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Updated: June 22, 2025
Thus, in the three South American Passerine families, the tyrant-birds, wood-hewers, and ant-thrushes, numbering together between eight and nine hundred species, a very large majority appear to have displays of this description.
E. D. Cuming calls "brow-wrinkling family responsibilities," and each pair builds in a low bush a cup-shaped nest. All passerine birds which have hairs springing from the back of the head, and of which the tarsus the lower half of the leg is shorter than the middle toe, plus its claw, are classified by scientific men as members of the sub-family Brachypodinæ, or Bulbuls.
The annual destruction of adult birds is very great more than double that, I believe, which takes place in other passerine families.
Something of the beginnings and progressive development of this instinct may be learnt, I think, by noticing the behaviour of various passerine birds in the presence of danger, to their nests and young. Their actions and cries show that they are greatly agitated, and in a majority of species the parent bird flits and flutters round the intruder, uttering sounds of distress.
The way passerine birds are killed and eaten in that country is a disgrace to the government of Italy, and a standing reproach to the throne. Even kings and parliaments have no right in moral or international law to permit year after year the wholesale slaughter of birds of passage of species that no civilized man has a right to kill.
The humming-birds are chiefly to be found near the flowers at which each of the species of the genus is wont to feed. The pie, the gallinaceous, the columbine and passerine tribes resort to the fruit- bearing trees. You never fail to see the common vulture where there is carrion.
That these large kinds thrive so well with us is an encouraging fact; but the question that concerns us at present is the feasibility of importing birds of the grove, chiefly of the passerine order, and sending them forth to give a greater variety and richness to our bird life. To go with such an object to tropical countries would only be to court failure.
Instead of the abundant and bushy thickets of sarsaparilla, we met with nothing but stunted shrubs. However, as we approached the mountain the vegetation assumed a richer aspect, and the bare rocks no longer protruded through the soil. Here and there, tanagers, with black backs, yellow breasts, and violet-blue throats, fluttered around us; also other variegated birds of the Passerine family.
It is in no way connected with the jay tribe, being not even a passerine bird.
Their life is thus one of perpetual danger in a far greater degree than with other passerine families, such as warblers, tyrants, finches, thrushes, &c.; while an exclusively insect diet, laboriously extracted from secret places, and inability to change their climate, contribute to make their existence a hard one.
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