66 Birds Every Child Should Know 



shorter than the sparrow. His cousin, the 

 Blackbumian warbler, a much rarer bird, 

 with a colour scheme of black, white, and 

 beautiful rich orange, not salmon flame, can be 

 named instantly by the large amount of white 

 in his tail feathers. There are so few brilliantly 

 coloured birds that find their way to us from the 

 tropics, that it should not take any boy or girl 

 longer to learn them than it does to learn the 

 first miiltiplication table. In Cuba the red- 

 start is known as ** El CandeHta" — ^the little 

 candle flame that flashes in the deep, dark, trop- 

 ical forest. 



Who would believe that this small firebrand, 

 half glowing, half charred, whirling about 

 through the trees, as if blown by the wind, is 

 a cousin of the sombre oven-bird that walks 

 so daintily and leisurely over the ground? The 

 redstart keeps perpetually in motion that he 

 may seize gnats and other gauzy winged mouth- 

 f uls in mid-air — not as the flycatchers do, by wait- 

 ing on a fence rail or limb of a tree for a dinner to 

 fly past, then dashing out and seizing it, but 

 by flitting about constantly in search of insect 

 prey. The bristles at the base of his bill pre- 

 vent many an insect from getting past it. He 

 rests on the trees only long enough to snatch a 

 morsel, then away he goes again. No wonder 

 the Spaniards call all the gaily coloured, trop- 

 ical wood warblers "Mariposas" — ^butterflies. 



