When they came to a river they used to pause long upon its bank before venturing to attempt the passage. They sometimes remained so for two or three days, during which time the old males would walk to and fro, strutting and gobbling with the greatest self importance, and with the air of being engaged in a deliberation of the utmost consequence to all the world. At length, as it seemed, they would succeed in raising their courage to the proper point, and they would proceed to climb up to the topmost branches of the tallest trees growing near the river. There they would select their positions, and after a great deal more gobbling and strutting and innumerable false starts, they would commence their flight. The oldest and strongest birds would succeed in flying across the river before coming down to the ground, but the younger and feebler ones, especially if the river was wide, would fall into the water at a greater or less distance from the bank.
Then would follow a scene of floundering, scrambling and swimming, astonishing to behold, the result of which would be that the greater proportion of the flock would at last reach the land, though may of them would be carried by the force of the current far down the stream.
The value of the flesh of the turkey for food was soon made known to Europeans, and the bird is now domesticated, and has become very abundant, in almost every part of the world.
The Alligator
An alligator is an immense reptile of the lizard kind, which haunts the inlets, rivers, swamps and lagoons of the southern States in great numbers. When full grown it is a very terrible animal, on account of its great size and strength. It is sometimes fifteen or twenty feet long. it crawls slowly on the land, but it can move through the water with great speed. Its body is covered with horny scales, which form a coat of mail that is proof against a musket ball. It is only near the head and shoulders that the skin can be penetrated by even a rifle bullet.
Of course the alligator is a very formidable animal, the more so from his having an immense mouth, which is armed with rows of teeth of terrible aspect. Generally, however, he is pretty quiet in his disposition, and is often seen lying harmless, basking in the sun, on the shores of his lagoon, or crawling slowly along through the canes and flags that grow out of the slime. But sometimes, for example at certain seasons of the year, or when he is hungry, or has been in any way irritated or disturbed, he is very ferocious, and in such a case he becomes a dangerous as well as an ugly enemy.
The alligator, like most other reptiles, is very prolific. Indeed, one great function that the animal seems destined to fulfill in the economy of nature is that of producing eggs and rearing young, to be consumed as food by birds of prey. Only a small portion of its progeny survives the dangers which thus beset the period of their infancy.
The mothers make their nests in quite an artificial manner. They are built upon the ground, on the banks of lazy streams, or in the cane-brakes or marshes, and are of the form of great shallow cups, three or four feet in diameter. They are built of mud and grass, and a great many are usually constructed together, so as to form quite a village.
In these nests the northern alligator lays a great number of eggs, which she packs in mud, in several successive layers, one above the other, in the most singular manner. First she covers the floor of her nest with a sort of mortar which she spreads over it, made of mud and slime, and upon this lays one layer of eggs. This layer, when complete, she covers with another stratum of mortar, and over this lays another tier of eggs. The eggs have hard shells, and are somewhat larger than hen's eggs, and the monster lays so many of them as to build up her nest sometimes four or five feet high with these alternate layers.
When this work is finished the eggs are left to be hatched by the warmth of the sun, through the mother remains by them to guard them from the attacks of the pilferers that are always at hand in great numbers to steal and devour them. It has been said that in thus guarding these deposits the alligators in some sense make common cause, so that when one of the mothers has gone away to seek food, the others who remain watch over and protect her nest, and it is with some instinctive idea of this advantage that they adopt the plan of building their nests together.
There are sometimes not less than a hundred and fifty or two hundred eggs in a single nest. Of these, however, but a portion are hatched, and still fewer of the young arrive at maturity. The young that are hatched are watched and defended by their mothers with great care, but they are exceedingly tender and helpless, and great numbers of them are seized and devoured by beasts and birds of prey.
The greatest enemy of the alligator, however, is man. In gradually advancing the settlement of the countries in which they live, he intrudes more and more upon their haunts, and as their size is too great to allow them, like other reptiles, to secrete themselves from their pursuers, their numbers are all the time continually diminishing, and it is not improbable that before many years they may entirely disappear. The crocodile of the Nile is an animal of the same general character with the alligator, but is of an altogether different species.
The Eagle
America is celebrated for its eagles. Indeed, one of the species, the bald eagle, so called, has been selected as the emblem of the national power. The eagles are all birds of prey, and they are remarkable for their size and the strength of their pinions. They seek their habitations on the summit of the various mountain ranges and on lofty cliffs overhanging the sea. From these elevated positions they survey vast regions of the air and watch for their prey. For this purpose they are endowed with powers of vision of almost incredible acuteness.
The eagle has always been held in high estimation by the American Indians, and his plumage has been prized more than that of any other bird for the dress and the decorations of warriors. This high estimation is derived partly from the warlike courage and propensities of the bird itself, and partly probably from the difficulty of taking him. Thus, eagles' feathers attached to a head-dress of a native chief, or ornamenting the shaft of a spear, were not only emblems of courage and strength proper to signalize the martial spirit of the wearer as a warrior, but they were also trophies of the daring and skill which he displayed as a huntsman, in scaling the lofty heights where alone they were to be procured.
The eagle is very long-lived. Some specimens have been known to live from eighty to a hundred years.
cochineal
The forests of America produce a great many different woods which have been used extensively in dyeing, and for other similar purposes in the arts, but the most important pigment that has been derived from the productions of this country is cochineal.
The cochineal is an insect. It is of the form of a little bug. It is a native of Mexico. It feeds upon certain species of cactus. Immense numbers of these plants are cultivated in Mexico and Peru, for the sake of the insects that feed upon them. The work of collecting these insects, which is very slow and tedious, is performed by women, who go about among the cactus plants and brush the bugs off into a basket with a little brush made of the tail of a squirrel, or of some other animal.
The insects, when collected, are killed by being thrown into boiling water, and then are carefully dried by being placed in ovens, or exposed to the sun. The article is then ready for market.
The cochineal insect produces a beautiful crimson dye, though a scarlet color can be obtained from it by a certain mode of using it. It is an article of very great value. Several millions of dollars' worth are annually exported from South America, and it is so precious that it is regarded in the markets of the world almost in the light of gold. Indeed it sometimes fulfills the functions of gold by being used for remittances and for making payments.
The Rattlesnake and Humming Bird
There are two other animals that remain to be mentioned among those that are peculiar to America - animals that, however dissimilar in other respects, are alike in this, namely, that each is marked by a very striking peculiarity of the same general kind, while nothing at all approaching to either exists in any other part of the known world. These two animals are the rattlesnake and the humming-bird. The peculiarity which gives them special distinction is a power of producing a sound by the motion of a part of their bodies - the humming bird by its wings and the rattlesnake by its tail.