Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 18, 2025
The cow-birds were excessively numerous among the trees in summer, perpetually hunting for nests in which to deposit their eggs: they fed on the ground out on the plain and were often in such big flocks as to look like a huge black carpet spread out on the green sward. On a rainy day they did not feed: they congregated on the trees in thousands and sang by the hour.
We got very near a pair of snowy ibis, or cow-birds, as they are called, attending on two grazing cows. White as geese, parading about on black stilt-like legs, which raise them a foot or more off the ground, they have yellow bills and a slightly puffed throat, in flight extending their long legs behind them.
We rode on, across dry plain, over old river-beds, through patches of olive-trees, pink oleander, and castor-oil plant; leaving Arab douars behind; meeting with white cow-birds which recalled Tetuan; passing men with merchandise on camels and donkeys, strings of country people, and wanderers of all sorts; stopping to rest near wells where swallows were building in the brickwork and donkeys stood asleep in the shade; watching Arabs beating out corn with sticks, men ploughing, until we were once more amongst "greenery" and in a fertile stretch of country.
In underneath the arches were shade and cool tiling, and outside more tiled ground suggested steaming brews of fragrant green tea, tiny glasses, low tables, and long divans spread under the sky. The flats lay below to the left, and a horizontal blue pencil line was scored beyond them. Cow-birds stalked about the garden among some new vines which the old negro was putting in.
Cow-birds wage war on the parasites of mules, donkeys, oxen, and sheep, hopping about the fields and dropping down on to their backs: they are never shot. Morocco is by no means short of bird life. Only that morning, as we rode along, we saw several pairs of whinchats, any number of crested larks, some plover, pied and grey wagtails, starlings, and a sand-martin.
But as soon as the young cow-birds are able to shift for themselves, and begin to associate with their own kind, their habits change, and they become suspicious and wild like other birds.
But one egg is usually deposited in a single nest; the presence of two eggs probably indicates, as in the case of the European cuckoo, the visits of two cow-birds rather than a second visit from the same individual the presence of two cow-bird chicks of equal size being rather a proof of this than otherwise, in that kind Nature would seem to have accommodated the bird with an exceptional physiological resource, which matures its eggs at intervals of three or more days, as against the daily oviposition of its dupes, thus giving it plenty of time to make its search and take its pick among the bird-homes.
Who, for instance, would imagine that the sexes could be faithful in parasitical species like the cuckoo of Europe and the cow-birds of America?
It is surprising that they never do actually lay in such nests, except when the side or dome has been accidentally broken enough to admit the light into the interior. Whenever I set boxes up in my trees, the female Cow-birds were the first to visit them.
Lying in bed in the early morning before it was light, duck were to be heard calling up the river; and, breakfast over, we strolled down to the banks, where the thick green orange-trees on the opposite side bore a crop of cow-birds, sitting like a covey of white cockatoos on the tips of the branches among the golden oranges, so thick and snowy that the tree might well have burst into abnormal flower.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking