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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.
Between the minute, straight, conical, tit-like beaks of the Laptasthenura a tit in appearance and habits and the extravagantly long, sword-shaped bill of Nasica, or the excessively attenuated, sickle-shaped organ in Xiphorynchus, the divergence is amazing, compared with what is found in other families; while between these two extremes there is a heterogeneous assemblage of birds with beaks like creepers, nuthatches, finches, tyrant-birds, woodpeckers, crows, and even curlews and ibises.
The others tanagers, finches, tyrant-birds; red, white, blue, grey, yellow, and mixed were, I must own, less troublesome, for, after hopping about for a while, screaming, chirping, and twittering, they very sensibly flew away, no doubt thinking their friends the cuckoos were making a great deal too much fuss.
Among the tyrant-birds are several species of the beautiful wing-banded genus, snow-white in colour, with black on the wings and tail: these are extremely graceful birds, and strong flyers, and in desert places, where man seldom intrudes, they gather to follow the traveller, calling to each other with low whistling notes, and in the distance look like white flowers as they perch on the topmost stems of the tall bending grasses.
This aerial dance over, they alight in separate couples on the tree tops, each couple joining in a kind of duet of rapidly repeated, castanet-like sounds. The displays of the wood-hewers, or Dendrocolap-tidae, another extensive family, resemble those of the tyrant-birds in being chiefly duets, male and female singing excitedly in piercing or resonant voices, and with much action.
The tyrant-birds, which represent in South America the fly-catchers of the Old World, all have displays of some kind; in a vast majority of cases these are simply joyous, excited duets between male and female, composed of impetuous and more or less confused notes and screams, accompanied with beating of wings and other gestures.
Then came other tyrant-birds and the loved swallows the house- swallow, which resembles the English house-martin, the large purple martin, the Golodrina domestica, and the brown tree-martin. Then, too, came the yellow-billed cuckoo the kowe-kowe as it is called from its cry.
In the forest areas of the hotter regions it is different; there the birds form large gatherings or "wandering bands," composed of all the different species found in each district, associated with birds of other families wood-peckers, tyrant-birds, bush shrikes, and many others.
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