The Naturalist in La Plata | Page 8

with mighty resonant voices. The duck order is very rich, numbering at least twenty species, including two beautiful upland geese, winter visitors from Magellanic lands, and two swans, the lovely black-necked, and the pure white with rosy bill. Of rails, or ralline birds, there are ten or twelve, ranging from a small spotted creature no bigger than a thrush to some large majestic birds. One is the courlan, called "crazy widow" from its mourning plumage and long melancholy screams, which on still evenings may be heard a league away. Another is the graceful variegated _ypicaha,_ fond of social gatherings, where the birds perform a dance and make the desolate marshes resound with their insane humanlike voices. A smaller kind, Porphyriops melanops, has a night-cry like a burst of shrill hysterical laughter, which has won for it the name of "witch;" while another, Rallus rythyrhynchus, is called "little donkey" from its braying cries. Strange eerie voices have all these birds. Of the remaining aquatic species, the most important is the spur-winged crested screamer; a noble bird as large as a swan, yet its favourite pastime is to soar upwards until it loses itself to sight in the blue ether, whenca it pours forth its resounding choral notes, which reach the distant earth clarified, and with a rhythmic swell and fall as of chiming bells. It also sings by night, "counting the hours," the gauchos say, and where they have congregated together in tens of thousands the mighty roar of their combined voices produces an astonishingly grand effect.
The largest aquatic order is that of the Limicolse--snipes, plover, and their allies--which has about twenty-five species. The vociferous spur-winged lapwing; the beautiful black and white stilt; a true snipe, and a painted snipe, are, strictly speaking, the only residents; and it is astonishing to find, that, of the five-and-twenty species, at least thirteen are visitors from North America, several of them having their breeding-places quite away in the Arctic regions. This is one of those facts concerning the annual migration of birds which almost stagger belief; for among them are species with widely different habits, upland, marsh and sea-shore birds, and in their great biannual journey they pass through a variety of climates, visiting many countries where the conditions seem suited to their requirements. Nevertheless, in September, and even as early as August, they begin to arrive on the pampas, the golden plover often still wearing his black nuptial dress; singly and in pairs, in small flocks, and in clouds they come--curlew, godwit, plover, tatler, tringa--piping the wild notes to which the Greenlander listened in June, now to the gaucho herdsman on the green plains of La Plata, then to the wild Indian in his remote village; and soon, further south, to the houseless huanaco-hunter in the grey wilderness of Patagonia.
Here is a puzzle for ornithologists. In summer on the pampas we have a godwit--Limosa hudsonica; in March it goes north to breed; later in the season flocks of the same species arrive from the south to winter on the pampas. And besides this godwit, there are several other North American species, which have colonies in the southern hemi-spere, with a reversed migration and breeding season. Why do these southern birds winter so far south? Do they really breed in Patagonia? If so, their migration is an extremely limited one compared with that of the northern birds--seven or eight hundred miles, on the outside, in one case, against almost as many thousands of miles in the other. Considering that some species which migrate as far south as Patagonia breed in the Arctic regions as far north as latitude 82 degrees, and probably higher still, it would be strange indeed if none of the birds which winter in Patagonia and on the pampas were summer visitors to that great austral continent, which has an estimated area twice as large as that of Europe, and a climate milder than the arctic one. The migrants would have about six hundred miles of sea to cross from Tierra del Fuego; but we know that the golden plover and other species, which sometimes touch at the Bermudas when travelling, fly much further than that without resting. The fact that a common Argentine titlark, a non-migrant and a weak flyer, has been met with at the South Shetland Islands, close to the antarctic continent, shows that the journey may be easily accomplished by birds with strong flight; and that even the winter climate of that unknown land is not too severe to allow an accidental colonist, like this small delicate bird, to survive. The godwit, already mentioned, has been observed in flocks at the Falkland Islands in May, that is, three months after the same species had taken its autumal departure from the neighbouring mainland. Can it be believed that