The Pelican of the wilderness—Attitudes of the bird-Its love of solitude—Derivation of the Hebrew word—Fantastic interpretation—Mode of feeding the young—Fables regarding the Pelican-Breeding— places of the bird—The object of its wide wings and largo pouch—Color of the Pelican.
ON page 490 it has been mentioned that in two passages of Scripture, the word which is translated in the Authorized Version as Cormorant, ought to have been rendered as PELICAN. These, however, are not the first passages in which we meet with the word kaath. The name occurs in the two parallel passages of Lev. 11 and Deut. 14 among the list of birds which are proscribed as food. Passing over them, we next come to Psa. 102:66I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert. (Psalm 102:6). In this passage, the sacred writer is lamenting his misery: “By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave to my skin.
“I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.”
In these sentences, we see that the Kaath was a bird of solitude that was to be found in the “wilderness," i.e. far from the habitations of man. This is one of the characteristics of the Pelican, which loves not the neighborhood of human beings, and is fond of resorting to broad, uncultivated Lands, where it will not be disturbed.
In them it makes its nest and hatches its young, and to them it retires after feeding, in order to digest in quiet the ample meal which it has made. Mr. Tristram well suggests that the metaphor of the Psalmist may allude to the habit common to the Pelican and its kin, of sitting motionless for hours after it has gorged itself with food, its head sunk on its shoulders, and its bill resting on its breast.
This is but one of the singular, and often grotesque, attitudes in which the Pelican is in the habit of indulging.
There are before me a number of sketches made of the Pelicans at the Zoological Gardens, and in no two cases does one attitude in the least resemble another.
In one sketch the bird is sitting in the attitude which has just been described. In another it is walking, or rather staggering, along, with its head on one side, and its beak so closed that hardly a vestige of its enormous pouch can be seen. Another sketch shows the same bird as it appeared when angry with a companion, and scolding its foe in impotent rage; while another shows it basking in the sun, with its magnificent wings spread and shaking in the warm beams, and its pouch hanging in folds from its Chin.
One of the most curious of these sketches shows the bird squatting on the ground, with its head drawn back as far as possible, and sunk so far among the feathers of the back and shoulders that only a portion of the head itself can be seen, while the long beak is hidden, except an inch or two of the end. In this attitude it might easily be mistaken at a little distance for an oval white stone.
The derivation of the Hebrew word kaath is a very curious one. It is taken from a verb signifying “to vomit," and this derivation has been explained in different ways.
The early writers, who were comparatively ignorant of natural history, thought that the Pelican lived chiefly on mollusks, and that, after digesting the animals, it rejected their shells, just as the owl and the hawk reject the bones, fur, and feathers of their prey. They thought that the Pelican was a bird of a hot temperament, and that the mollusks were quickly digested by the heat of the stomach: "conchas enim, calore ventris coctas, rursus evomit, ut testis rejectis, esculenta seligat.”
At the present day, however, knowing as we do the habits of the Pelican, we find that, although the reasons just given are faulty, and that the Pelican lives essentially on fish, and not on mollusks, the derivation of the word is really a good one, and that those who gave the bird the name of Kaath, or the vomiter, were well acquainted with its habits.
The bird certainly does eat mollusks, but the principal part of its diet is composed of fish, which it catches dexterously by a sort of sidelong snatch of its enormous bill. The skin under the lower part of the beak is so modified that it can form, when distended, an enormous pouch, capable of holding a great quantity of fish, though, as long as it is not wanted, the pouch is so contracted into longitudinal folds as to be scarcely perceptible. When it has filled the pouch, it usually retires from the water, and flies to a retired spot, often many miles inland, where it can sit and digest at its ease the enormous meal which it has made.
As it often chooses its breeding-places in similar spots, far from the water, it has to carry the food with which it nourishes its young for many miles. For this purpose it is furnished, not only with the pouch which has been just mentioned, but with long, vide, and very powerful wings, often measuring from twelve to thirteen feet from tip to tip. No one, on looking at a Pelican as it waddles about or sits at rest, would imagine the gigantic dimensions of the wings, which seem, as the bird spreads them, to have almost as unlimited a power of expansion as the pouch.
In these two points the true Pelicans present a strong contrast to the cormorants, though birds closely allied. The cormorant has its home close by the sea, and therefore needs not to carry its food for any distance. Consequently, it needs no pouch, and has none. Neither does it require the great expanse of wing which is needful for the Pelican, that has to carry such a weight of fish through the air. Accordingly, the wings, though strong enough to enable the bird to carry for a short distance a single fish of somewhat large size, are comparatively short and closely feathered, and the flight of the cormorant possesses neither the grave nor the power which distinguishes that of the Pelican.
When the Pelican feeds its young, it does so by pressing its beak against its breast, so as to force out of it the enclosed fish. Now the tip of the beak is armed, like that of the cormorant, with a sharply-curved hook, only, in the case of the Pelican, the hook is of a bright scarlet color, looking, when the bird presses the beak against the white feathers of the breast, like a large drop of blood. Hence arose the curious legend respecting the Pelican, which represented it as feeding its young with its own blood, and tearing open its breast with its hooked bill. We find that this legend is exemplified by the oft-recurring symbol of the “Pelican feeding its young “in ecclesiastical art, as an emblem of Divine love.
This is one of the many instances in which the inventive, poetical, inaccurate Oriental mind has seized some peculiarity of form, and based upon it a whole series of fabulous legends. As long as they restricted themselves to the appearance and habits of the animals with which they were familiarly acquainted, the writers were curiously full, exact, and precise in their details. But as soon as they carne to any creature of whose mode of life they were entirely or partially ignorant, they allowed their inventive facilities foil scope, and put forward as zoological facts statements which were the mere creation of their own fancy.
We have already seen several examples of this propensity, and shall find more as we proceed with the zoology of the Scriptures.
The fabulous legends of the Pelican are too numerous to be even mentioned, but there is one which deserves notice, because it is made the basis of an old Persian fable.
The writer of the legend evidently had some partial knowledge of the bird. He knew that it had a large pouch which could hold fish and water; that it had large and powerful wings; and that it was in the habit of flying far inland, either for the purpose of digesting its food or nourishing its young. Knowing that the Pelican is in the habit of choosing solitary spots in which it may bring up its young in safety, but not knowing the precise mode of its nesting, the writer in question has trusted to his imagination'', and put forward his theories as facts.
Knowing that the bird dwells in “the wilderness," he has assumed that the wilderness in question is a sandy, arid desert, far from water, and consequently from vegetation. Such being the case, the nurture of the Pelican's young is evidently a difficult question. Being aquatic birds, the young must needs require water for drink and bathing, as well as fish for food; and, though a supply of both these necessaries could be brought in the ample pouches of the parents, they would be wasted unless some mode of storing were employed.
Accordingly, the parent birds were said to make their nest in a hollow tree, and to line it with clay, or to build it altogether of clay, so as to leave a deep basin. This basin the parent birds were said to use as a sort of store-pond, bringing home supplies of fish and water in their pouches, and pouring them into the pond. The wild beasts who lived in the desert were said to be acquainted with these nests, and to resort to them daily in order to quench their thirst, repaying their entertainers by protecting their homes.
In real fact, the Pelican mostly breeds near water, and is fond of selecting little rocky islands where it cannot be approached without danger. The nest is made on the ground, and is formed in a most inartificial manner of reeds and grass, the general mass of the nest being made of the reeds, and the lining being formed of grass. The eggs are white, of nearly the same shape at both ends, and are from two to five in. number. On an average, however, each nest Will contain about two eggs, The parent birds are very energetic in defense of their eggs oz young, and, according to Le Vaillant, when approached they are "like furious harpies let loose against us, and their cries rendered us almost deaf. They often flew so near us that they flapped their wings in our faces, and, though we fired our pieces repeatedly, we were not able to frighten them." When the well-known naturalist Sonnerat tried to drive a female Pelican from her nest, she appeared not to be frightened, but angry. She would not move from her nest, and when he tried to push her off, she struck at him with her long bill and uttered cries of rage.
In order to aid the bird in carrying the heavy weights with which it loads itself, the whole skeleton is permeated with air, and is exceedingly light. Beside this, the whole cellular system of the bird is honeycombed with air-cells, so that the bulk of the bird can be greatly increased, while its weight remains practically unaltered, and the Pelican becomes a sort of living balloon.
The habit of conveying its food inland before eating it is so characteristic of the Pelican that other birds take advantage of it. In some countries there is a large hawk which robs the Pelican, just as the bald-headed eagle of America robs the osprey. Knowing instinctively that when a Pelican is flying inland slowly and heavily and with a distended pouch it is carrying a supply of food to its home, the hawk dashes at it, and frightens it so that the poor bird opens its beak, and gives up to the assailant the fish which it was bearing homewards.
It is evident that the wings which are needed for supporting such weights, and which, as we have seen, exceed twelve feet in length from tip to tip, would be useless in the water, and would hinder rather than aid the bird if it attempted to dive as the close-winged cormorant does. Accordingly, we find that the Pelican is not a diver, and, instead of chasing its finny prey under water, after the manner of the cormorant, it contents itself with scooping up in its beak the fishes which come to the surface of the water. The very buoyancy of its body would prevent it from diving as does the cormorant, and, although it often plunges into the water so fairly as to be for a moment submerged, it almost immediately rises, and pursues its course on the surface of the water, and not beneath it. Like the cormorant, the Pelican can perch on trees, though it does not select such spots for its roosting-places, and prefers rocks to branches. In one case, however, when some young Pelicans had been captured and tied to a stake, their mother used to bring them food during the day, and at night was accustomed to roost in the branches of a tree above them.
“But the cormorant [Pelican in margin] and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it: and He shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion and the stones of emptiness.”
These words form part of a prophecy concerning Idumæa, or Edom, in which the desolation that is to come upon the land is painted in the most vivid colors. The streams are to be turned into pitch, and the dust into brimstone; thorns are to come up in the palaces, and nettles and brambles in the fortresses, and the land is to be washed with blood. And so great is to be the desolation of the land, that even the Pelican, which keeps itself far from the habitations of men, is to possess it.
A similar figure is employed by the prophet Zephaniah, when writing of the utter destruction of Nineveh, that rejoicing city, that dwelt carelessly, that said in her heart, I am, and there is no more beside me." In chap 2. ver. 13, 14, the prophet writes as follows: “He will stretch out His hand against the north, and destroy Assyria; and will make Nineveh a desolation, aid dry like a wilderness.
“And flocks shall lie down in the midst of her, all the beasts of the nations; both the cormorant [Pelican] and bittern shall lodge in the upper lintels of it, their voices shall sing in the windows; desolation shall be in the threshold: for He shall overcome the cedar work.”
In both these passages the Jewish Bible renders the word kaath as Pelican. For a further explanation of them the reader is referred to the article on the hedgehog.
It will be now seen that, accepting the Kaath to be the Pelican, the imagery of the scriptural writers is as accurate as it is forcible. Though under some circumstances a thoroughly social bird, it is yet fond of retiring to the most solitary spots in order to consume at peace the prey that it has captured and, as it sits motionless and alone for hours, more like a white stone than a bird, it may well be accepted as a type of solitude and desolation.
The color of the common Pelican is white, with a very slight pinky tinge, which is most conspicuous in the breeding season. The feathers of the crest are yellow, and the quill feathers of the wings are jetty black, contrasting well with the white plumage of the body. The pouch is yellow, and the upper part of the beak bluish gray, with a red line running across the middle, and a bright red hook at the tip. This plumage belongs only to the adult bird, that of the young being ashen gray, and four or five years are required before the bird puts on its full beauty. There is no difference in the appearance of the sexes. The illustration on page 496 represents a fine old male Crested Pelican (Pelecanus cristatus). The general color is greyish white, with a slight yellowish tint on the breast. The pouch is bright orange, and the crest is formed of curling feathers.