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There is a considerable number of species of this bird, all of which have a magnificent plumage. They are of moderate size, and are allied in their habits and structure to crows, starlings, and to the Australian honey-suckers.
Such are the so-called brush turkeys and mound builders, the only feathered things that never sit upon their own eggs, but allow them to be hatched, after the fashion of reptiles, by the heat of the sand or of fermenting vegetable matter. The piping crows, the honey-suckers, the lyre-birds, and the more-porks are all peculiar to the Australian region. So are the wonderful and æsthetic bower-birds.
Scarcely less curious is the case of Mr. Wallace's Malayan orioles, two species of which exactly copy two pugnacious honey-suckers in every detail of plumage and coloration. As the honey-suckers are avoided by birds of prey, owing to their surprising strength and pugnacity, the orioles gain immunity from attack by their close resemblance to the protected species. When Dr.
I could easily have thought them to be departed spirits who had left this world unsatisfied, and so keep coming back to it again and again in the guise of bees, paying me an inquiring visit in passing. But I think nothing of the kind. I am sure they are real bees, otherwise known, in Sanskrit, as honey-suckers, or on still rarer occasions as double-proboscideans.
It appears at first sight a surprising circumstance that some closely- allied species should regularly undergo a double annual moult, and others only a single one. On the moulting of the ptarmigan, see Gould's 'Birds of Great Britain. On the honey-suckers, Jerdon, 'Birds of India, vol. i. pp. 359, 365, 369.
Not even an insect could I see, although the furze was in full blossom; the honey-suckers were out of sight and torpid, and the bloom itself could no longer look "unprofitably gay," as the poet says it does. "Not even a wheatear!" I said, for I had counted on that bird in the intervals between the storms, although I knew I should not hear his wild delightful warble in such weather.
Instead also of the various birds which exist in other parts of the world, it has the mound-making brush-turkeys, the cockatoos, and the brush-tongued lories, as well as honey-suckers, to be found in no other part of the world. These peculiarities are discovered in the other islands I have mentioned, forming the Austro-Malayan division of the archipelago.
I think it was the song of one of the honey-suckers, a red bird with black wings that in flight looked like our scarlet tanager. Our course took us out over the cracked and contorted lava-beds, where no green thing was growing. The forms of the lava-flow suggested mailed and writhing dragons, with horrid, gaping mouths and vicious claws.
Wallace tells us of no less than four kinds of orioles, which birds mimic, more or less, four species of a genus of honey-suckers, the weak orioles finding their profit in being mistaken by certain birds of prey for the strong, active, and gregarious honey-suckers.
Honey-buzzard of India, variation in the crest of. Honey-sucker, females and young of. Honey-suckers, moulting of the; Australian, nidification of. Honour, law of. Hooker, Dr., forbearance of elephant to his keeper; on the colour of the beard in man. Hookham, Mr., on mental concepts in animals. Hoolock Gibbon, nose of. Hoopoe, sounds produced by male. Hoplopterus armatus, wing-spurs of.
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