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Updated: June 16, 2025
When, therefore, the sun was just above the center of the forest, the girl set out on her way with a bowl of soup, but the field-sparrows, and wood-sparrows, larks and finches, blackbirds and siskins had picked up the millet long before, and the girl could not find the track. Then trusting to chance, she went on and on, until the sun sank and night began to fall.
By day, few objects of interest presented themselves: linnets and finches fluttered here and there upon the rare bushes, whilst swallows joined the caravan, and skimmed round and round for hours among the camels, almost brushing the faces of the drivers. Lizards glanced and snakes writhed across the path. We started three wadan or mouflon, churlish animals, fond of such solitudes.
The first thing in the morning, we always wandered in our garden down the grassy paths among the dew; measured the rain-gauge; looked at the sky; watched the birds, of which a flight, chiefly flocks of finches, invariably travelled over the little terraces of fruit-trees towards the river, taking our garden on the way, and feeding there for a while.
The purple finch is our finest songster among the finches. Its strain is so soft and melodious, and touched with such a childlike gayety and plaintiveness, that I think it might sound well even in a cage inside a room, if the bird would only sing with the same joyous abandonment, which, of course, it would not do.
Colony at Charles Island. James Island. Salt-lake in crater. Natural history of the group. Ornithology, curious finches. Reptiles. Great tortoises, habits of. Marine Lizard, feeds on Sea-weed. Terrestrial Lizard, burrowing habits, herbivorous. Importance of reptiles in the Archipelago. Fish, shells, insects. Botany. American type of organisation.
If, therefore, we except the eighteen marine, the one fresh-water, and one land-shell, which have apparently come here as colonists from the central islands of the Pacific, and likewise the one distinct Pacific species of the Galapageian group of finches, we see that this archipelago, though standing in the Pacific Ocean, is zoologically part of America.
These birds, although now still more persecuted, do not readily become wild: in Charles Island, which had then been colonised about six years, I saw a boy sitting by a well with a switch in his hand, with which he killed the doves and finches as they came to drink.
There would be no more telling them by their notes. Thrushes and jays, wrens and chickadees, finches and warblers, all would be singing one grand medley. Inappreciably but ceaselessly the work goes on. Here and there is born a master-singer, a feathered genius, and every generation makes its own addition to the glorious inheritance.
There were several pretty finches, warblers, and flycatchers, and among them I obtained the elegant blue and red Cyornis hyacinthina; but I cannot recognise among my collections the species mentioned by Dampier, who seems to have been much struck by the number of small songbirds in Timor.
All this country is stocked with a great variety of small birds, such as finches, fly-catchers, thrushes, and the ubiquitous sparrow, as well as their natural enemies, eagles, hawks, and falcons, birds of prey which exhibit most wonderful sagacity in seeking for victims with which to appease their appetites.
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