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"I wish some one would tell a story," said one of the common hens, as she ruffled all her feathers up on end, and then shook them straight again, for coolness. "I am tired of scrabbling in the dust, and fly-catching is an amusement only suited to sparrows and such vulgar birds." This was a hit at one of the foreign hens, who had wandered away a little and was pecking at flies on the wall.
The solitaires, Myadestes, or fly-catching thrushes, are natives of the West Indies and Mexico, with one branch in the Rocky Mountains. My bird was M. obscurus, and came from Mexico. I found him in a New York bird-store, where he looked about as much at home among the shrieking and singing mob of parrots and canaries as a poet among a howling rabble of the "great unwashed."
Think of a troop of angels fly-catching, snail-seeking, and bug-hunting through all lands, lugging through the air, horses, giraffes, elephants, and rhinoceroses, and dropping them at the door of the ark.
On the wall the lizards, awakened by the sudden glare, resumed their fly-catching, and scuttled with a dry, scurrying sound over the walls, breaking the silence with a perpetual "chuck-chuck" as they chased each other. Joicey looked as though he was dreaming evil dreams, and nothing of his surroundings was real to him.
It is already notorious that the golden-wing is giving up the profession of woodpecker and becoming a ground bird; it is equally patent to one who observes him that the red-head is learning the trade of fly-catching. Frequently, during the weeks that I had him under observation, I saw him fly up in the air and return to the fence, exactly like the kingbird.
But in the case of most of the birds the cares of nesting are past, and the woods abound with full-sized but awkward young birds, blundering through their first month of insect-hunting and fly-catching, tumbling into the pools from which they try to drink, and shrieking with the very joy of life, when it would be far safer for that very life if they remained quiet.
"Don't you fool yourself," he said. "They've landed below here, and maybe they're in town while we've got our mouths open, fly-catching around an empty car." "Good boy, Abrams," I said. "My opinion exactly." "And what's to be done, then?" he asked anxiously. "For the first thing, to visit the telegraph office at once." The operator was just locking his little room in the station as we came up.
After a while the old bird flew away, when that deceiving little rogue took upon himself the business of fly-catching. He flew out, snapped his beak, and, returning to his perch, wiped it carefully. Yet when the elder returned he at once resumed his begging and crying, as if starved and unable to help himself. That, then, is another of the supposed songless birds added to the list of singers.
The dragonflies, by the way, were well worth looking at; indeed, they divided my interest with the birds. So many and such variety I never noticed elsewhere, and they acted exactly like fly-catching birds, staying an hour at a time on one perch, from which every now and then they sallied out, sweeping the air and returning to the perch they had left.
The operation of this fly-catching apparatus, in any case, is plain. If the insect is small, and the lodgment toward one side, only the neighboring tentacles may take part in the capture.
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