United States or Burkina Faso ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Numbers of red-rumped swallows are to be seen daily seeking their insect quarry over the lake at Naini Tal. The great majority of the wagtails are merely winter visitors to India. Thus they are likely to be seen in the hills only when resting from their travels. That is to say, in April and May, when homeward bound, or in September and October, when they move southwards.
A struggle between two pairs of Pied Wagtails is worth mentioning. It impressed itself upon my memory because of the unusual vigour with which it was conducted.
Anyway, he now picked up a young peewit and made for the nearest dike; then along this, and presently into the water and across to the other side, swimming strongly and well; then along a smaller dike, hugging the reeds as much as possible, and pursued by a running fire of abuse from the sedge and marsh and grasshopper warblers, from wagtails, meadow-pipits, reed-buntings, larks, and all the small-bird population of those parts, till he came to the sea-bank, called by the natives "sea-wall."
An arched bridge connects it with the shore. All around it, the calm waters of the great river play peacefully amongst the reeds, and the wagtails flutter over the moist crests of the stones. The history of the Malaquis castle is stormy like its name, harsh like its outlines. It has passed through a long series of combats, sieges, assaults, rapines and massacres.
Oh! if my life were my own, I could blow my brains out." "Pooh, pooh! Keep cool," said Ronquerolles. "Duchesses do not fly off like wagtails. She cannot travel faster than three leagues an hour, and tomorrow we will ride six. Confound it! Mme de Langeais is no ordinary woman," he continued. "Tomorrow we will all of us mount and ride. The police will put us on her track during the day.
They sing on till after the lamps are lit in the evening. Far back in the snow-time a pair of wagtails used to come several times a day close to the windows, their black markings showing up singularly well against the snow on the ground. They seemed to have just arrived. But now the weather is open and food plentiful they have left us.
She watched the wagtails strut magisterially, the moorhens with the worried air of overworked charwomen, all the mysterious evening life of a summer pool, but she had no smile for them to-day. The swallows slid and circled across the water; their silence was no longer intimate, but alien. She looked across at Undern.
The swallows that dipped their wings in the water, the kingfishers that flew along the banks or perched on the willow stumps, and the graceful wagtails, were for some miles my only river companions excepting, of course, the fish, with which a treacherous current or a sunken rock might have placed me at any moment on terms of still closer intimacy.
Flocks of Waders roam about the tidal estuaries in search of food, and different kinds of Gulls assemble there and preen their feathers or sleep; Warblers alter their mode of life, and in the osier bed, or amongst the elders, seek their food together in peace; Finches, Buntings, Pipits, and Wagtails, though food is everywhere abundant, gather themselves together respectively into bands which, as winter approaches, grow into flocks and even into composite flocks; and as the Warblers leave for the south, so their places are filled by flocks of Thrushes and Finches from the north.
As was stated above, this species is often called the hill-wagtail. The name is not a particularly good one, because wagtails proper occur in the Himalayas. The forktail, however, has many of the habits of the true wagtail. I was on the point of calling it a glorified wagtail, but I refrain. Surely it is impossible to improve upon a wagtail.
Word Of The Day