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Northeast Borneo and North Celebes have a comparatively cool climate, but from Samarinda southward it is warmer. I called on the assistant Resident, in whose office a beautiful blue water-rail, with a red head, walked unconcernedly about. He advised me that this was the worst time for travelling, when the northwest monsoons, which are accompanied by much rain, are blowing.
Here are plenty of water-rail, blue kingfishes, and metallic dragon-flies, the latter skimming over the still water, daintily touching the surface now and again. Hereabouts the woods and open glades are crowded with bird life.
So damp was the ground, that there were large beds of a coarse cyperus, in which great numbers of a very small water-rail lived and bred. One day we accompanied a party of the Spaniards in their whale-boat to a salina, or lake from which salt is procured.
They make extremely pretty old-fashioned shooting when beaten up by a spaniel from the sedge and osier cover. I once turned out a dozen water-hens, a brown owl, a woodcock, and a water-rail from one little withe patch. When shooting the wood we always had one or two water-hens in the bag, and sometimes a chance at a duck flying overhead from the river.
This one produced unexpectedly a pair of sedge-warblers and a reed-warbler, atoms who gyrated and grated their annoyance; a willow-tit, who made needle-point rebukes; a water-rail, with a long beak and long legs, running away like a long-legged pullet; a moorhen very much concerned as to her nest; a big rat very much concerned as to the moorhen's nest, too, but in a different way; a grass snake, who glistened as if newly painted in the sun; and a spotted crake, who is even more of a running winged ventriloquial mystery than the corn-crake of our childhood's hay-times.
Upon the river and lagoons and creeks the swan and wild goose and countless duck made constant clamor, and there were water-rail and snipe along the shallows. There were eggs to be found, and an egg baked in the ashes was a thing most excellent. It was with the waterfowl that the boys were most successful.
I sat there all the afternoon, not even unhitching my teams, listening as the afternoon drew on toward night, to the bitterns crying "plum pudd'n'" from the marsh, to the queer calls of the water-rail, and to the long-drawn "whe-e-ep whe-e-e-ew!" of the curlews, as they alighted on the prairie and stretched their wings up over their backs.
Sometimes a water-rail would come out from the sedges and walk on the surface of the lake as a tiny ostrich might on the shifting sand; pretty creatures of all sorts seemed to find their homes near the deep wonderful water, and the whole morning might be passed in silently watching the birds and beasts that came around.
So damp was the ground, that there were large beds of a coarse cyperus, in which great numbers of a very small water-rail lived and bred. One day we accompanied a party of the Spaniards in their whale-boat to a salina, or lake from which salt is procured.
As they rowed back again, Giles described the habits of the birds which frequented this reedy spot. Jamie listened open-eyed to his accounts of the moor-hen, flapper, coot, water-rail, dab-chick, and sand-piper, to say nothing of rats in abundance, and an otter now and then. If you crept upon the islet very quietly, you could hear the rats before you saw them.
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