MARCH 341 
‘“‘ His plumage is beautiful in texture and soft in colour; 
bluish gray that sometimes looks quite blue in the bright 
light; wings and tail-feathers spotted with white, a white 
collar deep in front and narrow at the back, and a broad 
belt of the gray crossing the white breast and seeming 
to keep the gray mantle from slipping from his shoulders. 
The long head-feathers, also of the bluish gray, form a 
crest that the bird can raise at will and thus put on an 
expression of combined alertness and defiance. 
“The Kingfisher’s plumage is more perfect than his 
form, his head, with its beak two inches in length, being 
out of proportion to his short tail, and his small, weak 
feet seeming too small to support a body more than 
a foot long. 
“In disposition the Kingfisher seems to be rather re- 
mote and unfriendly; they never seem to travel in flocks, 
and even in the nesting season, the only time in which 
they associate in pairs, they seem to be quarrelling and 
wrangling, so very harsh are their notes. Hereabouts 
we have very few Kingfishers. Last summer a_ pair 
tunnelled a hole in the loamy bank of the river fifty 
feet below the grist-mill; for the Kingfisher does not 
build a tree nest, or, in fact, any nest, but, like the 
Bank Swaliow, burrows sidewise into a_ bank of 
sufficiently stiff soil not to cave in for the depth 
of anywhere from three to fifteen feet. This burrow 
may be only a few feet below the surface, or if the 
bluff rises above the stream, the hole may be twenty 
feet from the top and close to high-water mark. 
“Sometimes the hole runs straight, and then again it 
may have several turns before the nesting-chamber is 
