United States or China ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Sometimes the chirping of the ant-thrushes drew attention to where a great body of army-ants were foraging amongst the fallen branches, sending the spiders, cockroaches, and grasshoppers fleeing for their lives, only to fall victims to the surrounding birds.
They do not, however, feed on the ants, but on the insects they disturb. Besides the ant-thrushes, trogons, creepers, and a variety of other birds, are often seen on the branches of trees above where an ant army is foraging below, pursuing and catching the insects that fly up. The insects caught by the ants are dismembered, and their too bulky bodies bitten to pieces and carried off to the rear.
Thus, in the three South American Passerine families, the tyrant-birds, wood-hewers, and ant-thrushes, numbering together between eight and nine hundred species, a very large majority appear to have displays of this description.
Proposed improvement of the river. Progress of the delta. Mosquitoes. Disagreeable night. Fine morning. Vegetation of the banks. Seripiqui river. Mot-mots. Foraging ants: their method of hunting. Ant-thrushes. They attack the nests of other ants. Birds' nests, how preserved from them. Reasoning powers in ants. Parallel between the Mammalia and the Hymenoptera. Utopia.
It might easily have escaped from the ants by using its wings, but it would only have fallen into as great a danger, for the numerous birds that accompany the army ants are ever on the look out for any insect that may fly up, and the heavy flying locusts, grasshoppers, and cockroaches have no chance of escape. Several species of ant-thrushes always accompany the army ants in the forest.
I am inclined, however, to think that they may act, in a less direct way, as protectors of the community, namely, as indigestible morsels to the flocks of ant-thrushes which follow the marching columns of these Ecitons, and are the most formidable enemies of the species.
These thickets swarmed with ants and ant-thrushes; they were also frequented by a species of puff-throated manikin, a little bird which flies occasionally across the road, emitting a strange noise, made, I believe, with its wings, and resembling the clatter of a small wooden rattle.
Now and then little troops of birds of many kinds passed wood-hewers, ant-thrushes, tanagers, flycatchers; as in the spring and fall similar troops of warblers, chickadees, and nuthatches pass through our northern woods. On the rocks and on the great trees by the river grew beautiful white and lilac orchids, the sobralia, of sweet and delicate fragrance.
Several flycatchers, finches, ant-thrushes, a tribe of plainly-coloured birds, intermediate in structure between flycatchers and thrushes, some of which startle the new-comer by their extraordinary notes emitted from their places of concealment in the dense thickets; and also tanagers, and other small birds, inhabited the neighbourhood.
Word Of The Day