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Updated: May 23, 2025
Not gay plumaged birds, though, for the most part; only now and then a pair of kingfishers, flashing green and orange as they fly, or the purple beauty of a pukeko, scuttling away into the depths of the swamp. By-and-by we emerge into the expanse of the harbour.
Movable covers of netting over the ponds are most certainly advisable, particularly if the rearing ponds are in an unfrequented spot near a stream. On one occasion I caught four kingfishers during a period of three weeks, all of which had in some way got under some herring net, which was pegged out carefully over a rearing pond containing trout fry.
The blue birds have dull red breasts like our robins, with turquoise-blue backs and wings, glinting with the same metallic sheen on the blue that the angel-fish display in the water. As with our kingfishers, one has the sense of a brilliant flash of blue light shooting past one.
Quite near at hand also ran the broad and muddy Jordan, whose fertile banks were clothed in spring with the most delicious greenery and haunted by kingfishers, cranes, wildfowl, and many other birds.
They hung side by side, like two tall, slender girls, in their narrow shining length, and made one wish to float in them on warm summer mornings and evenings along the flower-covered banks of the river, where the trees dip their branches into the water, where the rushes are continually rustling in the breeze and where the swift kingfishers dart about like flashes of blue lightning.
Do not young men think, speak, act, just now, in this very incoherent, fragmentary way; without methodic education or habits of thought; with the various stereotyped systems which they have received by tradition, breaking up under them like ice in a thaw; with a thousand facts and notions, which they know not how to classify, pouring in on them like a flood? a very Yeasty state of mind altogether, like a mountain burn in a spring rain, carrying down with it stones, sticks, peat-water, addle grouse-eggs and drowned kingfishers, fertilising salts and vegetable poisons not, alas! without a large crust, here and there, of sheer froth.
The Housatonic wanders at its own sweet and lazy will among the meadows, turning and returning upon itself till it has loitered twenty miles in crossing the eight-mile township, but never turning a mill or offering encouragement to any industry but that of the muskrats who burrow in its banks, or the kingfishers who break its glassy surface in pursuit of their prey.
Ancient Britons did not stain themselves blue because they lived in blue forests; nor did Georgian beaux and belles powder their hair to match an Arctic landscape; the Britons were not dressing up as kingfishers nor the beaux pretending to be polar bears.
Wild geese, herons, kingfishers, sparrows, and pheasants were the principal officiators; the mourning rites, which included singing, and dancing,* continued for eight days and eight nights, and the proceedings were rudely interrupted by the prince's brother-in-law, who, coming to condole and being mistaken for the deceased, is so enraged by the error that he draws his sword, cuts down the mortuary house, and kicks away the pieces.
There were forty-four species of Longicorns among them, and on the last day I took twenty-eight species of Longicorns, of which five were new to me. My boys were less fortunate in shooting. A few of the pretty racquet-tailed kingfishers were also obtained, but in very poor plumage.
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