Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 13, 2025
With the robin, the wood thrush, the phœbe, the oriole, the hummingbird, the pewee, and many others, the male is only an interested spectator of the proceeding. He usually attends his mate in her quest for material, but does not lend a hand, or a bill. I think the cock wren assists in nest-building. I know the male cedar-bird does, and probably the male woodpeckers do also.
My shift forward was like the fall of a tree: it brought into existence about it a temporary circle of silence and fear a circle whose periphery began at once to contract; and after a few minutes the gorge again accepted me as a part of its harmless self. A huge bee zoomed past, and just behind my head a hummingbird beat the air into a froth of sound, as vibrant as the richest tones of a cello.
The bird whose nest we see there is called the Ruby-throated Hummingbird, because he has a patch of glittering ruby-red feathers under his chin, at the top of his buttoned-up vest that hardly shows any while shirt-front. He wears a beautiful golden-green dress-coat, with its dark purplish tails deeply forked. His wife looks very much like him, only she has no ruby jewels to wear.
Yet the spirits of evil and the spirits of goodness are represented under the Indian's masked dances, just as the old miracle plays represented Faith, Hope, Charity, Lust, Greed, etc. There is the Bird Dance representing the gyrations of hummingbird, mocking-bird, quail, eagle, vulture. There is the dance of the "mud-heads." Have we no "mud-heads" befuddling life at every turn of the way?
"Do you remember, Frantz, when the Princess Hummingbird entered your room, holding her little head very straight under a diadem of birds' feathers?" Frantz did not reply. He was too deeply moved to reply.
It is much smaller and less brilliant than the hummingbird; but its flight and motions are so nearly the same that a poet, with his eye in a fine frenzy rolling, might easily mistake one for the other.
Canada's wild life is represented in the foreground by splendid stuffed specimens, from the bear and the moose and the musk-ox to the marten and the muskrat, and from the great gray honker to the hummingbird. On the right, in a forest scene, is a beaver pond with dam and house, where the real beavers splash in the water.
The whirring of her wings arrested my attention, when, after a short pause, I had the good luck to see, through an opening in the leaves, the bird return to her nest, which appeared like a mere wart or excrescence on a small branch. The hummingbird, unlike all others, does not alight upon the nest, but flies into it. She enters it as quick as a flash, but as light as any feather.
The marriage hymn of the hummingbird if any there were was not for human ears; indeed, most of the life, certainly all of the wedded life of this bird, is shrouded in mystery, perhaps never to be unraveled till we understand bird language, and can subject him to an "interview." The first thing that surprised me in my little neighbor was her volubility, for I had never found her kin talkative.
What a contrast to the suitableness of the material the hummingbird uses the down of some plant, which seems to have a poetic fitness! Yesterday in my walk I saw where a red squirrel had stripped the soft outer bark off a group of red cedars to build its winter's nest with.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking