JS'trds in l-ielation to their Prey. 93 



full method is best illustrated in 559. The bird, " with head 

 drawn right back and neck well arched," would strike 

 " blow after blow with terrific force for so small a bird" at 

 the prostrate insect. It would steady it if necessary by 

 holding it firndy in one foot while it struck the blows, as a 

 man does sometimes to a stone he is shaping. It would 

 often, in the case of a slippery insect, strike with mandibles 

 somewhat open, and thus partly arrest the prey's tendency 

 to glance away. And it realized that the underside of the 

 abdomen was the most vulnerable spot, for it specially 

 turned the insect on to its back before commencing to 

 hammer. That the method was a highly effective one is 

 shown by the fact that the Babbler succeeded (559) in 

 breaking into and partly extracting the contents of a large 

 hard tlower -beetle that not only my Bulbuls, but a Roller 

 (^Coracias garrulus), failed to negotiate, and that my most 

 powerful batterer of all, a Kingfisher {Halcyon cyanoleucus), 

 took twenty minutes to make any impression on. My Shrike 

 {L. coUar'is liumeralis) experienced the very greatest difficulty 

 with one, but, finally, holding the beetle in one foot and 

 tearing at the underside of the abdomen with its bill, it 

 succeeded in doing just what the Babbler did: it extracted 

 the contents of the abdomen but failed with the thorax. 

 With the Coprid of experiment 555 the Babbler failed in 

 good company — the Roller, the Bulbul, and the Shrike. 

 The Kingfisher's " first five smashing blows " (the beetle 

 being held in its bill and struck against a branch) "produced, 

 I noticed, no result, but a few blows later the chitin of the 

 thorax cracked right across." As for- the weevils of experi- 

 ment 565, all the above birds failed with the harder species, 

 whether batterers, han)merers, crushers, or fearers, but a 

 Swempi {FrancoUnus coqui) just swallowed it. Even the 

 Swempi, however, had difficulty with a yet larger weevil 

 {Brac/iycerus conyestus of 5G7) owing to its holding its very 

 toughly attached legs straight out together instead of keeping 

 them tucked in like a dung-beetle. The Kingfisher, too, 

 succeeded only with the Anachalcos, and it was the King- 

 fisher alone that successfully dealt with the gloss and torj)edo- 



