264 A NATURALIST IN HIMALAYA 



carrion. The gannet, when high in the heavens, spies 

 its victim in the rough ocean. The birds of prey have 

 most remarkable powers of sight. It is astonishing to 

 see how a lammergeyer can detect a bone lying upon a 

 stony waste, or a kestrel can single out a protectively- 

 coloured locust in a field from a perch perhaps a 

 hundred yards away. Yet this is nothing compared 

 with the vision of insectivorous creatures that haunt 

 the night. It is almost incredible to observe the skill 

 with which bats and nightjars dart upon their prey 

 at dusk. Long after the sun has set, when to man's 

 eyes everything is wrapped in darkness, these nocturnal 

 creatures swoop upon the smallest insects and display 

 in the night a sense of the acutest vision. 



A pretty summer visitor to this valley is the purple 

 sunbird, Arachnectra asiatica. Every morning this 

 gay little bird, glistening in the sun with varying hues 

 of metallic purple, used to seek the nectar from the 

 scarlet bignonia that climbed about the sides of my 

 verandah. As it flitted from flower to flower, sucking 

 up the sweet honey with its long tubular tongue, it 

 seemed like a huge insect fertilizing every bloom and 

 called to mind the activities of the humming-bird. As 

 the sunbird passed from flower to flower it never 

 pushed its beak and head into the expanded mouth 

 of the tubular blossom in order to reach the nectar 

 at the bottom of the tube, but it always plunged its 

 beak through the petals near their junction with the 

 stem, and thus reached the nectar by a shorter route. 

 I do not think there was any anatomical difficulty to 

 prevent the sunbird seeking the nectar in the more 

 obvious manner, by pushing its head into the mouth 

 of the blossom, for I found that, in a dead specimen, 



