426 GALAPAGOS ARCHIPELAGO chap. 



with a wand he killed ten in half an hour. At that period the 

 birds must have been about as tame as they now are at the 

 Galapagos. They appear to have learnt caution more slowly 

 at these latter islands than at the Falklands, where they have 

 had proportionate means of experience ; for besides frequent 

 visits from vessels, those islands have been at intervals colonised 

 during the entire period. Even formerly, when all the birds 

 were so tame, it was impossible by Pernety^s account to kill 

 the black-necked swan — a bird of passage, which probably 

 brought with it the wisdom learnt in foreign countries. 



I may add that, according to Du Bois, all the birds at 

 Bourbon in 1571-72, with the exception of the flamingoes and 

 geese, were so extremely tame, that they could be caught by 

 the hand, or killed in any number with a stick. Again, at 

 Tristan d'Acunha in the Atlantic, Carmichael ^ states that the 

 only two land-birds, a thrush and a bunting, were " so tame as 

 to suffer themselves to be caught with a hand-net." From 

 these several facts we may, I think, conclude, first, that the 

 wildness of birds with regard to man is a particular instinct 

 directed against kim, and not dependent on any general degree 

 of caution arising from other sources of danger ; secondly, that 

 it is not acquired by individual birds in a short time, even when 

 much persecuted ; but that in the course of successive genera- 

 tions it becomes hereditary. With domesticated animals we 

 are accustomed to see new mental habits or instincts acquired 

 and rendered hereditary ; but with animals in a state of nature 

 it must always be most difficult to discover instances of acquired 

 hereditary knowledge. In regard to the wildness of birds 

 towards man, there is no way of accounting for it, except as 

 an inherited habit : comparatively few young birds, in any one 

 year, have been injured by man in England, yet almost all, 

 even nestlings, are afraid of him ; many individuals, on the 

 other hand, both at the Galapagos and at the Falklands, have 



1 Linn. Trans, vol. xii. p. 496. The most anomalous fact on this subject which 

 I have met with, is the wildness of the small birds in the Arctic parts of North 

 America (as described by Richardson, Fauna Boy. vol. ii. p. 332), where they are 

 said never to be persecuted. This case is the more strange, because it is asserted 

 that some of the same species in their winter-quarters in the United States are tame. 

 There is much, as Dr. Richardson well remarks, utterly inexplicable connected with 

 the different degrees of shyness and care with which birds conceal their nests. How 

 strange it is that the English wood -pigeon, generally so wild a bird, should very 

 frequently rear its young in shrubberies close to houses ! 



