I Made Many Excursions Into The Country, In Search Of A Good
Station For Collecting Birds And Insects.
Some of the villages a
few miles inland are scattered about in woody ground which has
once been virgin
Forest, but of which the constituent trees have
been for the most part replaced by fruit trees, and particularly
by the large palm, Arenga saccharifera, from which wine and sugar
are made, and which also produces a coarse black fibre used for
cordage. That necessary of life, the bamboo, has also been
abundantly planted. In such places I found a good many birds,
among which were the fine cream-coloured pigeon, Carpophaga
luctuosa, and the rare blue-headed roller, Coracias temmincki,
which has a most discordant voice, and generally goes in pairs,
flying from tree to tree, and exhibiting while at rest that all-
in-a-heap appearance and jerking motion of the head and tail
which are so characteristic of the great Fissirostral group to
which it belongs. From this habit alone, the kingfishers, bee-
eaters, rollers, trogons, and South American puff-birds, might be
grouped together by a person who had observed them in a state of
nature, but who had never had an opportunity of examining their
form and structure in detail. Thousands of crows, rather smaller
than our rook, keep up a constant cawing in these plantations;
the curious wood-swallows (Artami), which closely resemble
swallows in their habits and flight but differ much in form and
structure, twitter from the tree-tops; while a lyre-tailed
drongo-shrike, with brilliant black plumage and milk-white eyes,
continually deceives the naturalist by the variety of its
unmelodious notes.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 297 of 419
Words from 80913 to 81191
of 114260
