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Is it conceivable that the hawk and the hummingbird, the spider and the honey bee, the turkey gobbler and the mocking-bird, the butterfly and the eagle, the ostrich and the wren, the tree toad and the elephant, the giraffe and the kangaroo, the wolf and the lamb should all be the descendants of a common ancestor?
But whether my head ever recovered its natural pose or not, I was happy; for I saw the hummingbird shaping her snug domicile to her tidy form, turning around and around in it, pressing with breast and bend of the wing, as I was certain, from the similarity of her attitude and motions to those of a robin I had closely watched at the same work.
Hummingbird hawk-moths, on the other hand, though so big and quick, she would kill immediately.
The time to see the hummingbird, he says, is after sunset in the summer gloaming; then it steals forth and hovers over the flowers. Now, the hummingbird is eminently a creature of the sun and of the broad open day, and I have never seen it after sundown, while the moth is rarely seen except at twilight.
But he stopped me with his lifted palm. "My fran', a hummingbird has de pas-sione' de ecstacie! One drop of blood wid the pas-sione in it" He waved his hand with a jerk of the thumb in disdain of spoken words, and it was I who added, "Is bigger than the sun?" "Hah!" was all he uttered in approval, turning as if to go to work. I feared I had disappointed him.
This is often saddled upon the limb in the same manner, though it is generally more or less pendent; it is deep and soft, composed mostly of some vegetable down covered all over with delicate tree-lichens, and, except that it is much larger, appears almost identical with the nest of the hummingbird.
Soon I heard the familiar sound again, and a bird dashed past the window, not going near the nest. My little dame in the apple-tree paid no attention. An hour later a hummingbird appeared, perhaps the same one, without flying near the apple-tree. Madam left her nest and they had a chase, both passing out of sight.
It is the nest of the ruby-throated hummingbird, so well concealed by the leaves and by the lichens fastened to its exterior that it would not have been noticed at all but for the whirling wings of the exquisite creature a month ago.
I was only a boy at the time, but already pretty well acquainted with the birds of the district I lived in, near La Plata River, and among them were three species of the hummingbird. One spring day I saw a fourth a wonderful little thing, only half as big as the smallest of the other three the well-known Phaithornis splendens and scarcely larger than a bumble-bee.
That is the way they got their wives. He might think that our "blond-beast" theories are a reflex of our own civilization. Anyway, there lies Little Zeke, a long time asleep, wrapped in cerements of fine woven cloth with fluffy-ruffles and fol-de-rols of woven blue jay and bluebird and hummingbird feathers round his neck. Zeke's people understood weaving.
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