The Result of the Acclimatisation Crase in Jamaica.

Otago Witness, Issue 1602, 5 August 1882, Page 22

The Result of the Acclimatisation Crase in Jamaica.

(London Post, 13th May.)

An inquiry into the working of the Act for the Protection of Wild Birds, if Mr Gladstone would pledge himself not to foresee grave polilical complications likely to arise therefrom, might be both interesting and profitable. The divergence of opinion as to the results' of ornithological legislation so far is certainly curious. In jsome parts of the country sparrow clubs have been reorganised with a view to checking' what was described last autumn as "a plague of small birds " ; but on the other hand, philornithic voices are still far from silent as to the depopulation of our groves and fields of their feathered denizens by the wholesale and direct evasion of the Act by bird-catchers. The fact is that the balance of nature, like the , " balance of power " in Europe, is easily upset but! incapable of violent rectification. Those who are in favour of more drastic measures, and, who would by Act of Parliament compel all good birds to be common and all bad birds to be rare, should study the natural history of Jamaica as presenting an epitome of the harrowing results of scientific intervention, Jamaica, we are told, was once a happy land' rejdicing in sugar ; cacao, cocoanut, and fowls in abundance, until some ships introduced the. first element of disturbance in the shape of blask and brown rats. These intelligent crea* tures cheerfully accommodated themselves to the] conditions; of a country where there were neither cats nor ferrets, and even the trees were edible, until the rapidly-increasing num- J ber£ of such unweloome immigrants seemed to call for authoritative interference. To readjust the balance of nature Sir Harry Price is popularly supposed to have intro. duced an animal, honourably distinguished among other rats by the title of the canepie^e rat and by the proud possession of a white stomach, m the hope— the laudable but mistaken hope— that it would probably fall to and devour the black and brown rafcs. Tha ne «r comer, however,- gave its sole and undivided attention to the destruction of sugarcane, with such success that the 'black and proton vermin sank into insignificance, and tha 'Massa Price ratta," as this , white-bellied enormity is called, has for a century been' the' -' curse of J amaica, one-tbird of the sugar crops beiriff annually destroyed. In 1762,. Mr Thos ' Raffles, acting on his own responsibility introduced a carnivorous ant,' the /ormica > . | onmivora of scientists, to eat the young rats ' Thesse ants, he argued, eat everything. ' ' There--' ■ forej they will eat the young cane-piece rats. ' So he acclimatised this formidable insect, and it promptly became, in the words of a colonist a more intolerable scourge than all the other plagues put together." Matters could not be allowed to rest here, so in 1844 Mr Anthony Davis bethought himself of the inestimable ; virtues of a certain South American toad— a sort, of gigantic bull-frog— which was known' to be capable of assimilating anything, from an ant toaWhite-belhedrat. The Aqua toad was, therefore!, introduced into Jamaica in large num- | bera but soon became hopelessly demoralised, and' developed a consuming appetite for young I ducklings and a lung power W hich, either i£ the form of a "loud nocturnal bellowing" or a sort of modulated snoring noise/ was fouiid to be a most effectual antidote to sleep. ' In addition thanks to the toad, the island suffers acutely from a chronic plague of. "ticks/ and grass-lice, for the reptile Ite the predacious insects that used to eat the ticks, wn !fJ it* ferrets were introduced to • kill off the rats they could not withstand the ticks, but incontinently died. The selected assortment of unnatural history specimens m Jamaica was made complete-up to date-by Mr Espeut in 1874, wL imported the ,pmk-nosed mungoose from India The "Massa Espeut ratta," as the natives call it certainly quenched the white-bellied rat- but as cannot climb and a black rat can, it indirectly restored the original supremacy of the original rat, and the partial success of the mungoose is heavily discounted in many ways It eats the « meeifaced » ffi£ , that; ought Jo eat the ticks, and the snakes that ought to eat the toads, and the fowls that used to lay eg« Thus far, then, the total result of highhanded interference with the balance of nature m Jamaica may be tabulated as f olWs:— Firstly, black and brown rats, which whM h.r PSJ S6C ° n f y > "^-bellied rat£ which do the same, only more so; thirdly toads, which exterminate the ducks and ii! directly encourage the ticks ; fourthly, ants 2£j£.fT ™n er ? hingr the y come ac ™*, ex'ceptjrats ; fifthly, ferrets, defunct; sixthly and lastly, mungooses which eat the domestic fowls, the useful lizards, and the snakes. Against all this intolerable deal of mischief we have only the single countervailing advantage of the temporary subjugation of the white-bellied rat by the mungoose. From this it will be seen that though much has been done in Jamaica, much may yet oe done in the way of ace W tisation of new animals ; and even in England ?■ !? SufHPossible that by encouraging wild birds till the crops are half destroyedfor by exterminating wild birds till insects and weeds become a p a^ue, a wide field may be opened to similar exciting experiments