Papagaios, Life & Times on a Speculative Archipelago

Extract* taken from “Treze meses no Éden” or “Thirteen months in Eden; a Year and a Month Living in the Wild Places of the Papagaios Islands and Documenting the Creatures Found There,” by Georgina de Oliveira, University of Lisbon. Published 1925.

*Translated from Portuguese

As previous chapters have laid out, the richness of life in the Papagaios is surely due to two things: favourable currents bringing rich waters to the islands and the continuing volcanism that both formed the islands and remakes them like an artist who is unwilling to lay down his brush. The slopes of extinct volcanoes provide fertile soil for the islands’ lush forests and the ash that rains down from those still active make the Papagaian fields some of the most productive farmland in the world (at least in those areas cleared of the pervasive walnut toxins). Those islands that are still actively, violently volcanic may be deemed to be inhospitable to life, yet this is far from the truth.

One week after Easter in 1923, I sailed north from Porto Oeste to the cluster of smaller islands north of Milagres known as Milagrinhos or Little Miracles. I made landfall on Ihla dos Golfinhos, the second largest of those islands and so named, not for any notable dolphin population but for the island’s shape which is remarkably like that of the marine mammal. (For those doubting how such an island could form, there is a similar example with the seahorse-shaped Isabella Island in the Galapagos, perhaps suggest an affinity between cooling lava and unusually shaped islands.)

Map of Ilha dos Golfinhos within the Milagrinhos,
in relation to the rest of the Papagaios

Milagres, the largest Papagaian island, has few remaining active volcanoes. The Milagrinho group to which Golfinhos belongs is in contrast extremely volatile. As a result, only the hardiest of plants grow here and the animal life likewise comprises but a few resilient species. I was the first naturalist to spend any time on these islands, indeed I believe I was the first person to spend more than a day here since the decline in smuggling a century before.

The beaches boast, as expected, large colonies of marquinhets and the solitary stormborn species favour these islands for mating before departing to lay their eggs on small barren rocks miles from shore. Slenderbills also patrol the beaches and it is one species in particular, which has become the king of these islands.

Closely related to the blacksands prober, the fénix has left the beaches in favour of life further inland. Standing at over two feet tall, it stalks the sandy volcanic slopes and rocky plains of the island on long legs – over half its entire height. As with its prober cousins it uses its long beak to find invertebrates beneath the ground, but the fénix will also pry open dry vegetation, investigate narrow crevasses and even chase down small lizards which it kills with a swift kick.

Its plumage is largely black, like the volcanic soil, but as the largest terrestrial animal on the island, it does not fear predators and so limits its ability to hide with a bright white chest, red throat and red and orange wing feathers as vibrant as the flames of their volcano home. Beneath their eyes are a featherless patch of scaly orange skin and two long red feathers reach back from their heads like antennae. This is true of both males and females and are used in recognising individuals. The fénix is monogamous within a single breeding season but will have a pool of several mates it revisits over the course of its life, usually no more than five.

It is during the breeding season that the fénix’s most unusual behaviours are exhibited. The birds gather on the mountain slopes and dance - males and females alike - by spreading their fiery wings and leaping side to side from one foot to the other. This dance forms and renews social bonds and is how individuals choose which of their regular mates their will pair with that year. The most impressive dancers will do so close to danger, such as at the edge of cliffs, over steaming fissures in the earth or even beside flowing lava. Such courage is rewarded and these will be the only birds to take multiple mates in a single year; although it should be said that I witnessed no fewer than three individuals plummet to their fiery death in a single afternoon making it a high-risk high-reward strategy.

After mating, the females disperse across the island. They are seeking areas of sand where the heat of the geologic processes beneath them will keep their eggs warm. It also noted that much like the slenderbills of the coast, the female fénix will dig many more holes than she has laid eggs as a way of distracting egg thieves. Cleverly, she will remain close to her nest site not to brood, but to wait for egg-eating lizards whom she will then eat herself, making the false nests both decoys and lures.

Some four to six weeks later, the young emerge from the ash and sand and begin their life, independent from the moment of hatching. Unlike their parents they are entirely black in plumage until they are a year old. It was fascinating spend time on their islands and one can easily understand how these birds which live dangerously close to seams of fire and are born from spoking black sand came to be associated with the mythical bird that is reborn from its own ashes.