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The tinamou is excessively timid, and sometimes when birds of this species are chased for gaucho boys frequently run them down on horseback and when they find no burrows or thickets to escape into, they actually drop down dead on the plain. Probably, when they feign death in their captor's hand, they are in reality very near to death.
An occasional gay-plumaged bird of the toucan variety, but larger than the ordinary South American species, was seen, while large numbers of plump birds of the tinamou family went drumming off through the forest at the approach of the party. Penguins strutted in complete "full dress" among the rocks of the southern shore.
I have spent many a night in the desert, and when waking on the wide silent grassy plain, the first whiteness in the eastern sky, and the fluting call of the tinamou, and the perfume of the wild evening primrose, have seemed to me like a resurrection in which I had a part; and something of this feeling is always associated in my mind with the first far-heard notes of Chanticleer.
The most characteristic pampean birds are the tinamous called partridges in the vernacular the rufous tinamou, large as a fowl, and the spotted tinamou, which is about the size of the English partridge.
We also went tinamou, or partridge, catching, and sometimes we had sham fights with lances, or long canes with which we supplied the others.
By the light of the full-moon the vigilant and cautious naturalist may see him sitting in the position already described. The small tinamou has nothing that can be called a tail. It never lays more than one egg, which is of a chocolate colour. It makes no nest, but merely scratches a little hollow in the sand, generally at the foot of a tree.
The important thing was that it lay motionless had been in this identical position for some time, and so long as it did not move it gave off no scent. It was for this same reason that the tinamou and quail and other ground-nesting birds escaped the keen noses of the foxes, otherwise they would have been exterminated long ago. The preying animals hunted by scent, not by sight.
And with the rhea go the flamingo, antique and splendid; and the swans in their bridal plumage; and the rufous tinamou sweet and mournful melodist of the eventide; and the noble crested screamer, that clarion-voiced watch-bird of the night in the wilderness.
He was quite willing to have birds killed young pigeons, wild ducks, plover, snipe, whimbrel, tinamou or partridge, and various others which he liked to eat but the killing always had to be done by others.
The beautiful mixture of grey, yellow, green, black, white and chestnut in the plumage of this bird baffles any attempt to give a description of the distribution of them which would be satisfactory to the reader. There is something remarkable in the great tinamou which I suspect has hitherto escaped notice.
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