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Updated: May 31, 2025
Even the ornithologists who are interested in birds as birds haven't a good word to say of the daw. According to them he alone is responsible for the disappearance of his distinguished relation, the chough.
Another bird which has interested me here is the Louisiana water thrush, called also large-billed water-thrush, and water-wagtail. It is one of a trio of birds which has confused the ornithologists much. The other two species are the well-known golden-crowned thrush or wood-wagtail, and the northern, or small, water-thrush.
G.H. Mackay stated that this bird and the golden plover had decreased 90 per cent in fifty years, and in the last ten years of that period 90 per cent of the remainder had gone. "Now ," says Mr. Forbush, "ornithologists believe that the Eskimo curlew is practically extinct, as only a few specimens have been recorded since the beginning of the twentieth century."
Robins and Mourning Doves, for example, are still shot in some of the Southern States as game birds. The Audubon Law. Little was done in the way of securing laws for the benefit of song and insectivorous birds and birds of plumage until 1886, when the bird-protection committee of the American Ornithologists' Union drafted a bill for this specific purpose.
Perhaps the older ornithologists, like Audubon and Wilson, did not use helps of this kind, but they used guns, and consequently had to study dead birds, while you and I want to study living ones.
The nest was made unusually deep and capacious, and it may be questioned if such a thing of beauty was ever before woven by the cunning of a bird. Nuttall, by far the most genial of American ornithologists, relates the following: This long string and many other shorter ones were left hanging out for about a week before both the ends were wattled into the sides of the nest.
It is a very well-known habit of the bird, and on account of it and of the very peculiar character of the sounds emitted, his song is frequently described by ornithologists as "mocking, defiant, scolding, angry," etc. It seems clear that at different times the bird sings from different exciting causes.
Ornithologists make out a list of over three hundred distinct species of birds in Ceylon, among which the largest variety is found in the parrot family, very nearly equaled by the wading and aquatic tribes. The Wearisome Tropics. Waterspouts. Climatic Conditions. Length of Days. A Land Rich in Prehistoric Monuments. History and Fable. Last King of Ceylon. Ancient Ruins. Aged Cave Temples.
But that naturalist who should attempt, by ever so minute a description of a pied blackbird, to give his readers a correct idea of the Gracula Ferruginea of ornithologists, would not more utterly fail of accomplishing his object, than have the authors whose creations we have named, by delineating such individual instances by holding up, as it were, such outre specimens of an original class failed to convey any thing like an accurate impression of the habits, customs, and general character of the western pioneers.
As William Bateson remarks: "We may even be certain that numbers of excellent species recognized by entomologists or ornithologists, for example, would, if subjected to breeding tests, be immediately proved to be analytical varieties, differing from each other merely in the presence or absence of definite factors."
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