66 Wonders of the Bird World 



in their ways. They are, however, allied to the Honey- 

 suckers (Meliphagida) to a great extent, and have an 

 extensile tongue. Like the Humming-birds, they are 

 attracted to flowers in order to feed on the insects which 

 frequent the latter, but they do not poise themselves in 

 the air or hover in front of the blossoms like the Humming- 

 birds, but cling like Tits to the stems of the flowers and 

 extract the nectar and capture the tiny insects with their 

 long tongue. Some of the finest Sun-birds equal in the 

 beauty of their metallic plumage the grandest of the 

 Humming-birds, as will be. seen by our illustration of the 

 splendid Sun-bird (Cinnyris splendidus] of West Africa 

 (p. 62). Here nearly the whole plumage is metallic, and 

 one principal decorative feature is to be seen in the bright 

 yellow pectoral tufts which stand out on each side of the 

 breast. These yellow tufts play a great part in the orna- 

 mentation of the male Sun-birds, and however small may 

 be the amount of metallic colouring, the yellow tufts are 

 always present, and hence we may argue that it is an 

 ornament donned originally by some ancestral species and 

 retained by the most brilliant of the succeeding species to 

 the present day. 



Thus we find the divergence of decorative colour 

 especially marked in the males, for the females are almost 

 invariably birds of dull plumage, 

 and the young males at first 

 resemble their mothers. From this 

 point of view the characters of 

 some of the African species are 

 remarkably interesting. In C. hart- 

 laubi from West Africa (Fig. i) 



i The male of Cinnyris hartlaubi. , , , 



pectoral tufts are present, but the 



colour of the upper parts is dark olive and the breast grey. 

 Metallic plumage only appears on the throat. The female 

 is entirely plain. In C.cyanolcemus (Fig. 2) the general tint 



