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On the third day the heads were covered with slate-colored down; on the fourth, wing-feathers began to show among the heads, but the body was still perfectly bare; on the fifth, the eyes opened on the green world about them, they were then certainly five days old, and may have been seven; owing to our unfortunate absence at the critical time I cannot be sure.
The wild turkey-cock erects his glittering plumage, expands his finely- zoned tail and barred wing-feathers, and altogether, with his crimson and blue wattles, makes a superb, though, to our eyes, grotesque appearance. Similar facts have already been given with respect to grouse of various kinds. The female is brownish-green, shaded with red, and has a much smaller crest.
Upper parts all mixed with black, brown, gray, buff, and white in very intricate patterns; long wing-feathers plain dusky with a white edge on the outside one; tail-feathers beautifully barred with black, white, and reddish.
By looking to the next two or three succeeding wing-feathers, an absolutely insensible gradation can be traced from one of the last-described basal spots, together with the next higher one in the same row, to a curious ornament, which cannot be called an ocellus, and which I will name, from the want of a better term, an "elliptic ornament." We here see several oblique rows, A, B, C, D, etc.
Length from twenty-three to thirty-four inches, which is a very unusual difference in birds of the same species. Upper parts all freckled with brown, black, and tan color of various shades, as if sun-burnt, with a velvety black patch on each side of the neck, and the longest wing-feathers plain blackish with brown tips; top of head plain brown.
Then it was that the beautiful stiff wing-feathers, which should have been spread in flight, were worn upon the hats of women; and the soft white breast-feathers, which should have been brooding brownish eggs all spattered over with pretty marks, were stuffed into feather-beds for people to sleep on.
The ostrich rugs, which are made here, are more ornamental, though not so warm and light as the guanaco robes. They are made of the entire skin of the ostrich, from which the long wing-feathers have been pulled out.
In the feather-legged bantam, the 'boots, or feathers, which grow from the outside of the leg, and generally from the two outer toes, have, according to the excellent authority of Mr. Hewitt, been seen to exceed the wing-feathers in length, and in one case were actually nine and a half inches in length! As Mr.
And it seems to me that the wind, the seraph of many pinions which has spent three days in harrying the land, must now have whirled the earth into a blackness, a denseness, in which, exhausted, and panting, and scarcely moving, it is helplessly striving to remain within the encompassing, all-pervading obscurity where, helpless and weary in like degree, the wind has sloughed its thousands of wing-feathers feathers white and blue and golden of tint, but also broken, and smeared with dust and blood.
They explain also in the most interesting manner how certain characters have originated, such as the indented ocelli on the tail-feathers of the peacock, and the ball-and-socket ocelli on the wing-feathers of the Argus pheasant.
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