The early morning was always lovely on these rivers, and at that hour
many birds and beasts were to be seen. One morning we saw a fine marsh
buck, holding his head aloft as he stared at us, his red coat vivid
against the green marsh. Another of these marsh-deer swam the river
ahead of us; I shot at it as it landed, and ought to have got it, but
did not. As always with these marsh-deer--and as with so many other
deer--I was struck by the revealing or advertising quality of its red
coloration; there was nothing in its normal surroundings with which
this coloration harmonized; so far as it had any effect whatever it
was always a revealing and not a concealing effect. When the animal
fled the black of the erect tail was an additional revealing mark,
although not of such startlingly advertising quality as the flag of
the whitetail. The whitetail, in one of its forms, and with the
ordinary whitetail custom of displaying the white flag as it runs, is
found in the immediate neighborhood of the swamp-deer. It has the same
foes. Evidently it is of no survival consequence whether the running
deer displays a white or a black flag. Any competent observer of big
game must be struck by the fact that in the great majority of the
species the coloration is not concealing, and that in many it has a
highly revealing quality. Moreover, if the spotted or striped young
represent the ancestral coloration, and if, as seems probable, the
spots and stripes have, on the whole, some slight concealing value, it
is evident that in the life history of most of these large mammals,
both among those that prey and those that are preyed on, concealing
coloration has not been a survival factor; throughout the ages during
which they have survived they have gradually lost whatever of
concealing coloration they may once have had--if any--and have
developed a coloration which under present conditions has no
concealing and perhaps even has a revealing quality, and which in all
probability never would have had a concealing value in any
"environmental complex" in which the species as a whole lived during
its ancestral development. Indeed, it seems astonishing, when one
observes these big beasts--and big waders and other water-birds--in
their native surroundings, to find how utterly non-harmful their often
strikingly revealing coloration is. Evidently the various other
survival factors, such as habit, and in many cases cover, etc., are of
such overmastering importan