A Barbarian in Asia

NATURAL HISTORY

The bat is not a bird, if you like. But it can give all of them points in flying. You would think a pigeon was paddling, that it was beating the water, it makes so much noise with its wings. The bat no one hears. One would think it was taking to the air like a sheet with hands.

With its long beak and its torpedo-boat head, the crow is a black poltroon. In India, a quarter of an hour before sunset, it becomes voracious and, risking everything, hurls itself upon a piece of bread given by a timid little girl. This temerity is brief, and soon it flies away swiftly toward its nest, a hard nest and made without taste. There are tens and tens of millions of crows in India.

Ten minutes later comes the bat, here, there, where? silent, bewildered, with wings that weigh nothing and do not even make a sigh in the air. You hear a humming bird; but a bat, no. And it never crosses a space in a straight line. It follows ceilings, corridors, walls, it coasts. Then it is on a branch and in a twinkling is hanging from it by its claws, as if to sleep. And the silent moon shines on it.

It often amuses one to look at birds. They go away, come back, circle about: tricksters.

That is not the parakeet’s idea of flying. Flying is the passage from one point to another in a straight line. Parakeets are always in a hurry, the rudder very straight (they have very long and strong tails), they go away without turning their heads, almost always two of them, neither wind nor shadows make them swerve from their course, and they chatter all the while.

The pigeon is sexually obsessed. As soon as it has swallowed a mouthful and has regained a little strength, there it is, back in the clutches of its demon. Its throat rattles (who ever called that cooing?), a thick rattle that would fluster a hermit, and at once the female responds, she always responds, even if she does not wish to be approached immediately — a rattle that overwhelms her, that is much bigger than she, and heavy, obese.

And they fly off, noisier than the sound of boots.

INDIA

Kites are big good-for-nothings. As long as they can make use of the winds, and lounge around, they are quite happy.

Even the crows, who are afraid of everything, attack the kites. I saw a couple of them who really did not know where to go next. In the trees, the small birds attacked them. Crows chased them off a rooftop.

A mouse that is stalked by a cat can still escape. With a mongoose on its tracks, it can still keep a spark of hope.

But if a crow, perched on a branch, has noticed it, all is up. Diving almost on the perpendicular, or if the branches do not lend themselves to this, slipping down on a slant or even horizontally, it arrives, it is there, it carries it off. Fast though the mouse may run, it is like a man who is running swiftly, and is pursued by a plane. He is lost. He is irrevocably lost.

MALAYA

The red-beaked white-stoppers are lighter and better shaped than the sparrow, with feathers so close together no wind can lift them.

The red-beaked white-stoppers have a specialty. As soon as there are two of them installed on a branch (and when there is one, an instant later there are two of them) one retreats (oh, a very little retreat) sideways along the bough and without turning its head.

The other at once moves along (oh, a very little move) the same distance — an eighth of an inch.

They spend hours in this way. For a tree has more than one branch. As soon as a branch has exhausted its possibilities of fun, on to the next. And no ugly chirping like sparrows; no, sometimes, rarely, a little ‘tac…’ to show that it is not an empty thing. And though small, it has none of that epileptic headshaking that makes the sparrows so silly and so foreign to us.

ZOO IN SAIGON

The Jabiru does not eat a fish that is alive. He swallows it dead. He seizes it therefore, and clinches his beak on it, on the head, on the body, tosses it, catches it again, and again tosses it and recaptures it till it is dead.

There is the prudent Jabiru, and the imprudent Jabiru.

The imprudent Jabiru, that is to say, who is satisfied with a semblance of death (and beware of the bones of a fish that is alive and struggling in the stomach) is the one who carries it onto the pebbles where he gives it many a blow with his beak till it lies still. Then he eats it. But any experienced Jabiru knows that a fish that has stopped moving on the pebbles may not be dead, and may still be dangerous. That is why the prudent Jabiru dips it in the water, to test it, and in fact very often the fish is alive, and at once, though very slowly, hopelessly, seeks to abandon the scene and death. It happens also that a Jabiru is unable to get his fish out of the water, though he has given it many blows, but each time it falls back. Then all of a sudden, impatiently, he waves immense and noisy wings over the pond and he wonders, and you wonder, and all the other birds wonder what is going to happen.