166 THK NEST OK THE KINGFISHER. 



its somewhat curious nature have ever fascinated me. If you incautiously 

 advance suddenly on her haunts, your inquiry is awakened, but not appeased, 

 for the eye is just dazzled for an instant by something as brilliant and rapid 

 as a meteor, shooting down the margin of the stream. But if you advance 

 quietly, the Kingfisher appears to extend confidence to man, and you may 

 then see her sitting motionless on a willow spray overhanging the water, like 

 some pendent and beautiful flower, resplendent in the sun of a warmer clime. 

 If you have patience, and it is a virtue indispensable in a naturalist, you will 

 see her suddenly dart from her resting-place, hover for a moment over the 

 brook, like some gaily -pain ted butterfly, ere it pitches on its chosen flower, 

 and then in mystery is lost to your gaze, leaving only a faint ripple on the 

 stream as a conjecture whither she has vanished. You are not however long 

 in anxiety as to her fate, for in the twinkling of an eye she regains her 

 favoured seat — usually some old branchless trunk — with the hapless minnow 

 in her mouth. Nature, in her ever just distribution of the beautiful, seems 

 to have given this little bird its gorgeous plumage, as a compensation for its 

 total absence of song. The only note I have ever heard her tune, is a 

 mournful and singularly-plaintive whistle, should you advance near her nesting- 

 place, which freshens in one's memory Ovid's sorrowful tale of the Shipwrecked 

 and transformed Ceyx, and the devotion of his Queen. 



Where the stream suddenly winds, the watei's washing with some force 

 against the contending bank, play back in a rippling eddy; here, the bank 

 being usually high, and free from the burrowings of the water-rat, the King- 

 fisher loves it for a home to incubate and rear her callow brood. The 

 practised eye can never fail to discover her nest. The hole is almost inva- 

 riably about a foot from the top of the bank, and of nearly a circular form; 

 its length averages about four feet, and at the extremity is somewhat larger, 

 and hollowed out in a circular form. These little birds appear fully to 

 understand the principle of drainage, for you always see a gradual fall from 

 the nest to the entrance of the hole, so as to allow the foeces of the young 

 to run off"; and indeed so well does their ingenuity succeed that it is often 

 their betrayer, for the excrement finding vent at the entrance of the hole, 

 tells the plundering youth that it is the home of the Kingfisher. I have 

 read somewhere in books, written I think by men who have observed but 

 little for themselves, that this bird often constructs its nest in the hole of 

 the water-rat. I have ever endeavoured to discover thxt such is the case, 

 but I have always found that on the contrary tho Kingfisher carefully avoids 

 rat's holes, and selects such a position in the bank for her nest, as is out of 

 the reach of these animals, and far above high water mark. The eggs arc 

 generally five or six in number, and of a delicate pink hue, but when blown 

 become of a beautiful enamelled white. They soon however lose their trans- 

 parency, unless the thin membrane which encircles the inside of the shell be 

 extracted, when they retain their grained appearance for a long period. The 

 eggs are placed on a small quantity of minute fi;>h bones, (probably as much 



