Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 May 1885 — CATCHING A MAN-O’-WAR BIRD. [ARTICLE]

CATCHING A MAN-O’-WAR BIRD.

A .‘Jailor’s Story of How He Got an Extraordinary Stem for His Pipe. An old sailor, whose appearance indicated that he had been mnch buffeted by wind and wave, stood resting his back against a mooring-post near a bulkhead in South street, meditatively smoking. The glowing bowl of his pipe rested on the top of a barrel some distance away, and the stem was fully four feet long. It was very thin, and seemed to be bone. Its hue was a bright, glossy black, though what its original color had been the sailor had to say. It curved with a long, graceful, uniform sweep from the mariner’s lips to the bowl. “It's the wing bone of a man-o’-war bird,” said the owner, when asked about it. “Land folks, I believe, call them albatrosses; we sailors like the old name of man-o’-war bird better. I caught the one that I got this stem from about five hundred miles south of the Cape of Good Hope. I hooked him with a piece of raw fat pork tied to the end of a rope lanyard. It was blowing half a gale of wind, and the man-o’-war birds were out enjoying it, as usual. “They just touch the top of a wave with their feet, and then give a sharp, quick cry and go driving on a hundred yards or so before they take another plunge. I got a big lump of fat pork at the galley, and let it tow overboard with the lanyard, about fifty yards astern of the ship. One of the birds saw it, and had swallowed it in a minute, and we began to haul him in. My stars, but he gave us a job. It took five of us to get him on deck, and then, of all the unwieldly birds you ever saw he was the worst. A goose would have been graceful to him, and he did not seem a bit like the beautifulwhite birds of his kind that were sweeping about the ship, now ahead and now astern, sailing against the wind or with it at just about the same rate of speed, and seeming to be part of the gale. “My prisoner squatted down on the deck and began to cry. There was no doubt about it. He sobbed and whimpered like a hurt child, and the tears ran down his long hooked beak and dropped off' the knob at the end. After a time he became seasick. But his illness did not cease there. He got more and more sick every minute as the vessel rolled and pitched in tliq heavy sea that was running. It was genuine seasickness. This seems curious with a bird that lives altogether on the water, but a man-o’-war bird always gets seasick when he is taken on the deck of a rolling ship. 1 would have saved him if I could, but if I had thrown him overboard he would have been swamped by the big seas before he could have used his long wings. Neither could he rise from the deck, and in alxjut two hours he laid his head down on the planks and died. “I divided the long wing bones among the crew, and they all made pipe-stems of them. They are hollow, flesh-col-ored, and very light, and that is the reason the man-o’-war bird can fly so long. It is forever on the wing, and only goes ashore on some uninhabited island at breeding-time. Sailors think they sleep flying, that is, some of them think so, but I believe they sleep floating on the water, when it is calm enough—which is not often about the Cape of Good Hope, or else never sleep at all. They are the biggest birds that live .anywhere. The one that I caught weighed twenty-nine pounds, and measured seventeen feet from wing tip to wing tip, and he was not at all a large one. No, we had no ill-luck after the bird’s death. If you shoot one and kill him you may look out for squalls, but to eatoh him with a piece of fat pork and let him die on <feck is a different thing altogether, you know.” —New York Sun.