United States or Brazil ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The patios of the better class of houses are ornamented with flowering plants, and pets of all sorts, especially birds, are numerous, the favorite species being the mocking-bird. One patio we noticed full to repletion of tame pigeons, blue, black, white, and mottled fantails.
Look at the individuals of the same breed of the pigeon; and see what a prodigious amount of difference there is in the beak of tumblers, in the beak and wattle of carriers, in the carriage and tail of fantails, etc., these being the points now mainly attended to by English fanciers.
Moreover, when two birds belonging to two distinct breeds are crossed, neither of which is blue or has any of the above-specified marks, the mongrel offspring are very apt suddenly to acquire these characters; for instance, I crossed some uniformly white fantails with some uniformly black barbs, and they produced mottled brown and black birds; these I again crossed together, and one grandchild of the pure white fantail and pure black barb was of as beautiful a blue colour, with the white rump, double black wing-bar, and barred and white-edged tail-feathers, as any wild rock-pigeon!
Perhaps the parent bird of all fantails had only fourteen tail-feathers somewhat expanded, like the present Java fantail, or like individuals of other and distinct breeds, in which as many as seventeen tail-feathers have been counted.
Ceremonies at the Consistory; delivery of the cardinals' hats. At nine o'clock went to the Vatican; two large fantails with ostrich feathers; ladies penned up; Pope; cardinals kiss his hand in rotation; address in Latin, tinkling, like water gurgling from a bottle.
In pigeons alone there are carriers, pouters, tumblers, baldheads, beards, dragoons, barbs, jacobins, Antwerps, turbits, owls, orientals, damoscenes, capuchins, fantails, trumpeters, swifts, Lahores, Burmese, Scandaroons, magpies, nuns, Archangels, runts and so on.
Affectation is certainly that faint and sickly weed which is the curse of cultivated, not naturally fertile and extensive countries; an insect that infests our forcing stoves and hot-house plants: and as the naturalists tell us all animals may be bred down to a state very different from that in which they were originally placed; that carriers, and fantails, and croppers, are produced by early caging, and minutely attending to the common blue pigeon, flights of which cover the ploughed fields in distant provinces of England, and shew the rich and changeable plumage of their fine neck to the summer sun; so from the warm and generous Briton of ancient days may be produced, and happily bred down, the clay-cold coxcomb of St.
The most noteworthy of these races are, the four great stocks known to the "fancy" as tumblers, pouters, carriers, and fantails; birds which not only differ most singularly in size, colour, and habits, but in the form of the beak and of the skull; in the proportions of the beak to the skull; in the number of tail-feathers; in the absolute and relative size of the feet; in the presence or absence of the uropygial gland; in the number of vertebrae in the back; in short, in precisely those characters in which the genera and species of birds differ from one another.
I had tenderly kissed my own peculiar favourites, the pair of snow-white fantails; I had played my last tune on the old familiar piano, and sung my last song to papa: not the last, I hoped, but the last for what appeared to me a very long time.
The most noteworthy of these races are, the four great stocks known to the "fancy" as tumblers, pouters, carriers, and fantails; birds which not only differ most singularly in size, colour, and habits, but in the form of the beak and of the skull: in the proportions of the beak to the skull; in the number of tail-feathers; in the absolute and relative size of the feet; in the presence or absence of the uropygial gland; in the number of vertebrae in the back; in short, in precisely those characters in which the genera and species of birds differ from one another.
Word Of The Day