Page:Under the Sun.djvu/54

30

Another prominent visitor of my garden is the green parrot. It is, I think, Cervantes who has recorded the fact that Theophrastus complained “of the long life given to crows.” Now the argument of this complaint is not so superficial as at first it seems, and really contains internal evidence of a knowledge of bird-nature. Theophrastus, I take it, grumbled not simply because crows did in a long life get through more mischief than other birds can in a shorter one, but because, if Atropos were only more impartially nimble with her shears, crows would never be able to get through any mischief at all. And in this lies a great point of difference between the sombre crow and the dædal parrot.

The crow requires much time to develop and perfect his misdemeanors; the parrot brings his mischiefs to market in the green leaf. While a crow will spend a week with a view to the ultimate abstraction of a key, the parrot will have scrambled and screeched in a day through a cycle of larcenous gluttonies, and before the crow has finishing reconnoitring the gardener, the parrot has stripped the fruit-tree.

From these differences in the characters of the birds, I hold that Theophrastus chose “crows” advisedly, and made his complaint with judgment; but I wonder that, having thus headed a list of grievances, he did not continue it with a protest against the green color given to parrots. The probable explanation of the oversight is that he never saw a green parrot. But we who do see them have surely a reasonable cause for complaint, when nature creates thieves and then gives them a passport to impunity. For the green parrot has a large brain (some naturalists would like to see the Psittacid family on this account rank first among birds),