United States or Liechtenstein ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Nesting cares have not yet made them fearful of showing their bright plumage, and scores of the scarlet and orange forms play among the branches. The flycatchers and vireos now appear in force little hunters of insects clad in leafy greens and browns, with now and then a touch of brightness as in the yellow-throated vireo or in the crest of the kingbird.
FLYCATCHERS. The high-water mark in insect-destruction by our birds is reached by the flycatchers, dull-colored, modest-mannered little creatures that do their work so quietly you hardly notice them. All you see in your tree-tops is a two-foot flit or glide, now here and now there, as the leaves and high branches are combed of their insect life.
Spotted Flycatchers appear, however, to vary in numbers to a certain extent in different years.
Calling over and over their peculiar note, the pewees, flycatchers, and king-birds, fly through the forests. The crow and blue jay belong to the singers, you will be surprised to hear. And what a crowd of these song-birds there are trilling and warbling in the sunshine!
These we may call the flycatchers of the seas. "In the eighty-ninth genus of fishes, classed by Lacepede, belonging to the second lower class of bony, characterised by opercules and bronchial membranes, I remarked the scorpaena, the head of which is furnished with spikes, and which has but one dorsal fin; these creatures are covered, or not, with little shells, according to the sub-class to which they belong.
This distressed her very much; then to her great relief and joy she discovered that I was there with a motive which she could understand and appreciate: that I was watching some living thing, an insect perhaps, but oftener a bird a pair of little scarlet flycatchers building a nest of lichen on a peach tree, or some such beautiful thing.
Warblers, thrushes, flycatchers, shrikes, and crows must all be comparatively recent immigrants from the Asiatic mainland. Even in this respect, however, the Australian life-region still bears an antiquated and undeveloped aspect. Nowhere else in the world do we find those very oldest types of birds represented by the cassowaries, the emus, and the mooruk of New Britain.
"The crowing of a Rooster, the screech of a Night Owl, the Hawk's harsh scream, the laughing and hammering of a Woodpecker, all answer the same good purpose as a song. "The first family of Songless Perching Birds is that of the Tyrant Flycatchers, and the first of these birds with which we have to do is the one you have just seen. He belongs to the guild of Sky Sweepers.
It is to be found in most places along the west coast. Nor is it the only bulbul living on the hills. The justification for the name is that if a census were taken of the bird-folk who dwell in our hill stations, it would show that Otocompsa fuscicaudata outnumbered all the crows, mynas, sparrows, flycatchers, and sunbirds put together. It is the bird of the southern hills.
Is it Celia Thaxter who tells of having picked up her apron full of sparrows, warblers, flycatchers, etc., at the foot of the lighthouse on the Isles of Shoals, one morning after a storm, the ground being still strewn with birds of all kinds that had dashed themselves against the beacon, bewildered and fascinated by its tremendous light?
Word Of The Day