash basin under the tap, and looks at you imploringly, he does something that comes far nearer to human speech than anything that a jackdaw or goose can ever “say”, no matter how clearly “intelligible” and appropriate to the occasion the finely differentiated expressional sounds of these birds may appear. The dog wants to make you open the door or turn on the tap, and what he does has the specific and purposeful motive of influencing you in a certain direction. He would never perform these movements if you were not present. But the jackdaw or goose merely gives unconscious expression to its inward mood and the “Kia” or “Kiaw”, or the warning sound escapes the bird involuntarily; when in a certain mood, it must utter the corresponding sound, whether or not there is anybody there to hear it.

  The intelligible actions of the dog described above are not innate but are individually learned and governed by true insight. Every individual dog has different methods of making himself understood by his master and will adapt his behaviour according to the situation. My bitch Stasie, the great-grandmother of the dog I now possess, having once eaten something which disagreed with her, wanted to go out during the night. I was at that time overworked, and slept very soundly, so that she did not succeed in waking me and indicating her requirements, by her usual signs; to her whining and nosing I had evidently only responded by burying myself still deeper in my pillows. This desperate situation finally induced her to forget her normal obedience and to do a thing which was strictly forbidden her: she jumped on my bed and then proceeded literally to dig me out of the blankets and roll me on the floor. Such an adaptability to present needs is totally lacking in the “vocabulary” of birds: they never roll you out of bed.

  Parrots and large corvines are endowed with “speech” in still another sense: they can imitate human words. Here, an association of thought between the sounds and certain experiences is sometimes possible. This imitating is nothing other than the so-called mocking found in many song birds. Willow warblers, red-backed shrikes and many others are masters of this art. Mocking consists of sounds, learned by imitation, which are not innate and are uttered only while the bird is singing; they have no “meaning” and bear no relation whatsoever to the inborn “vocabulary” of the species. This also applies to starlings, magpies and jackdaws, who not only “mock” bird’s voices but also successfully imitate human words. However, the talking of big corvines and parrots is a somewhat different matter. It still bears that character of playfulness and lack of purpose which is also inherent in the mocking of smaller birds and which is loosely akin to the play of more intelligent animals. But a corvine or a parrot will utter its human words independently of song and it is undeniable that these sounds may occasionally have a definite thought association.

  Many grey parrots, as well as others, will say “good morning” only once a day and at the appropriate time. My friend Professor Otto Koehler possessed an ancient grey parrot which, being addicted to the vice of feather-plucking, was nearly bald. This bird answered to the name of “Geier” which in German means vulture. Geier was certainly no beauty but he redeemed himself by his speaking talents. He said “good morning” and “good evening” quite aptly and, when a visitor stood up to depart, he said, in a benevolent bass voice “Na, auf Wiedersehen”. But he only said this if the guest really departed. Like a “thinking” dog, he was tuned in to the finest, involuntarily given signs; what these signs were, we never could find out and we’ve never once succeeded in provoking the retort by staging a departure. But when the visitor really left, no matter how inconspicuously he took his leave, promptly and mockingly came the words “Na, auf Wiedersehen”!

  The well-known Berlin ornithologist, Colonel von Lukanus, also possessed a grey parrot which became famous through a feat of memory. Von Lukanus kept, among other birds, a tame hoopoe named “Höpfchen”. The parrot, which could talk well, soon mastered this word. Hoopoes unfortunately do not live long in captivity, though grey parrots do; so, after a time, “Höpfchen” went the way of all flesh and the parrot appeared to have forgotten his name, at any rate, he did not say it any more. Nine years later, Colonel von Lukanus acquired another hoopoe and, as the parrot set eyes on him for the first time, he said at once, and then repeatedly, “Höpfchen” … “Höpfchen” ….

  In general, these birds are just as slow in learning something new as they are tenacious in remembering what they have once learned. Everyone who has tried to drum a new word into the brain of a starling or a parrot knows with what patience one must apply oneself to this end, and how untiringly one must again and again repeat the word. Nevertheless, such birds can, in exceptional cases, learn to imitate a word which they have heard seldom, perhaps only once. However, this apparently only succeeds when a bird is in an exceptional state of excitement; I myself have seen only two such cases. My brother had, for years, a delightfully tame and lively blue-fronted Amazon parrot named Papagallo, which had an extraordinary talent for speech. As long as he lived with us in Altenberg, Papagallo flew just as freely around as most of my other birds. A talking parrot that flies from tree to tree and at the same time says human words, gives a much more comical effect than one that sits in a cage and does the same thing. When Papagallo, with loud cries of “Where’s the Doc?” flew about the district, sometimes in a genuine search for his master, it was positively irresistible.

  Still funnier, but also remarkable from a scientific point of view, was the following performance of the bird; Papagallo feared nothing and nobody, with the exception of the chimneysweep. Birds are very apt to fear things which are up above. And this tendency is associated with the innate dread of the bird of prey swooping down from the heights. So everything that appears against the sky, has for them something of the meaning of “bird of prey”. As the black man, already sinister in his darkness, stood up on the chimney stack and became outlined against the sky, Papagallo fell into a panic of fear and flew, loudly screaming, so far away that we feared he might not come back. Months later, when the chimney-sweep came again, Papagallo was sitting on the weathercock, squabbling with the jackdaws who wanted to sit there too. All at once, I saw him grow long and thin and peer down anxiously into the village street; then he flew up and away, shrieking in raucous tones, again and again, “the chimneysweep is coming, the chimney-sweep is coming”. The next moment, the black man walked through the doorway of the yard!

  Unfortunately, I was unable to find out how often Papagallo had seen the chimney-sweep before and how often he had heard the excited cry of our cook which heralded his approach. It was, without a doubt, the voice and intonation of this lady which the bird reproduced. But he had certainly not heard it more than three times at the most and, each time, only once and at an interval of months.

  The second case known to me in which a talking bird learned human words after hearing them only once or very few times, concerns a hooded crow. Again it was a whole sentence which thus impressed itself on the bird’s memory. “Hansl”, as the bird was called, could compete in speaking talent with the most gifted parrot. The crow had been reared by a railwayman, in the
next village, and it flew about freely and had grown into a well-proportioned, healthy fellow, a good advertisement for the rearing ability of its foster-father. Contrary to popular opinion, crows are not easy to rear and, under the inadequate care which they usually receive, mostly develop into those stunted, halfcrippled specimens which are so often seen in captivity. One day, some village boys brought me a dirt-encrusted hooded crow whose wings and tail were clipped to small stumps. I was hardly able to recognize, in this pathetic being, the once beautiful Hansl. I bought the bird, as, on principle, I buy all unfortunate animals that the village boys bring me and this I do partly out of pity and partly because amongst these stray animals there might be one of real interest. And this one certainly was! I rang up Hansl’s master who told me that the bird had actually been missing some days and begged me to adopt him till the next moult. So, accordingly, I put the crow in the pheasant pen and gave it concentrated food, so that, in the imminent new moult, it would grow good new wing and tail feathers. At this time, when the bird was, of necessity, a prisoner, I found out that Hansl had a surprising gift of the gab and he gave me the opportunity of hearing plenty! He had, of course, picked up just what you would expect a tame crow to hear that sits on a tree, in the village street, and listens to the “language” of the inhabitants.

  I later had the pleasure of seeing this bird recover his full plumage and I freed him as soon as he was fully capable of flight. He returned forthwith to his former master, in Wordern, but continued, a welcome guest, to visit us from time to time. Once he was missing for several weeks and, when he returned, I noticed that he had, on one foot, a broken digit which had healed crooked. And this is the whole point of the history of Hansl, the hooded crow. For we know just how he came by this little defect. And from whom do we know it? Believe it or not, Hansl told us himself! When he suddenly reappeared, after his long absence, he knew a new sentence. With the accent of a true street urchin, he said, in lower Austrian dialect, a short sentence which, translated into broad Lancashire, would sound like “Got ’im in t’bloomin’ trap!” There was no doubt about the truth of this statement. Just as in the case of Papagallo, a sentence which he had certainly not heard often had stuck in Hansl’s memory because he had heard it in a moment of great apprehension, that is immediately after he had been caught. How he got away again Hansl unfortunately did not tell us.

  In such cases, the sentimental animal lover, crediting the creature with human intelligence, will take an oath on it that the bird understands what he says. This, of course, is quite incorrect. Not even the cleverest “talking” birds which, as we have seen, are certainly capable of connecting their sound-expressions with particular occurrences, learn to make practical use of their powers, to achieve purposefully even the simplest object. Professor Koehler, who can boast of the greatest successes in the science of training animals, and who succeeded in teaching pigeons to count up to six, tried to teach the above-mentioned, talented grey parrot “Geier” to say “food” when he was hungry and “water” when he was dry. This attempt did not succeed, nor, so far, has it been achieved by anybody else. The failure in itself is remarkable. Since, as we have seen, the bird is able to connect his sound utterances with certain occurrences, we should expect him, first of all, to connect them with a purpose; but this, surprisingly, he is unable to do. In all other cases, where an animal learns a new type of behaviour, it does so to achieve some purpose. The most curious types of behaviour may be thus acquired, especially with the object of influencing the human keeper. A most grotesque habit of this kind was learned by a Blumenau’s parakeet which belonged to Prof. Karl von Frisch. The scientist only let the bird fly freely when he had just watched it have an evacuation of the bowels, so that, for the next ten minutes, his well-kept furniture was not endangered. The parakeet learned very quickly to associate these facts and, as he was passionately fond of leaving his cage, he would force out a minute dropping with all his might, every time Prof. von Frisch came near the cage. He even squeezed desperately when it was impossible to produce anything, and really threatened to do himself an injury by the violence of his straining. You just had to let the poor thing out every time you saw him!

  Yet the clever “Geier”, much cleverer than that little parakeet, could not even learn to say “food” when he was hungry. The whole complicated apparatus of the bird’s syrinx and brain that makes imitation and association of thought possible, appears to have no function in connection with the survival of the species. We ask ourselves vainly what it is there for!

  I only know one bird that learned to use a human word when he wanted a particular thing and who thus connected a sound-expression with a purpose, and it is certainly no coincidence that it was a bird of that species which I consider to have the highest mental development of all, namely the raven. Ravens have a certain innate call-note which corresponds to the “Kia” of the jackdaw and has the same meaning, that is, the invitation to others to fly with the bird that utters it. In the raven, this note is a sonorous, deep-throated, and, at the same time, sharply metallic “krackrackrack”. Should the bird wish to persuade another of the same species which is sitting on the ground to fly with it, he executes the same kind of movements as described in the chapter on jackdaws: he flies, from behind, close above the other bird and, in passing it, wobbles with his closely folded tail, at the same time emitting a particularly sharp “Krackrackrackrack” which sounds almost like a volley of small explosions.

  My raven Roah, so named after the call-note of the young raven, was, even as a mature bird, a close friend of mine and accompanied me, when he had nothing better to do, on long walks and even on skiing tours, or on motorboat excursions on the Danube. Particularly in his later years he was not only shy of strange people, but also had a strong aversion to places where he had once been frightened or had had any other unpleasant experience. Not only did he hesitate to come down from the air to join me in such places, but he could not bear to see me linger in what he considered to be a dangerous spot. And, just as my old jackdaws tried to make their truant children leave the ground and fly after them, so Roah bore down upon me from behind, and, flying close over my head, he wobbled with his tail and then swept upwards again, at the same time looking backwards over his shoulder to see if I was following. In accompaniment to this sequence of movements—which, to stress the fact again, is entirely innate—Roah, instead of uttering the above described call-note, said his own name, with human intonation. The most peculiar thing about this was that Roah used the human word for me only. When addressing one of his own species, he employed the normal innate call-note. To suspect that I had unconsciously trained him would obviously be wrong; for this could only have taken place if, by pure chance, I had walked up to Roah at the very moment when he happened to be calling his name, and, at the same time, to be wanting my company. Only if this rather unlikely coincidence of three factors had repeated itself on several occasions, could a corresponding association of thought have been formed by the bird, and that certainly was not the case. The old raven must, then, have possessed a sort of insight that “Roah” was my call-note! Solomon was not the only man who could speak to animals, but Roah is, so far as I know, the only animal that has ever spoken a human word to a man, in its right context—even if it was only a very ordinary call-note.

  9

  THE TAMING OF THE SHREW

  Though Nature, red in tooth and claw,

  With ravine, shrieked against his creed.

  Tennyson, In Memoriam

  All shrews are particularly difficult to keep; this is not because, as we are led proverbially to believe, they are hard to tame, but because the metabolism of these smallest of mammals is so very fast that they will die of hunger within two or three hours if the food supply fails. Since they feed exclusively on small, living animals, mostly insects, and demand, of these, considerably more than their own weight every day, they are most exacting charges. At the time of which I am writing, I had never succeeded in keeping any of the terrestr
ial shrews alive for any length of time; most of those that I happened to obtain had probably only been caught because they were already ill and they died almost at once. I had never succeeded in procuring a healthy specimen. Now the order Insectivora is very low in the genealogical hierarchy of mammals and is, therefore, of particular interest to the comparative ethologist. Of the whole group, there was only one representative with whose behaviour I was tolerably familiar, namely the hedgehog, an extremely interesting animal of whose ethology Professor Herter of Berlin has made a very thorough study. Of the behaviour of all other members of the family practically nothing is known. Since they are nocturnal and partly subterranean animals, it is nearly impossible to approach them in field observation, and the difficulty of keeping them in captivity had hitherto precluded their study in the laboratory. So the Insectivores were officially placed on my programme.