Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 4).djvu/387

 you please, fill him with somewhere about double his own bulk of food, and let him go again. In two minutes you shall find that bird gravely prospecting about and making all sorts of experimental borings—for something to eat. And birds show the most extraordinary conviction of the edibility of the world in general. Most birds will extract nourishment somehow from a brick, an old nail, or a broken bottle; those who can't will try. And when a certain tract has been searched through, pebble by pebble, and found to be absolutely barren, then they will begin on it again, on the off-chance of a thrown brick or the passing of some human creature in the meantime having left behind it something to eat.

Here most of the birds are omnivorous—certainly none are vegetarians but the doves. The doves, as vegetarians, represent the brotherhood, or the cause, or the belief, or whatever it is, rather unfavourably. The dove can never do anything much credit, being rather an insignificant humbug itself. Here, in contrast with the rest, you observe it as a miserably inactive and sulky little bird, who won't join anything else in a hopeless food-hunt, but is as greedy as all the rest together when the keeper brings a regular meal. Also it growls and fumes angrily at the friendly approach of any other bird—a bird probably who would make little trouble of eating it at a sitting, beak and all. And sitting in fluffy little groups of two or three, it grunts pharisaically at the good-humoured ibis below, as he tosses his long beak and swallows whatever animal food it may have found him. The dove takes life more easily than any of the other birds in the place, and still goes about (or, more ordinarily, sits still) grumbling, peevish, and spiteful.

The flamingoes forming the upper ten (as well as four can) in this little world, insist on being served from a lordly pail, from which, their heads being inverted, their upper beaks scoop. The heron, although no inferior searcher of the ground, will never trouble unnecessarily about provisions already in a safe place. No provisions are in a safe place here among so many birds; but Jerry, the solitary purple heron in the cage just behind us, has a tiny pond to himself. Throw a little fish therein, soon after Jerry's dinner. Jerry, without leaving his perch, will inspect it narrowly—from above, to see if it be alive; from the side, to judge of its plumpness; and from each other direction, for purposes which any other intelligent heron will at once understand. Then Jerry will return to his siesta, his next snack assured, for he knows that the fish can never leave the pond.