4l2 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[ay 27, igos- 
squatted cross-legged under the shade of our tent flies 
and watched the impromptu foot and horse races grow- 
ing out of the morning's games, or else dozed lazily in 
the sun. 
I was quite ill at this time, and the morning's ex- 
citement having tired me out, after luncheon I retired 
to my tent with the intention of taking a siesta. Pres- 
ently, however, Lomocdi and a whole lot of other 
youngsters invaded my canvas mansion, so, instead of 
going to sleep, I spent most of the afternoon enter- 
taining them and being not a little entertained myself. 
They were nice youngsters, the whole lot of them, 
Lomocdi, Balading, Cambien and Tompugo being my 
especial favorites, although I was great friends with all 
of them and found them very much like our own, boys. 
We amused ourselves at first by talking over the 
morning's sports and incidents. Then I got. out a lot 
of old magazines and their delight and astonishment at 
the pictures was comical to see. Questions came thick 
and fast. How far would that enormous cannon stick- 
ing from the side of that "vinta grande" (one. of our 
war ships) shoot? Why weren't our houses built of 
bamboo like the Moros built theirs, and why were they 
so high? Didn't they kill a great many people when 
earthquakes shook them down? How many people 
lived in my town? How much did we have to pay 
for women and slaves? and so on, until they finally be- 
came interested in trying to pick out the women from 
the men in the picture's, their pride when they happened 
to strike it right being very amusing. They seemed to 
have quite as much trouble in making the distinction 
as some of my friends do in picking the women from 
the men in the photographs of the Moros, which I 
brought back. The boys thought the slender waists and 
long skirts of our women very odd, and wanted to know 
if they were like that all the time, or only gotten up 
for the occasion, to have their pictures taken. Finally 
they got to squabbling so over a picture, some claiming 
it was that of a "bye-bye" (woman), and others that it 
was of a "mama" (man), that they made me nervous, 
so I sprinkled the better part of the bottle of toilet 
water over them, and presenting them with a couple of 
packages of native cigarettes, sent them away. 
So many more accepted our invitation than we had 
expected that we found it would be impossible to pre- 
pare enough food for them with our limited facilities for 
cooking. So we decided to give them their things raw, 
and let them cook for themselves; an arrangement which 
seemed to be perfectly satisfactory to them and was 
certainly very much easier for us. The menu con- 
sisted of hard-tack, rice, coffee, brown sugar, plug 
tobacco, cigarettes and a few cans of salmon. After 
receiving their rations a great many of our guests left 
for their homes, while the others proceeded to cook up 
their "chow^" and dine. 
To cook their rice they cut a piece of bamboo as 
large in diameter as they could find, reamed out the 
partitions except the one at the bottom; put the rice in 
it and rested it in a forked stick so that the bamboo ; 
tube was' at a considerable angle with the ground. Under 
this tube they built a fire and when- the rice was cooked ■ 
all they had to do was to, split the bamboo off and there ; 
it was all ready to be eaten, and prepared itt this way ■ 
it is delicious. Of course, the bamboo used for this ; 
purpose must be green, and sufficiently large to ' have -j 
walls at least three-eighths of an inch thick, so..it won't 
burn through. I have made coffee in this way and , 
had no trouble, for, while bamboo will burn readily 
when dry, it is almost impossible to set it on fire' when - 
it is green. T don't know what the Moros would do ^ 
without the bamboo. They use it for about every thing : 
under the .sun," from building their houses with it to : 
eating it, the young shoots being very palatable and : 
not unlike cabbage. - j 
In the evening the Moros danced for us, if, it could ■ 
be called dancing. One of them would arise from 
among those squatted in a circle around a huge .fire, 
and with his kris or campilan in one hand and often a ! 
shield in the other, strike an. attitude and shout a few , 
words; then, changing his posture, shout a few words 
more and so on, each sentence ending with a peculiar i 
rising inflection of the voice. Some of their poses while ■ 
going through this so-called dance were extremely 
graceful, while others were comical almost to the verge 
of grotesque. . , ■ 
Leon, one of our interpreters, told me that . during ' 
this dance the performer first recounts the fame of his 
ancestors, 'then tells of his own war-like deeds, -and ' 
finally winds up by reviling his enemies. This I can 
very well believe, for I have often seen them go through 
the sEime antics in defiance to us as we were approach- 
ing one of their forts to attack it. 
During the evening a sword dance was also per- 
formed, the dancers going through the motions of an 
attack and defense with various weapons, which they . 
at times made very realistic by uttering piercing war 
whoops and making awful slashes at each other. The 
whole thing reminded me a good deal of some of the 
dances I have seen among our own Indians. 
The music for the occasion was. furnished by a Moro ^ 
(Trchestra whose instruments consisted of gongs of two 
sizes. One, about eighteen inches in diameter, called 
an "agun," and a series of smaller gongs arranged in 
little bamboo frames so as to form a sort of rude 
scale, somethinp- on the order of a xylophone, called 
a "culantangan," which the operator vigorously pounded 
with a drumstick, so far as I could see without any re- 
gard to time or which particular one he hit. But the 
Moros seemed to enjoy it, so the rest of us were 
satisfied. ■-. u ' . 
ihese gongs are the only musical (?) instruments I 
saw among the,^ Moros with the exception of a drum 
made of a hollow log with a piece of skin stretched 
over one .end. and, an instrument, closely resembling a 
violincello, which was found in a house by one of our 
officers during a fight. , 
Along about, 9 o'clock Pershmg politely informed our 
guests that it was time for them to go home, which 
they didn't seem at all inclined to do at first, but we 
finally managed to get rid of them and turned in well 
satisfied with our day's work, which we hopeed would . 
bear fruit in the shape of convincing some of the still 
hostile Moros that we had no evil intentions toward 
them. 
After leaving our camp, however, many of our guests 
apparently decided that the night was altogether too 
young for them to stop celebrating, so they adjourned 
to Pedro's house, where they kept up their merry-mak- 
ing pretty much all night, and it was not until the first 
streak of gray dawn appeared that everything became 
quiet and our first fiesta in Moroland was over. 
Ahmi Commissario. 
Some Bird Names, 
: BY ERNEST INGERSOLL. 
All the winged wanderers over the wide ocean are well 
identified by the watchful mariner, who often addresses 
them by fanciful titles. Thus for one reason he dubs 
"frigates" and "man-o'-war .birds" these tireless fliers 
which the naturalist names after Phcsthon, and calls them 
"boatswaiin's birds" for another — namely, the resemblance 
between the long projecting tail-feathers and a marling- 
spike. Additional instances will occur later. 
We have two pelicans in this country — the white and 
the brown. The word comes from a Greek one of nearly 
the same sound, which belonged to a woodpecker and also 
to a seabird. Its application to the former can be un- 
derstood, for it simply meant "the axman"; but why. to 
this one, of all the sea-birds? In Egypt the pelican is the 
"camel-of-the-river," and in Persia "the water-carrier." 
"Cormorant" is, in name, simply a sea-crow — corvus ma- 
rmMJ— brought tO' us apparently through the Portuguese ; 
another name for this unhandsome tribe is "shag," which 
is said by etymologists to be an obscure reference to the 
rough hair-like feathers on the bird's head. Undoubtedly 
that is the root, but the Icelanders, at least, had formed 
a separate word skegglinger (modern skegga) as long 
ago as when the Eddas were written. The closely allied 
gannet ("little goose") is often called a "haglet" — should 
this be "shaglet"? "Solan goose," a kind of gannet, is 
a mis-pronunciation of the Icelandic name sula. 
The Celtic tongue has given "gull" to our language; 
an old pronunciation was "gow," and "divie-gow" is the 
way some British sailors speak of a gull yet. The kitti- 
wake tells its name with every petulant scream, and you 
may see the black burden on the back of the "coffin- 
carrier" with each turn in his flight. The small gulls 
called "sea-swallows" or "terns" (Latin Sterna) have 
many names, but none require remark except "marlin" 
which is either a diminutive of the Icelandic . marr, the 
sea, or 'of "marlingspike." The big "jaeger" or hunter 
gulls of the North Atlantic, who yell skua! skua! are 
"marlingspike.s" to most sailors, and "hags," or "hag- 
dens" to the Banks fishermen, probably on account cf 
their witch-like and doleful screams, heard loudest in bad 
weather, when the birds can hardly be seen. 
Petrel is to be translated "little Peter," and applies to 
those wide-wandering birds because they seem tO' walk 
on the waves as did St. Peter. "Mother Carey's chick- 
ens," the name of the least of the race, comes to us, it is 
supposed, from the Portuguese Madre cara, meaning, in 
fact. Mother of Our Lord. Among all sailors this bird, 
which is suddenly attracted toward any ship in sight 
when storms arise, as if it were a guardian spirit sent 
from Above, is an object of reverent superstition, so that 
such a name is not surprising. AH the small petrels are 
known as "mollymokes" in the arctic regions, a term 
borrowed from the Greenland Eskimos and said by Cap- 
tain Austin ("Explorations," 1850) to mean stupid fliers. 
The puffins take their odd name from their puffed-out 
appearance, rio doubt; but are also known to seamen as, 
"Mother Carey's geese," and "hagdens," as also is the 
thin-beaked "shearwater." The word "grebe" is said by 
Skeat to be the French form- of a Celtic word, meaning 
a comb, or crest, in reference^'to that ornament on the 
head of the crested species tb" which it was first applied. 
Such names as. "dabchick^" "dipper," "di'dapper" and 
"water-witcfi"- refer to its astonishing quickness in dis- 
appearing after an alarm. Why grebes should be called 
"pegging awls"., arid "pine-knots" in New England, or 
"tinker loons" in Illinois I do not know. 
Another famous diver is the great northern one, called 
a "loon" here. and in the Old World, wher>;, however, it 
is not restricted to the Colymbi, as with , us. The word 
is now "loom" in northern Scotland, and comes from 
lomr, the Icelandic name of the bird, in imitation of its 
characteristic, cry; and from this root compounds were 
made by . the islanders that carry with them the sense of 
loud lamentation, so that to the ears of the early North- 
men the voice of the loon, which we call a "laugh," ap- 
pears to be a woful and melancholy cry. A common name 
for this bird in northern Ireland and Scotland is "ember," 
or "immer" goose, handed down from an old Icelandic 
name of the bird, himbrin, which is recorded in the 
Eddas. "Cape Race," "pegging awl," and "pegmonk" are 
Americah seamen's „words for this well-known sea bird. 
For "auk" we -must again turn to the Icelandic,. -which 
spelled it alka, but in old English books the spelling 
"alk" and ",auke" 'are frequently met with. As to "pen- 
guin" the 'Etymological Dictionary says : "In a tract 
printed in 1588 we read that Sir F. Drake gave a certain 
island the name , of Penguin Island in 1587, from the 
penguins found there. The word appears to be Welsh 
pen gwen,.i. e., white head. If so it must first have been 
given to another bird, such as the auk (the puffin is com- 
mon in Anglesey) since the penguin's head is black." 
This is unsatisfactory, but better than Worcester's sug- 
gestion that it comes- from the Latin pinguis, fat. Why 
not say the word is "pin-wing," in reference to the ap- 
, parently unfledged condition of the abortive wing, which 
is the most striking peculiarity about these birds? We 
still say /;m-feathers for those only half-grown, and the 
word is seen in old writings as "pinguin" and "pengwin," 
and even "pin-wing." The sailor's name for the giant of 
the race (Alca impennis) once abundant along the rocky 
islands and coasts of the North Atlantic, but now un- 
happily extinct, was "gare-fowl," meaning the birds that 
stood and stared at one instead of seekin- - to escape. 
This brings us to the end of the bird list, and leaves 
us where it found us, with the imitation of its voice as 
the strongest element in the making of birds' names, and 
the many derivatives thereform which enrich the vocabu- 
lary of all languages. 
Late Wild Geese. 
New London, Conn., May 19. — Editor Forest and 
Stream: On the 17th of this month I noticed a flock of 
twenty-five or thirty wild geese traveling in a north- 
easterly direction a little to the west of this place. I 
think this is unusual for this time of the year. If so, it 
might be of interest to some of the readers of Forest 
AND Stream. ^J. Roberts Mead. 
Female Kittland Warbler in Ohio. 
Lakewood, O., May 15. — Editor Forest and Stream: 
I had the good fortune to capture a female Kirtland 
warbler to-day (May 15), being second specimen in 
twenty years. About that time a female was taken May 
15. This seems to show that the males pass through first, 
as on May 4 a male was killed by me, which makes five 
taken in this locality. A. Hall, 
Capers of the Crow. 
By this title to an article in a recent issue of Forest 
and Stream by Charles Hallock I am reminded of many 
of the doings of tame crows that I have known. 
I wonder how many of the readers of Forest and 
Stream know that by getting a young crow, before it is 
able to fly, and by patience and perseverance for a few 
days, or perhaps weeks, it can be taught to talk, and 
after the first few words that it learns to pronounce it 
learns much faster than any child that I ever knew or 
heard of. Among wild crows I never have seen one that 
talked, so I cannot say whether talking would frighten 
crows or not, but I presume it would. I wish that a pair 
of talking crows could be mated, and raise a brood to- see 
whether they would teach their young to use human 
speech. 
I have seen things that astonished me as much as that 
would. I have seen a pet duck raise a brood of chickens, 
and before they were two weeks old she had them well 
versed in duck language, and had taught them to swim. 
The reason that I have for believing that they under- 
stood duck language is this: that if a hawk or crow flew 
near she would give one harsh quack and every one of 
the chicks would scud into the weeds, and after the dan- 
ger was past she would give five or six gentle quacks and 
out they would come, without the least appearance of fear. 
But the greatest performance was the way she im- 
pressed it on their minds that it was time that they 
learned to swim. One foggy cold morning, early in the 
spring, when they were about a week old, I heard her 
using some_ of the worst duck language that I ever heard 
and the chicks were yelling all kinds of bloody murder. 
I ran out to learn what was the trouble, and there' she 
was at the edge of the water grabbing the chicks in her 
mouth and throwing them in the river, and they were 
scrambling out so fast that she never had more than half 
of the brood in the water at one time. I knew that the 
water and the weather were, so cold that she would have 
them so chilled in a short time that they would all die, 
so I shut her up in the coop and kept her there for sev- 
eral days. When I again let her out she took the chickens 
to the water and gave them another lesson in swimming, 
and she repeated this several time a day, and in three or 
four days she had them educated so that when she would 
go into the water and call to them to come along they 
did so without any hesitation. She apparently .had sense 
enough not to keep them in the water long at a time, and 
that I call reasoning, for it certainly was not instinct. 
One of the talking crows that I have known was owned 
by a man by the name of Lew Labady, that kept a hotel 
in Petoskey, Mich., and his wife one day in a fit of anger 
for some misdemeanor that the crow had cut up, grabbed 
him and took him out in the yard and chopped his head 
off, the crow shouting "Oh, don't," "oh, don't," as she 
carried him to the block. 
I suppose I should not vvrite this last part, neither do I 
know as you will publish it, but I was angry at her 
for killing the crow, for I had taught him to talk several 
years before, and the offense was small. He had under- 
taken to fly off with a small bottle of something, ink 
probably, and had dropped it and the bottle broke and 
made a stain on the carpet. Her husband would have 
been willing to recafpet the room rather than to lose the 
crow, and he was as angry about it a^ I was. 
