BORNEAN CRESTED FIREBACK 133 



me for a time, and I had made some interesting notes on river birds, when an old 

 wild sow with a half-grown young one came slowly along the edge of the water. 

 Hardly had they appeared when the Dyaks on the other shore had occasion to hammer 

 smartly on their upturned canoe. The mud-caked porcine matron whirled facing 

 the sound, erected her tousled ears, and concentrated her whole being in obtaining 

 information of the danger through her quivering nostrils. They told her nothing, 

 and her little pale-winkered eyes evidently carried no image of the distant Dyaks to 

 her brain. The sound was not repeated, but the memory of it remained vivid, and 

 the habit of caution of a lifetime and of untold other lifetimes in the past, so deeply 

 implanted in that porcine brain, conquered, and she turned with a low grunt, and with 

 her offspring at her heels trotted back out of sight. My pheasants were the next to 

 appear, as I have said, wholly unexpectedly, and after pecking vaguely about for a 

 time, they collected in a compact group in the dense shade of a river plant, and there 

 for half-an-hour held low converse with each other, preening their plumage the while ; 

 at least they kept up a low confidential clucking or mumbling, which, to my ears, 

 indicated supreme contentment. When they moved off into the jungle again, I 

 descended, as I was slowly baking in the sun, and the network of liana stems on which 

 I lay was fairly hot to the touch. 



I caught many another sight of the birds on succeeding days, but apart from the 

 ever-vivid thrill which their appearance produced, I found them as uninteresting as 

 domestic fowls. They seldom uttered a note ; they pecked and scratched, and ate and 

 preened and slept ! It was the season of moult and I could expect little more from 

 them than I observed. Once only I heard the full vocal and wing challenge — a subdued 

 wooonk-k ! (whirrrrr) — woooitk-k ! (whirrrrr). Indeed, I got more from them in the 

 way of practice in stalking and knowledge of what I could do when in the presence 

 of wild pheasants without being observed, than I acquired valuable facts of their life- 

 history. 



I was impressed again and again with their invisibility when perfectly quiet and 

 the ease with which one could distinguish them even in the dimmest recesses of the 

 forest when any part of their body was in motion. Thus I came to realize the 

 tremendous importance of their method of movement — quick, sudden jerks of head and 

 neck — a single motion if possible — in snatching a beetle or other insect, and then a 

 period — a much longer extent of time — of absolute immobility. This reduced the 

 perceptive periods of danger to the shortest space of time, and gave to the birds all 

 possible opportunity for the detection of danger, they themselves at the same time 

 being least perceptible to possible watching enemies. 



Watching the full-grown cock Fireback feed for ten or fifteen minutes at a time — 

 as I did once — I was impressed with the fact that such a period is divided into two 

 very unequal parts, first, the search for, snatching and swallowing of food, and second, 

 the looking out for danger. It seemed as if a few seconds less to the first division 

 would result in starvation ; perhaps a single second deducted from the latter might 

 bring destruction ! Never for a moment was there any relaxation ; any sensible period 

 of transition from one to the other. It was complete concentration on an insect, 

 discovering it, seizing it, and then at the very moment of swallowing, the head and 

 neck would shoot up, and the keen eyes were on the watch ; twin scarlet search-lights 



