Close Up (Mar-Dec 1933)

264 CLOSE UP jackdaw walking about it looking for scraps of meat, and Carveth Wells' Australian eyrie from which a native was coming away with eagle's food for himself. Dr. Bailey's golden eagle eyrie on a narrow shelf of rock at the summit of a bleached pinnacle striped by transverse erosions, without vegetation or neighboring peaks was more " terrible " than Captain C. W. R. Knight's Scotch eyrie scenes — though no partial study can rival a life history such as Captain Knight showed, of male and female eaglet in The Filming of the Golden Eagle, 1929. It is difficult not to write a bookful on work such as this ; the shadings into unsatisfactorines and the supreme peaks of attainment, but of the present film, The Romance of the Golden Eagle, one must be content to mention a few rarities only : an Ailsa Crag gannet, in slow motion, leaving the nest ; the razor-bill steering itself with its feet, one on either side like little black masons' trowels ; the suggestion of power in the interacting acrs of the wings braking the momentum of the eagle as it pitches, on the ground, feet forward ; " the pass " or transfer in air, of the frog or mouse that he has in his feet, by the male marsh-hawk to the female as she flies toward him before he reaches the nest ; the tame raven with " beak rather like a pair of pliers " ; tame owl turning its head first one way and then the other, from a point in the circle around to the point from which it started without moving shoulders or body ; two young cuckoos so tall the foster robins must " hover in the air to hand over the ration." Captain Knight's interpretation of terms used in falconry, by examples of their use by Shakespeare should be embodied in a book ; as should the steps in training a falcon, given in The Filming of the Golden Eagle. In Strange Animals I Have Known, Dr. R. L. Ditmars, Curator of Reptiles and Mammals at the Bronz Zoological Park, presents a series of parallels in protection ; comparing the anthropoid apes " with a more lowly type like the beaver," with insects, crabs, clams, cuttlefish, sea-hares, and the like. He made the pictures " with various cameras " and " machinery such as is used in dramatic studios, some less complicated than that, and some more complicated." The study of beavers is of curious interest and represents seven years' work but does not smite the mind aesthetically as the insects do, and the triangular very black front of an armidallo's head ; " certain pallid forms on desert sand which in a way is like snow " ; or the giant ant-eater lapping milk with a tongue like a surveyor's tape for length, its " mouth so small that when yawning it would barely admit the tip of one's little finger " — a royally exotic animal with its white-edged isosceles triangle from the shoulder down the foreleg, a black patch on each shin, and heavy tail of upcurving fountaining fringe. The platypus moving about in water like a salamander, with pin-tipped claws connected by delicate black webs like internal membranes, was informing". An echidna gathering, with what resembled an anteater's tongue, a colony of white winged-ants from a fallen tree, should be mentioned — and a horned toad defined by white paper slipped behind the points of its collar. The manifestations of protection in marine creatures, photographed through the co-operation of the Biological Station in Naples and the Oceanographic Museum at Monaco — with equipment presented to Dr. Ditmars by the Prince of Monaco — have this