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Updated: June 15, 2025
Mem. for Agriculturists. Protect the birds and the insects will be in their crops. Destroy the birds and the crops will be in the insects. Humming-birds don't hum with their mouths. The humming is the vibration of their wings while flying for the same reason that a blue-bottle or an aeroplane hums." Pearson's Weekly.
The weapon or instrument, he said, was a sarbacan. Numerous beautiful birds were flying about in the neighbourhood, some of them the most diminutive humming-birds. Soon as we looked down fell one, then another and another. They were shot with little darts of hard wood pointed at one end, and twisted round with wadding at the other to prevent the wind escaping.
The gewgaws clattered like castanets, as though in frantic expostulation, and the radiant spun-glass humming-birds quivered until we expected them to break from their elastic fetters and fly away. The green and scarlet one with the gold-flecked wings fell on the floor and rolled under the seat just as the cab drew up at the great door of the school.
We thus have a succession of splendid and expensive works dealing separately with such groups as woodpeckers, trogons, humming-birds, tanagers, king-fishers, and birds of paradise; for with these, even if there be nothing to record beyond the usual dreary details and technicalities concerning geographical distribution, variations in size and markings of different species, &c., the little interest of the letter-press is compensated for in the accompanying plates, which are now produced on a scale of magnitude, and with so great a degree of perfection, as regards brilliant colouring, spirited attitudes and general fidelity to nature, that leaves little further improvement in this direction to be looked for.
Humming-birds are scarce, though here and there a few appear; while countless numbers of parrots and parrakeets fly overhead in dense crowds, at times drowning every other sound with their noisy clatter. Birds of prey are not wanting. Among them is the red hawk, about the size of a kite and so tame, that even when a canoe passes under the branch on which he is sitting, he does not fly away.
Tiny fish, glowing like jewels, flash and dart among the intricate, interlacing branches, or quiveringly poise about some slender point humming-birds of the sea, sipping their nectar. A pink translucent fish no greater than a lead-pencil wriggles in and out of the lemon-coloured coral.
I overlooked the garden, which was deserted except by the bees and humming-birds busy among the flowers. The mid-day heat had passed, and a breeze rustled the leaves and moaned in the pine trees. It was a fair world, and I felt what one often experiences in coming back to reality after high emotion a sort of strangeness in the beauty of tree and grass and sea and wood.
My conclusion, after I got to know their voices in the woods, was that the humming-birds around Santo Domingo equalled in number all the rest of the birds together, if they did not greatly exceed them. Yet one may sometimes ride for hours without seeing one. They build their nests on low shrubs often on branches overhanging paths, or on the underside of the large leaves of the shrubby palm-trees.
In Bolivia are found the Bolivian violet-ear, Warren's wood-star, and many others; but we must bring our description of the humming-birds of this region to a conclusion. Full of animal life as are the forests of South America, the number of species of what are generally called wild beasts is remarkably small.
The feet are yellow, with two beautiful white ruffs surrounding the legs. In the same district, invariably keeping at the bottom of the valleys, is found the Columbian thorn-bill. It does not even mount, as do many humming-birds, to the tops of the trees, but seeks its food among the low, flowering shrubs.
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