Sunbird

“ All the cock sunbirds (Arachnechthra asiatica) are now in the full glory of their nuptial plumage. Here and there an energetic little hen is busily constructing her wonderful pendent nest. Great is the variety of building material used by the sunbird. Fibres, slender roots, pliable stems, pieces of decayed wood, lichen, thorns and even paper, cotton and rags, are pressed into service. All are held together by cobweb, which is the favourite cement of bird masons. The general shape of the nest is that of a pear. ”

“ It is true that the cock sunbird never takes a turn on the nest; he is not a family man, but a gay young spark, who goes about bravely attired, with his hand upon the handle of his sword, ready to draw it upon the least provocation. A more pugnacious little bird does not exist. While the hen is laboriously building the wonderful little nest, he spends his time in drinking and revelry, with an occasional visit to the growing nursery to criticise its construction. Hence it might seem that, in the case of the sunbird, the above-mentioned explanation of the sexual dimorphism is the true one. ”

“ The sunbirds of Africa are very conspicuous when out of their natural environment, being brilliant and gorgeously colored. These birds find their main food supply among plants that have very conspicuous flowers; the aloe-blossoms, especially, which they frequent, are brilliantly colored. The colors of these birds so completely harmonize with the gay colors of the blossoms that even the keen eye of the hawk is unable to detect them. One species of these birds, the black sunbird, is never absent from a forest tree known as the Kaffir boom. ”

“ Three fresh eggs of this sunbird collected by Whitehead near Paranas, Samar, July 19, 1895, are thus described: “Shape ovate. Ground-color pale pinkish white, a heavily, marked irregular zone of dull red toward the larger end, and some scattered spots and blotches of the same color over the rest of the shell, with here and there underlying brown markings. Measurements 14 mm. ”

“ Sunbirds are always literally bubbling over with energy. They are bundles of vivacity—ever on the move. Although they eat tiny insects, they subsist chiefly on the nectar of flowers, which appears to be a most stimulating diet.
Sunbirds have long, slender, curved bills and tubular tongues, hence they are admirably equipped to secure the honey hidden away in the calyces of flowers. As the little birds insert their heads into the blossoms they get well dusted with pollen, so that, like bees and some other insects, they probably play an important part in the cross-fertilisation of flowers ”

“ A dozen of the black sunbirds may be feeding in this tree, and their notes may be heard among its branches all the day, yet their color adaptation to their environment is so complete that they are seen with the greatest difficulty or are entirely invisible. ”

“ It is pretty to watch the sunbirds feeding. They are as acrobatic as titmice and strike the most extraordinary [221] attitudes in their attempts to procure honey. When there is no convenient point d’appui they hover like humming birds, on rapidly vibrating wings, and while so doing explore with their long tongues the recesses of honeyed flowers. ”

“ The number of birds that show themselves is truly astonishing.
Recently I tarried for a little time in such a grove consisting of half a dozen mango trees, a tamarind and a pipal, and witnessed there a veritable avian pageant—a pageant accompanied by music.
The sunbirds (Arachnechthra asiatica) were the leading minstrels. There may have been a dozen of them in the little tope. To count them was impossible, because sunbirds are never still for two seconds together. When not flitting about amid the foliage looking for insects they are playing hide-and-seek, or pouring out their canary-like song. ”

“ The bee-eaters, for example, are probably among the number of the birds grouped together under the word deror, and we may conjecture that the same is the case with the sunbirds, those bright-plumed little beings that take in the Old World the place occupied by the humming-birds in the New, and often mistaken for them by travellers who are not acquainted with ornithology. ”

“ The cock sunbirds are singing brilliantly although they are still wearing their workaday garments, which are quaker brown save for one purple streak along the median line of the breast and abdomen.
Many birds are beginning to moult. They are casting off worn feathers and assuming the new ones that will keep them warm during the cool winter months. With most birds the new feathers grow as fast as the old ones fall out. ”

“ Sometimes the bird looks black, at others green, and more frequently mauve, according to the intensity of the light and the angle at which the sun’s rays fall upon it. It is not very easy to distinguish between these two sunbirds unless specimens are held in the hand, when the violet-black abdomen of the purple species can be easily distinguished from the snuff-brown lower parts of [80] Loten’s. ”

“ Garbed in rich olive green, royal blue, and bright yellow, and of a quick and lively disposition, small as he is, he is always before his public, never forgetful of his appearance, or regardless of his rights. Feeding on honey and on insects which frequent honey-supplying flowers, the sun-bird is generally seen amid surroundings quite in keeping with the splendour of his plumage. ”

“ No, my boy; but there is a tribe of tiny birds there that we know as sun-birds, almost as beautiful in their plumage, and of very similar habit. I hope to make a long study of their ways, and to get a good collection. I know nothing, however, more attractive to a man who loves nature than to lie down beneath some great plant of convolvulus, or any trumpet-shaped blossom, and watch the humming-birds flashing to and fro in the sunlight. Their scale-like feathers on throat and head reflect the sun rays like so many gems, and their colours are the most gorgeous that it is possible to conceive. ”

“ Day after day, as the snow melts away and the sunshine grows hotter, more birds will come. One day a catbird or two, another day an oriole in black and gold, and another day a pert little wren. So it will go on, till by the time June comes in, all our birds will be back with us, very busy, hopping around in our bushes and trees, making their nests all about, and singing the whole day long.
Almost the first thing every bird thinks of, when he comes to us, is making the nest. For summer is the only time in his life that a bird has a home. ”

“ Not until the morning stars quarrel together will the cat-bird or scarlet tanager herald the spring. The irreverent song of a cat-bird in the gray gloom of March would turn the spring back and draw the winter out of his uncovered grave. The bluebird comes and broods over this death and birth, until the old winter sleeps his long sleep, and the young spring wakes to her beautiful life.
Within my house is another very human little bird—the chimney-swallow. Sharing our very firesides as he does, he surely ought to have a warm place in our hearts ”

“ In the spring and summer, you go to field and garden, and you hear and see many birds. As you walk about the woods, you may see a dozen kinds of birds in [Pg 187] a few minutes. There will go a yellow-bird, looking like a canary. There, all splendid in black and gold, an oriole is busy building his curious nest. There flies from the swamp a red-wing blackbird. A big woodpecker drums on the nearest tree. A bluebird with a russet breast sits singing on the top rail of a fence. Sparrows, swallows, crows, are everywhere. ”

“ One group, however, is dull in hue, and but for the presence in some of its members of yellow or flame-coloured precostal tufts, which are very characteristic of the family, might at first sight be thought not to belong here. Graceful in form and active in motion, sun-birds flit from flower to flower, feeding on small insects which are attracted by the nectar and on the nectar itself; but this is usually done while perched and rarely on the wing as is the habit of humming-birds. ”

“ Night-butterflies never have the vivid tints of those that fly by day, and among the latter those of spring have clearer, brighter shades than the autumn ones. The gold-and-azure dust that adorns them harmonizes with the tones of colors in surrounding Nature. Night-birds, in the same way, have dark plumage, and the downiness of their coverings contrasts with the stiffness of those that fly by day. Shells secluded under rocks wear pale shades, compared with those that drink in the light. We have spoken above of cave-animals. ”

“ Perhaps the most lovely and interesting of all, however, are the sun-birds, which are here in the East the representatives of the true humming-birds of the Western tropics. “They are ethereal, gay, and sprightly in their movements, flitting briskly from flower to flower, and assuming a thousand lovely and agreeable attitudes. ”

“ Now over ice-bound river or lake, or rushing past a myriad dark spires of spruce, then hovering wonderingly over a multitude of lights from the streets of some town, the strong Arctic bird forges southward, until one night, if we only knew, we might open our window and, looking upward, see two great yellow eyes apparently hanging in space, the body and wings of the bird in 298 snow-white plumage lost amidst the flakes. We thrill in admiration at the grand bird, so fearless of the raging elements. ”

“ We'll be growing scales and tails presently.... Did you ever hear of a Southern bird—a sort of hawk, I think—that almost never alights; that lives and eats and sleeps its whole life away on the wing? and even its courtship, and its honeymoon? Grace Ferrall pointed one out to me last winter, near Palm Beach—a slender bird, part black, part snowy white, with long, pointed, delicate wings like an enormous swallow; and all day, all night, it floats and soars and drifts in the upper air, never resting, never alighting except during its brief nesting season.... ”

“ The Sky-Bird II was flying as steady as a rock. All the bracing wires were tuned to a nicety, the wind humming through them and along the smooth sides of the great creature's body with a whistling monotone which arose and fell with bewitching rhythm as the force fluctuated. The varnish and fire-proofing compound glistened brightly in the sunshine, attracting the attention of numerous seabirds, mostly gulls and ospreys, which followed them at times for short distances, only to be outdistanced. ”

“ Here, too, close to the river, I frequently saw the bird called sun-bird by the English colonists and tirana by the Spaniards in the Oroonoque. It is very elegant, and in its outward appearance approaches near to the heron tribe; still, it does not live upon fish. Flies and insects are its food, and it takes them just as the heron takes fish, by approaching near and then striking with its beak at its prey so quick that it has no chance to escape. ”

“ All day long the little creature, about the size of a king-bird, black above and gray below, with a saffron band across the throat, sits on the top of some dead tree, seemingly asleep; but let a fly or an insect of almost any kind pass along and the bird immediately becomes charged with activity and darts into the air in hot pursuit, catches its victim, and returns to its perch with graceful flits of the wings. It remains on the same twigs for hours, and usually returns day after day. If a stick is thrown at it the little creature flies away and comes back again and again. ”

“ Where there are no woods to make a shade, the sun suffers the brilliant eclipse of flocks of pearl-white sea birds, or of the solitary creature driving on the wind. Theirs is always a surprise of flight. The clouds go one way, but the birds go all ways: in from the sea or out, across the sands, inland to high northern fields, where the crops are late by a month. They fly so high that though they have the shadow of the sun under their wings, they have the light of the earth there also. ”

“ It is true that our native song-birds, moulting in autumn or early winter, assume at this season a thicker, warmer, fresher plumage after all the wear and [126] tear consequent on the labours of nidification, incubation, and love-making throughout the spring and summer; but it is equally true that it is only in spring, as Mr. Tennyson correctly asserts, that our wild birds assume their gaudiest and gayest attire, every colour and shade of colour in the individual bird’s feathering there and then only being at its best and brightest. ”

“ We cocked our guns and stepped cautiously on, to find ourselves at the edge of an opening where no less than five of the lovely birds we sought were perched, each on a dead bough, with plumage absolutely glittering in the sun-rays, which shot through, just as the flashing scale of the humming-bird sends forth its gleams of broken light.
Every now and then one darted out into the full sunshine in chase of butterfly or beetle, its loose tail-feathers spreading out comet-like and waving in the clear air. ”

“ This is especially noticeable with such birds as are wont to frequent our large cities, which may be seen throughout all hours of the day sailing high in the air. Generally, however, it is most lively early in the morning and just before nightfall, when its supply of insect food is most abundant. But it is never to be found on the wing after dark. As soon as the twilight deepens into the shades of night all retire to rest as regularly, if not at quite as early an hour, as other birds in regard to the diurnal habits of which there is no question. ”

“ The first frosts of autumn are a warning to the summer songsters that it is time to prepare for their long trip to the southland. From pine and beech and shrub they come, lingering to catch a stray insect or to feast on the seeds so plentiful at this season of the year, steadily collecting until dozens and fifties and hundreds of a kind are grouped together.
Whether the smaller birds, such as the robins, blue birds and ground birds, select a leader for the trip south, it is difficult to say. Some birds do so, and follow their leaders, as the sheep of olden time followed their shepherd. ”