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This species may be said to be the warbler of the Western Himalayas, and, as such, it has been made the subject of a separate essay. The butcher-birds are the best-known members of this fraternity. Undoubtedly passerine in structure, shrikes are as indubitably raptores by nature. They are nothing less than pocket hawks.
It is strange to find a Passerine family, numerous as the Tree-creepers, uniformly of one colour, or nearly so; for, with few exceptions, these birds have a brown plumage, without a particle of bright colour. But although they possess no brilliant or metallic tints, in some species, as we shall see, there are tints approaching to brightness.
Both the male and female gallitos are of an olive-brown; but the pollo, or young male, is distinguishable at the earliest age, by its size and its yellow feet. This tint grows pale more easy than in the other genera of the passerine order. The young males, as in most other birds, have the plumage or livery of their mother.
Probably not fewer than a dozen species of the plover order are breeders on the great austral continent; also other aquatic birds ducks and geese; and many Passerine birds, chiefly of the Tyrant family.
The performance is then over and the visitor goes back to his own ground and mate, to receive a visitor himself later on. In the Passerine order, not the least remarkable displays are witnessed in birds that are not accounted songsters, as they do not possess the highly developed vocal organ confined to the suborder Oscines.
The humming-birds are chiefly to be found near the flowers at which each of the species of the genus is wont to feed. The pie, the gallinaceous, the columbine, and passerine tribes, resort to the fruit-bearing trees. You never fail to see the common vulture where there is carrion.
"This is my young friend," Sir James said, "of whom I have been speaking to you, and whose work you are all admiring. This, Frank, is Mr. Goodenough, the traveler and naturalist, of whom you may have heard." "Yes, indeed," Frank said, looking at the gentleman indicated. "I have Mr. Goodenough's book on The Passerine Family at home." "It is rather an expensive book too," the gentleman said.
Hood's labors were poetic, but his sports were passerine. Lamb admired and was very familiar with him. "What a fertile genius he is!" He then expatiates particularly on Hood's sketch of "Very Deaf indeed!" wherein a footpad has stopped an old gentleman, but cannot make him understand what he wants, although the fellow is firing a pistol into his ear trumpet. "You'd like him very much," he adds.
This species was probably solitary, except when assembling for the purpose of display; but in a majority of cases, especially in the Passerine order, the solitary species performs its antics alone, or with no witness but its mate.
Many people are totally at a loss to distinguish between a swallow and a swift. The two birds differ anatomically. A swift is not a passerine bird. It cannot perch. When it wants to take a rest it has to repair to its nest. Swallows, on the other hand, are fond of settling on telegraph wires. It is quite easy to distinguish between the birds when they are on the wing.
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