I am not an admirer of pet parrots. To me, and I have made the discovery that to many others too, it is a depressing experience, on a first visit to nice people, to find that a parrot is a member of the family. As a rule he is the most important member. When I am compelled to stand in the admiring circle, to look on and to listen while he exhibits his weary accomplishments, it is but lip service that I render: my eyes are turned inward, and a vision of a green forest comes before them resounding with the wild, glad, mad cries of flocks of wild parrots. This is done purposely, and the sound which I mentally hear and the sight of their vari-coloured plumage in the dazzling sunlight are a corrective, and keep me from hating the bird before me because of the imbecility of its owners. In his proper place, which is not in a tin cage in a room of a house, he is to be admired above most birds; and I wish I could be where he is living his wild life; that I could have again a swarm of parrots, angry at my presence, [Pg_250] hovering above my head and deafening me with their outrageous screams. But I cannot go to those beautiful distant places—I must be content with an image and a memory of things seen and heard, and with the occasional sight of a bird, or birds, kept by some intelligent person; also with an occasional visit to the Parrot House in Regent's Park. There the uproar, when it is at its greatest, when innumerable discordant voices, shrill and raucous, unite in one voice and one great cry, and persons of weak nerves stop up their ears and fly from such a pandemonium, is highly exhilarating.  
Of the most interesting captive parrots I have met in recent years I will speak here of two. The first was a St Vincent bird, Chrysotis guildingi, brought home with seven other parrots of various species by Lady Thompson, the wife of the then Administrator of the Island. This is a handsome bird, green, with blue head and yellow tail, and is a member of an American genus numbering over forty species. He received his funny specific name in compliment to a clergyman who was a zealous collector not of men's souls, but of birds' skins. To ornithologists this parrot is interesting on account of its rarity. For the last thirty years it has existed in small numbers; and as it is confined to the [Pg_251] island of St Vincent it is feared that it may become extinct at no distant date. Altogether there are about five hundred species of parrots in the world, or about as many parrots as there are species of birds of all kinds in Europe, from the great bustard, the hooper swan, and golden eagle, to the little bottle-tit whose minute body, stript of its feathers, may be put in a lady's thimble. And of this multitude of parrots the St Vincent Chrysotis, if it still exists, is probably the rarest.
 
The parrot I have spoken of, with his seven travelling companions, arrived in England in December, and a few days later their mistress witnessed a curious thing. On a cold grey morning they were enjoying themselves on their perches in a well-warmed room in London, before a large window, when suddenly they all together emitted a harsh cry of alarm or terror—the sound which they invariably utter on the appearance of a bird of prey in the sky, but at no other time. Looking up quickly she saw that snow in big flakes had begun to fall. It was the birds' first experience of such a phenomenon, but they had seen and had been taught to fear something closely resembling falling flakes—flying feathers to wit. The fear of flying feathers is universal among species that are preyed upon by hawks. In [Pg_252] a majority of cases the birds that exhibit terror and fly into cover or sit closely have never actually seen that winged thunderbolt, the peregrine falcon, strike down a duck or pigeon, sending out a small cloud of feathers; or even a harrier or sparrow-hawk pulling out and scattering the feathers of a bird it has captured, but a tradition exists among them that the sight of flying feathers signifies danger to bird life.
 
When I was in the young barbarian stage, and my playmates were gaucho boys on horseback on the pampas, they taught me to catch partridges in their simple way with a slender cane twenty to twenty-five feet long, a running noose at its tip made from the fine pliant shaft of a rhea's wing feather. The bird was not a real partridge though it looks like it, but was the common or spotted tinamou of the plains, Nothura maculosa, as good a table bird as our partridge. Our method was, when we flushed a bird, to follow its swift straight flight at a gallop, and mark the exact spot where it dropped to earth and vanished in the grass, then to go round the spot examining the ground until the tinamou was detected in spite of his protective colouring sitting close among the dead and fading grass and herbage. The cane was put out, the circle narrowed until the small noose was exactly over the bird's head, so that [Pg_253] when he sprang into the air on being touched by the slender tip of the cane he caught and strangled himself. To make the bird sit tight until the noose was actually over his head, we practised various tricks, and a very common one was, on catching sight of the close-squatting partridge, to start plucking feathers from a previously-killed bird hanging to our belt and scatter them on the wind. Sometimes we were saved the trouble of scattering feathers when we were followed by a pair of big carrion hawks on the look-out for an escaped bird or for any trifle we throw to them to keep them with us. The effect was the same in both cases; the sight of the flying feathers was just as terrifying as that of the big hovering hawks, and caused the partridge to sit close.
 
This way of taking the tinamou may seem unsportsmanlike. Well, if I were a boy in a wild land again—with my present feelings about bird life, I mean—I should not do it. Nor would I shoot them; for I take it that the gun is the deadliest instrument our cunning brains have devised to destroy birds in spite of their bright instinct of self-preservation, their faculty of flight, and their intelligence. It is a hundred times more effective than the boy-on-horseback's long cane with its [Pg_254] noose made of an ostrich feather—therefore more unsportsmanlike.
 
To return. The resemblance of falling flakes to flying white feathers does not deceive birds accustomed to the sight of snow: it is very striking, nevertheless, and so generally recognised that most persons in Europe have heard of the old woman plucking her geese in the sky. It is curious to find the subject discussed in Herodotus. In Book IV. he says: "The Scythians say that those lands which are situated in the northernmost parts of their territories are neither visible nor practicable by reason of the feathers that fall continually on all sides; for the earth is so entirely covered, and the air is so full of these feathers, that the sight is altogether obstructed." Further on he says: "Touching the feathers ... my opinion is that perpetual snows fall in those parts, though probably in less quantity during the summer than in winter, and whoever has observed great abundance of snow falling will easily comprehend what I say, for snow is not unlike feathers."
 
Probably the Scythians had but one word to designate both. To go back to the St Vincent parrot. Concerning a bird of that species I have heard, and cannot disbelieve, a remarkable story. [Pg_255] During the early years of the last century a gentleman went out from England to look after some landed property in the island, which had come to him by inheritance, and when out there he paid a visit to a friend who had a plantation in the interior. His friend was away when he arrived, and he was conducted by a servant into a large, darkened, cool room; and, tired with his long ride in the hot sun, he soon fell asleep in his chair. Before long a loud noise awoke him, and from certain scrubbing sounds he made out that a couple of negro women were engaged in washing close to him, on the other side of the lowered window blinds, and that they were quarrelling over their task. Of course the poor women did not know that he was there, but he was a man of a sensitive mind and it was a torture to him to have to listen to the torrents of exceedingly bad language they discharged at one another. It made him angry. Presently his friend arrived and welcomed him with a hearty hand-shake and asked him how he liked the place. He answered that it was a very beautiful place, but he wondered how his friend could tolerate those women with their tongues so close to his windows. Women with their tongues! What did he mean? exclaimed the other in great surprise. He meant, he said, those wretched nigger [Pg_256] washerwomen outside the window. His host thereupon threw up the blind and both looked out: no living creature was there except a St Vincent parrot dozing on his perch in the shaded verandah. "Ah, I see, the parrot!" said his friend. And he apologised and explained that some of the niggers had taken advantage of the bird's extraordinary quickness in learning to teach him a lot of improper stuff.
 
Another parrot, which interested me more than the St Vincent bird, was a member of the same numerous genus, a double-fronted amazon, Chrysotis lavalainte, a larger bird, green with face and fore-part of head pure yellow, and some crimson colour in the wings and tail. I came upon it at an inn, the Lamb, at Hindon, a village in the South Wiltshire downs. One could plainly see that it was a very old bird, and, judging from the ragged state of its plumage, that it had long fallen into the period of irregular or imperfect moult—"the sere, the yellow leaf" in the bird's life. It also had the tremor of the very aged—man or bird. But its eyes were still as bright as polished yellow gems and full of the almost uncanny parrot intelligence. The voice, too, was loud and cheerful; its call to its mistress—"Mother, mother!" would ring through [Pg_257] the whole rambling old house. He talked and laughed heartily and uttered a variety of powerful whistling notes as round and full and modulated as those of any grey parrot. Now, all that would not have attracted me much to the bird if I had not heard its singular history, told to me by its mistress, the landlady. She had had it in her possession fifty years, and its story was as follows:—
 
Her father-in-law, the landlord of the Lamb, had a beloved son who went off to sea and was seen and heard of no more for a space of fourteen years, when one day he turned up in the possession of a sailor's usual fortune, acquired in distant barbarous lands—a parrot in a cage! This he left with his parents, charging them to take the greatest care of it, as it was really a very wonderful bird, as they would soon know if they could only understand its language, and he then began to make ready to set off again, promising his mother to write this time and not to stay away more than five or at most ten years.
 
Meanwhile, his father, who was anxious to keep him, succeeded in bringing about a meeting between him and a girl of his acquaintance, one who, he believed, would make his son the best wife in the world. The young wanderer saw and loved, and as the feeling was returned he soon married and endowed [Pg_258] her with all his worldly possessions, which consisted of the parrot and cage. Eventually he succeeded his father as tenant of the Lamb, where he died many years ago; the widow was grey when I first knew her and old like her parrot; and she was like the bird too in her youthful spirit and the brilliance of her eyes.
 
Her young sailor had picked up the bird at Vera Cruz in Mexico. He saw a girl standing in the market place with the parrot on her shoulder. She was talking and singing to the bird, and the bird was talking, whistling, and singing back to her—singing snatches of songs in Spanish. It was a wonderful bird, and he was enchanted and bought it, and brought it all the way back to England and Wiltshire. It was, the girl had told him, just five years old, and as fifty years had gone by it was, when I first knew it, or was supposed to be, fifty-five. In its Wiltshire home it continued to talk and sing in Spanish, and had two favourite songs, which delighted everybo............