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In mediaeval days the Bird of Paradise was in like manner thought to be without feet. The error arose in a very natural but most prosaic way, and simply sprang from the fact that the natives who bartered the skins of the birds with the merchants cut off the legs before bringing them, naturally thinking that they were of no value, and that it was for the richness of the plumage alone that the skins were esteemed. The lovers of the marvellous in the West built upon this weak foundation a most poetic superstructure, and believed that the bird was indeed the denizen of paradise, fed upon the dew of heaven, incapable of contact with earth, building no nest, but hatching its eggs in a cavity upon its own back ; ever ,soaring in the sunlight far above earth, and independent of all mundane association.
Tavernier supplies another explanation, equally prosaic, of their footless condition-one in fact, that entirely removes the poor birds from all poetic association, and reduces them to the "drunk and incapable" state that some other bipeds are prone to indulge in. He tells us in his book that the birds of paradise come in flocks during the nutmeg season to the plantations, and that the odour so intoxicates them that they fall helplessly to the earth, and that the ants eat off their feet while they are thus incapacitated. Moore, in his " Lalla Rookh," thus refers, it will be remembered, to this Tavernier tale in writing of- " Those golden birds that in the spice-time drop Upon the gardens drunk with that sweet food Whose scent hath lured them o'er the summer flood." |