United States or Curaçao ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


As sexual selection depends on so fluctuating an element as taste, we can understand how it is that, within the same group of birds having nearly the same habits, there should exist white or nearly white, as well as black, or nearly black species, for instance, both white and black cockatoos, storks, ibises, swans, terns, and petrels.

Coues saw the gulls to Buphogus the sea-hen of the sealers pursue make them disgorge their food, while, on the other side, the gulls and the terns combined to drive away the sea-hen as soon as it came near to their abodes, especially at nesting-time. "To see them attacking a buzzard, a kite, a crow, or an eagle, is one of the most amusing spectacles.

The monu- ment of Margaret herself is on the left, all in white merble, tormented into a multitude of exquisite pat- terns, the last extravagance of a Gothic which had gone so far that nothing was left it but to return upon itself.

A vast swarm of sooty terns, with flapping wing and sharp, croaking note, slid out from the mountain forest and fled seaward, and low down upon the land-locked depths of Lela a soft mist still hovered, so that, were it not for the deadened throbbing beat and lapping murmur of the flowing tide, one might have thought, as he looked across from land to land, that the high green walls of verdure in whose bosom the waters of Lela lay encompassed were but the portals to some deep and shadowy mountain valley in a land of utter silence, untenanted by man.

While this terns really signifies irregularity and intermittence of the heart, it may also be broadly used to indicate a pulse which is abnormally slow or one which is abnormally fast, a rhythm which is trot correct for the age, condition and activity of the patient.

At length, fixing his eye on a blue crab-eater, he fired, and the bird fell to the ground. At the sound of the shot the pelicans took to flight in good order, followed by the cormorants and crows; the gulls and terns flew off up the creek; but the herons, more courageous or more stupid, remained perched on the higher branches of the neighbouring trees.

The scenery was wonderful; the white surf of the shore, and misty blue mountains rising high above the green background, being ever in sight from the deck. The water was alive with flying-fish, porpoises, sharks, whales, dolphins, and now and then an immense turtle; while over the ship's foamy wake the gulls and terns and pelicans sailed and dived.

Barren, sterile, brown as an autumn field; grey cliffs rose on all sides, the tops of which could not be discerned, for a heavy fog hung upon them and revealed only the dark base. Gulls and terns flew screaming overhead, and swooped about the strange vessel which had dared invade the sacred precincts of their island.

The library where I found them was full of book cases-open bookcases, bookcases with glass doors, tall bookcases, dwarf bookcases, bookcases standing on legs, bookcases standing on the floor of statuettes yellow with smoke, of desks crowded with paper-weights, paper-knives, pens, and inkstands of "artistic" pat terns.

Looking out of our windows, to our left across the river, the scenery reminds me of loch Suinnart or loch Swene in Argyll: there are knolly hills, with woodcock scrub, and terns, or sea-swallows, dipping in the current.