United States or Cook Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It was smaller than the other lagoons I have described and much shallower, so that the big birds, such as the stork, wood-ibis, crested screamer, and the great blue ibis, called vanduria, and the roseate spoonbill, could wade almost all over it without wetting their feathers.
One of the most magnificent birds is the American flamingo, which is of a more beautiful and intense scarlet than that of Europe, and fully as tall; another bird, the wood-ibis, has the same form as the glossy ibis of southern Europe. In Carolina and Florida is found the magnificent scarlet ibis, but it seldom makes its way to the northern parts of the Union.
Here is another Southern bird, the fish-crow, smaller than ours, you see. Here I have a white heron and a wood-ibis. These will give me work for to-day." "What game did you see, doctor?" inquired Captain Herbert. "I saw some quails in the palmetto scrub behind the house, and shot one to see if it differs from ours.
"Wood-ibis do you think they might come to it?" he asked so naturally that a sudden glow of confidence in him, in the sunlit world around her, warmed her. "Let me look at your book?" He brought it.
Besides the parrots and scarlet and yellow macaws, and other strange-looking birds which we have elsewhere mentioned, there were long-tailed light-coloured cuckoos flying about from tree to tree, not calling like the cuckoo of Europe at all, but giving forth a sound like the creaking of a rusty hinge; there were hawks and buzzards of many different kinds, and red-breasted orioles in the bushes, and black vultures flying overhead, and Muscovy ducks sweeping past with whizzing wings, and flocks of the great wood-ibis sailing in the air on noiseless pinions, and hundreds of other birds that it would require an ornithologist to name; and myriads of insects, especially ants and spiders, great and small, that no entomologist could chronicle in a lifetime; all these were heard and seen at once; while of the animals that were heard, but not so often seen, there were black and spotted jaguars, and pacas, and cotias, and armadillos, and deer, and many others, that would take pages to enumerate and whole books to describe.
We shot merely the two or three specimens the naturalists needed for the museum. I killed a wood-ibis on the wing with the handy little Springfield, and then lost all the credit I had thus gained by a series of inexcusable misses, at long range, before I finally killed a jabiru. Kermit shot a jabiru with the Luger automatic.
"As I advanced, I fell in with game; and I succeeded in bagging several, both of the great wood-ibis and the white species. But the bird which I most wanted seemed that which could not be obtained. I wanted the scarlet ibis.
A full-foliaged tree of vivid green, its round surface crowded with these birds, as if it had suddenly blossomed with huge white flowers, is a sight worth seeing. Here and there on the sand- bars we saw huge jabiru storks, and once a flock of white wood-ibis among the trees on the bank.
All this was paralleled among the men; and the fusion of the colors was going on steadily. Around the village black vultures were gathered. Not long before reaching it we passed some rounded green trees, their tops covered with the showy wood-ibis; at the same time we saw behind them, farther inland, other trees crowded with the more delicate forms of the shining white egrets.
All nature seemed alive. Numberless birds, many of large size, flew through the air or waded on the banks. Among them were the black and white wood-ibis, which appeared in large flocks from among the branches of the trees; there were blue herons, snow-herons, pelicans, and cranes.
Word Of The Day