Ornithological and Other Oddities 



one who did not know his business had been 

 confusing the collection I was inspecting ; and 

 many years ago a mimetic oriole {Oriolus bouru- 

 ensis) was actually described in a scientific 

 publication as one of the friar-birds. It is 

 accordingly presumed that hawks make the same 

 mistake about the living birds, and let off the 

 orioles when they meet them, for fear of getting 

 a whole brotherhood of friars about their unlucky 

 heads. 



Another case, even more striking than this, 

 because the birds concerned in it are not so 

 nearly akin — both friar-birds and orioles being 

 Passerines — is that of the drongo and its mimic, 

 the fork-tailed cuckoo. The drongo (Dicrurus 

 ater) is familiar to all residents in the East as the 

 king-crow ; he is a black bird about the size of 

 a starling, with short legs and a conspicuously 

 forked tail, who spends most of his time sitting 

 on telegraph wires or dead boughs and dashing 

 out at passing insects. Such time as he 

 has to spare he bestows on hustling out of his 

 vicinity various predatory birds, especially crows 

 and kites, for, being remarkably nimble in the 

 air and very sharp of bill and claw, he can make 

 himself respected by species of very much larger 

 size. 



Now in the Indian region, where the drongo 

 is one of the very commonest birds, there also 



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