United States or Egypt ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
At the present day they are numerous in the valley of the Colorado, which is three hundred miles due south of Monte Video. It seems probable that this additional migration has happened since the time of Azara.
Azara, vol. iv. p. 173. This appears to me very improbable. He asserts that four or five hens associate for incubation with one cock, who sits only at night. When at the Rio Negro, we heard much of the indefatigable labours of this naturalist.
Even in such trifling characters as the colouring, the harsh tone of the voice, and undulatory flight, its close blood-relationship to our common woodpecker is plainly declared; yet, as I can assert, not only from my own observations, but from those of the accurate Azara, in certain large districts it does not climb trees, and it makes its nest in holes in banks!
Azara caused the body of a horse, which had been recently killed by a jaguar, to be drawn within musket-shot of a tree, in which he intended to pass the night, anticipating that the jaguar would return in the course of it, to its victim; but while he was gone to prepare for his adventure, behold the animal swam across a large and deep river, and having seized the horse with his teeth, dragged it full sixty paces to the river, swam across again with his prey, and then dragged the carcass into a into a neighboring wood: and all this in sight of a person, whom Azara had placed to keep watch.
During the embassy of Lucien Bonaparte to the Court of Madrid, in the autumn of 1800, Gravina was by his influence restored to favour; and after the death of the late Spanish Ambassador to the Cabinet of St. Cloud, Chevalier d' Azara, by the special desire of Napoleon, was nominated both his successor and a representative of the King of Etruria.
Many of the shrubs and plants afford dyes of the richest hues, Azara found four hundred new species of the feathered tribe in the gorgeous woods and coppices of Paraguay, and all, with the melancholy caw, caw of the toucans overhead, spoke of a tropical land. Parrots chattered in the trees, and sometimes a serpent glided across the red sand road.
Azara, describing a small finch, which he aptly named Oscilador, says that early and late in the day it mounts up vertically to a moderate height; then, flies off to a, distance of twenty yards, describing a perfect curve in its passage; turning, it flies back over the imaginary line it has traced, and so on repeatedly, appearing like a pendulum swung in space by an invisible thread.
This may be the case with covered nests made of soft materials, loosely put together; but it cannot be said of the solid structure the tree-creeper bnilds, and which, as often as not, the bird erects in the most conspicuous place it can find, as if, writes Azara, it desired all the world to admire its work.
To these observations I may add, on the high authority of Azara, that the Carrancha feeds on worms, shells, slugs, grasshoppers, and frogs; that it destroys young lambs by tearing the umbilical cord; and that it pursues the Gallinazo, till that bird is compelled to vomit up the carrion it may have recently gorged.
But it is precisely the animals, high or low in the organic scale, that are social, and possess the instinct of helping each other, that will on occasions attack a fellow in misfortune such an attack being no more than a blunder of the helping instinct. Felix de Azara records a rather cruel experiment on the temper of some tame rats confined in a cage.
Word Of The Day