Sbirro

“ There has been an unusual number of shrikes the past fall and winter; like the hawks, they follow in the wake of the little birds and prey upon them. Some seasons pass and I never see a shrike. This year I have seen at least a dozen while passing along the road. One day I saw one carrying its prey in its feet,—a performance which I supposed it incapable of, as it is not equipped for this business like a rapacious bird, but has feet like a robin. One wintry evening, near sunset, I saw one alight on the top of a tree by the roadside, with some small object in its beak. ”

“ An old olive-stump softened underground by decay, provides me with the larva of the Rhinoceros Beetle. It is a plump sausage, as thick as a man’s thumb. When stung by the Scorpion, the paunchy grub glides among [92] the scraps of decayed olive-wood with which I have furnished a glass jar; heedless of its mishap, it works its jaws so lustily that, eight months later, having thrived and waxed fat, it is preparing its cell for the metamorphosis. It has passed through the dreadful ordeal unscathed.
As for the adult insect, we have already seen what it does. ”

“ All this the Canary saw. The Crow, however, was not afraid of either cats or hawks. She often had a notion to have a taste of a young bird herself. At first, the Canary could not believe this, but she really did see this with her own eyes. A flock of sparrows were chasing the Crow, chattering and screaming.
"Let her go! Let her go!" screamed [ 120] the sparrows, beside themselves, flying over the Crow's nest in a frenzy. "This is awful! This is real robbery!"
The Crow hid deep in her nest and the Canary saw with horror a bleeding sparrow, dead. ”

“ Well, on this afternoon, a big, silky tiger came walking down the lane. Suddenly, when he was just about opposite us, he stopped short—like this statue—his head down. He stared at something. We followed his shining eyes. A cobra had slipped out of the box in which the chap kept his snakes. The tiger stared as if paralyzed, fascinated, a yard from the snake's head. A cobra! That's the wrong kind of a girl—a cobra. Mind you, this tiger could have killed the thing with one blow of his paw. He could have killed a lion, or scattered a regiment. ”

“ Siberian forests are dumb and dead, “dead to the point of starvation”, as Middendorf most justly says. The silence which reigns within them is a positive torture. When the pairing of the black-cock is past one may hear the song of the fieldfare and the black-throated thrush, the warbling of the white-throat, the linnet, and the pine grosbeak, the melody of the wood-wren, and the call of the cuckoo, but hardly ever all these voices at once. ”

“ Even the little sparrow, which flits about by the roadside, can laugh at us with his impudent little chirp, as he flies up out of reach to the topmost branch of a tree. And yet a glance at his skeleton will show us that he has the same framework as a reptile, only it is altered to suit his mode of life. ”

“ The trunks of the thickest trees are rent with a loud clang, masses of rock are torn from their sites, the ground in the valleys is split into a myriad fissures, from which the waters that are underneath bubble up, throwing off a cloud of smoke, and immediately congealing into ice. The atmosphere grows dense; the glistening stars are dimmed. The dogs outside the huts of the Siberians burrow in the snow, and their howling, at intervals of six or eight hours, interrupts the general silence of winter. ”

“ Let us next try to understand the Scarab’s logic. Let us find out why she has to make that pear of hers, so unusual a shape in insect structures; let us seek to explain the suitability of the egg’s curious position. We are venturing on dangerous ground when we enquire into the how and wherefore of things. We easily lose our footing in that mysterious land where the moving soil gives way beneath us, swallowing the foolhardy in the quicksands of error. ”

“ It is only necessary to watch the common sparrow. In spring his merry chirp and his few notes of song are heard on the roof or in the garden; here he spends his time till the broods are reared and the corn is ripe. ”

“ But I had not really forgotten it, for before me lies a paragraph announcing the discovery, in Siberia, of one of those colossal animals, which nature is very fond of dropping in, in a casual way, every now and then, just to keep our pride down and to remind us, the creatures of a degenerate growth, what winter meant in the years gone by and what kind of person an inhabitant of the earth then was. ”

“ Far from seeking our habitations, he lives apart, in the untilled solitudes. Beside the Black Scorpion he is a giant who, when full-grown, measures three to three and a half inches in length. His colouring is the yellow of faded straw.
The tail, which is really the animal’s abdomen, is a series of five prismatic segments, shaped like little kegs whose staves meet in undulating ridges resembling strings of beads. Similar cords cover the arms and fore-arms of the nippers and divide them into long facets. ”

“ The Siberians not only believe the horns of the rhinoceros to be the claws of an enormous bird, and call them "birds' claws" accordingly, but a family of myths has developed itself out of this belief, how these winged monsters lived in the country in the time of the ancestors of the present inhabitants, who fought with them for the possession of the land. ”

“ Native birds have been driven from their homes and have been robbed of much of their food and many of their nesting sites.
Song: The English Sparrow has no true song, but rather is content to call Chirp—Chirp—Chirp—Chirp! over and over again. Sometimes, in the larger cities such as New York, far from the parks where no other birds would probably be, the hardy little Sparrow is welcomed by the children to whom, without him, bird life would be entirely a closed book. ”

“ Having fastened his gaze upon a sparrow, a rattlesnake sprung open his spanning jaws, and invited her to enter.
"I should be most happy," said the bird, not daring to betray her helpless condition, but anxious by any subterfuge to get the serpent to remove his fascinating regard, "but I am lost in contemplation of yonder green sunset, from which I am unable to [pg 38] look away for more than a minute. I shall turn to it presently."
"Do, by all means," said the serpent, with a touch of irony in his voice. "There is nothing so improving as a good, square, green sunset." ”

“ But Lop-Ear and I strayed over to the hills one day. We would not have strayed had we not been teasing a tiger. Please do not laugh. It was old Saber-Tooth himself. We were perfectly safe. We chanced upon him in the forest, early in the morning, and from the safety of the branches overhead we chattered down at him our dislike and hatred. And from branch to branch, and from tree to tree, we followed overhead, making an infernal row and warning all the forest-dwellers that old Saber-Tooth was coming. ”

“ It first hides in some dense shrubbery and then imitates the song of whatever species it hears chirping in the neighborhood. The imprudent ones come at its call, which they think proceeds from one of their own kind, and the red-backed shrike pounces on them as soon as it has them well within reach. ”

“ Besides the sparrow-like note that I first heard, they had a sort of trilling chirp. Once they all started like a flock of goldfinches or grackles in a chirping chorus. When they flew, they sometimes gave a single, clear flight-note, but never made a sound when feeding on the ground. The birds had short, slightly forked tails, and the yellow ring around the eye gave them, when seen in profile, a curious spectacled appearance; while the huge beak and short tail made them seem clumsy as compared with the other grosbeaks. ”

“ Sciron, a celebrated robber in Attica, who threw his victims over the cliffs into the sea; he was slain by Theseus, Hip. 1023, 1225. Scorpion, one of the zodiacal constellations, Thy. 859. Scylla, one of the two shipwrecking monsters in the Sicilian Strait, H. Fur. 376; H. Oet. 235; Med. ”

“ I caught him one day hopping about and pecking at the twigs of a Biscayan bindweed. He was getting in his hay, strewing the ground with it.
The evidence of the Shrike, confirmed by that of all the other workers—weavers, basket-makers or woodcutters—whom we may care to call as witnesses, shows us what a large part must be assigned to discernment in the bird's choice of materials for its nest. Is the insect as highly gifted? When it works with vegetable matter, is it exclusive in its tastes? Does it know only one definite plant, its special province? ”

“ It is true that glowing sparks from the [Pg 163] smouldering tree-trunk fall throughout the night alike on the hunter and his dogs, but a Siberian’s fur hunting-coat can stand as much as a Siberian dog’s skin; and it is evident that a log like this will give much more heat than a much larger free fire. It is to the hole what the stove is to the room; it alone makes it possible for the sportsman to camp out in the forest. ”

“ I say the Egyptian cobra, because there is a closely allied species, the cobra of India (Naja tripudians) , which very much resembles the Naja haje, and which is also tamed by serpent-charmers. A passing allusion to this custom in taming Serpents is made by St. James in his General Epistle, chap. iii. 7: "For every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed by mankind:
"But the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison."
How the serpent-charmers perform their feats is not very intelligible. ”

“ A cave opens out and, in the moist warmth of the yawning vault, I see a splendid pear lying full-length upon the ground. I shall certainly long remember this first revelation of the maternal work of the Scarab. My excitement could have been no greater were I an archæologist digging among the ancient relics of Egypt and lighting upon the sacred insect of the dead, carved in emerald, in some Pharaonic crypt. O blessed joys of truth suddenly shining forth, what others are there to compare with you! ”

“ A rivulet, clear as crystal, traverses the network of gullies, and in one place forms a tiny cascade. One nook is called the Southern Siberia, because in it the snow lies unmelted throughout the summer. ”

“ Every fine day Jack took me out of doors, and I had a scamper in the clump of shrubs to which, ever since my narrow escape from the terrier, I was careful to confine myself. And as for food, no squirrel could have fared better. My master [64] was always bringing me fresh delicacies. One day it would be a cob of Indian corn, which grew to perfection under the south wall of the kitchen garden, and which I enjoyed vastly, ripping off the thick green husks and pulling the kernels out one by one. ”

“ The charmer continued his crooning noise, and the great cobra swayed its inflated neck to and fro as though to some mysterious rhythm, the native with naked hand and arm seeming to direct it.
"Loathsome!" murmured a voice into Beryl's ear, but she did not hear it. Her whole intelligence was riveted upon the movements of the serpent and its master. It was a hideous spectacle, but it occupied her undivided attention. She had no room for panic.
Suddenly the man's crooning ceased, and on the instant the cobra ceased to sway. ”

“ And so is it also with the larches, whose true home is Siberia; it is only in the south of the forest zone, especially on the mountains, that they attain the stately height of those in our country.
The above-named species include almost all those which occur regularly in the woodlands of Western Siberia. There seems to be [Pg 129] a complete absence of oak and beech, elm and ash, lime and maple, silver fir and yew, hornbeam and black poplar. On the other hand, there are many kinds of bushes and shrubs in abundance everywhere. ”

“ Unless one knows it, and the cause of it, one may listen a long time and not discover the bird that utters it. The buntings sit as usual, motionless and unseen among the leaves of the tree, and, so long as you are near the nest, keep up the sound, an excessively sharp metallic chirp, uttered in turns by both birds, but always a short note in the female, and a double note in the male, the second one prolonged to a wail or squeal. ”

“ At its touch, the shell recovers the softness of its early days, the casket becomes yielding; the insect makes play with its legs, pushes with its back; it is free. It is, in fact, in the month of September, during the first rains which herald the coming autumn, that the Scarab leaves the native burrow and comes to enliven the pastoral sward, even as the former generation enlivened it in the spring. ”

“ The fineness of vessel or fibre of the Siberian crab, may be induced by the arid warm air, the continued radiation of heat and light upon the portion above ground, and the coldness of the ground around the roots during the short summer in Siberia, where the air and surface of the ground is warm, and vegetation progressive, while the ground remains frozen at a small depth. Like all varieties of plants habituated to colder climate, the Siberian crab developes its leaves under less heat than varieties of the same kind which have been habituated to milder climate. ”

“ Next he met a little Sparrow who was picking bugs from the grass. "Out of my way, Birdling!" cried the Crow haughtily. "I am the King."
"The King!" gasped the Sparrow, nearly choking over a fat bug, he was so surprised. "I did not know that the King wore such a robe. How gorgeous—but how queer!"
Next the Crow met Mr. Stork, standing gravely on one leg and thinking of the little baby which he was going to bring that night to the cottage by the lake. The Stork looked up in surprise as the wonderful stranger approached. ”