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Updated: June 11, 2025
The long-tailed swallows and the white-throated martins were with us for six months, but about the middle of October they were no more seen. All have gone southwards towards the Afric shore, seeking warmth and days of endless sunshine. Gone, too, the blackcap, the redstart, and the little fly-catcher; vanishing in the dark night, they gathered in legions and sped across the seas.
The Monedula is an adroit fly-catcher, for though it kills numbers of fire-flies and other insects, flies are always preferred, possibly because they are so little encumbered with wings, and are also more easily devoured. It occasionally captures insects on the wing, but the more usual method is to pounce down on its prey when it is at rest.
One of these birds could nearly always be seen on the lowest branch pursuing his business of fly-catcher, and I learned more of the singularly reserved creature than I ever knew before. I found, contrary to my expectation, that he had a great deal to say for himself, aside from the professional performance at the peak of the barn roof which gives him his name.
One visitor there was, however, to the fence and the locusts whom Master Robin did not molest. When a prolonged, incisive "pu-eep" in the martial and inspiring tone of the great-crested fly-catcher broke the silence, I observed that the robin always had plenty of his own business to attend to.
A small parrot builds constantly on the plains in a hole made in the nests of the termites, and a species of fly-catcher makes its nest alongside of that of one of the wasps. A yellow and brown flycatcher builds its nest in these bushes, and generally places it alongside that of a banded wasp, so that with the prickles and the wasps it is well guarded.
It may be that they affect this simplicity without having it, and when they grin at receiving a kick, they are saying inside, 'Just wait till my turn comes, and I'll give you three!" Then he suddenly seemed to repent of his suspicions. "At any rate, this Karl is a poor fellow, a mealy-mouthed simpleton who the minute I say anything opens his jaws like a fly-catcher.
If you look into the buddleia-tree beside him, you will see his hen moving about in silence, creeping, dancing, fluttering, as she gorges herself with insects. She is a fly-catcher at this season, leaping into the air and pirouetting as she seizes her prey and returns to the bough. She is restless and is not content with the spoil of a single tree.
Occasionally the jokes are good and the answers from the audience show the ready Yankee wit. Once an exceedingly fat man, too obese to descend from his high wagon, bought an immense dinner bell and he was hit unmercifully. A rusty old fly-catcher elicited many remarks as "no flies on that."
It was interesting to see a fly-catcher take his fruit "on the wing," as it were; that is, fly at it, seize it, and jerk it off without alighting. The phoebe picked berries in the same way, when he occasionally condescended to investigate the attraction that brought so many strangers into his quiet corner.
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