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Updated: June 15, 2025
A highwayman seems an honest fellow compared with your honourable corporation of fly-catchers. I could surrender to him with some satisfaction after a trial of the better man. I 've tried these tables, and couldn't stir a pulse. Have you? It had to be explained to Woodseer what was meant by trying the tables. 'Not I, said he, in strong contempt of the queer allurement.
Olly looked as if he didn't believe a word of it, as he generally did when Milly talked wisely to him; but just then he found that mother had put into his lap a whole basketful of letters to tear up, and that interested him so much that he forgot the fly-catchers.
She had not power to fight the bird's beak, and her poison-dagger was useless here; nor do fly-catchers often miss. This, however, was an occasion when one of them did by an eighth of an inch and only some electric-spark-like dodging on the part of the insect in the air made even that one miss possible. It was so quick, you could not see what happened.
The season before, a red squirrel had harried the nest of a wood-thrush in this same tree, and I was apprehensive that he would serve the fly-catchers the same trick; so, as I sat with my book in a summer-house near by, I kept my loaded gun within easy reach. One egg was laid, and the next morning, as I made my daily inspection of the nest, only a fragment of its empty shell was to be found.
The Linnet is an exception to this general habit of the singing-birds, and, in company with the Warbling Fly-catchers, he is commonly high up in an elm or some other tall tree, and almost entirely out of sight, when exercising himself in song. It is this preference for the higher branches of trees that enables these birds, as well as the Golden Robin, to be denizens of the city.
But these little sun-birds glitter like jewels among the leafy foliage, and the lustrous metallic hues of different shades with which they are richly coloured on the head and long tail-feathers change and flash in the sunlight with every slightest movement. Not all so brilliant in colour but very delightful to watch are the fly-catchers.
The small patch of weedy ground around the village swarms with plovers, sandpipers, striped herons, and scissor- tailed fly-catchers; and alligators are always seen floating lazily on the surface of the river in front of the houses.
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.
Whereupon the first, who was a beautiful Falcon, called together all the birds to a council; and there came the chaffinches, tomtits, woodpeckers, fly-catchers, jays, blackbirds, cuckoos, thrushes, and every other kind of bird. And when they were all assembled at his summons, he ordered them to destroy all the blossoms on the trees of Green-Bank, so that not a flower or leaf should remain.
It was the same with the lovely racket-tailed kingfishers and the fly-catchers, some of which had tails double the length of their own bodies, and of a delicacy that was beautiful in the extreme.
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