BIRDS. 



549 



perch on a limb and eat its fill, moving about to get more as soon as those 

 within reach are exhausted ; but flies from its perch, takes the fruit on the 

 wing, and returns again to his resting-place, the whole flight being accom- 

 plished with a degree of elegance that can- 

 not be described. 



The best known to us of all the swifts is 

 the chimney-swallow, which every student of 

 ornithology will tell you is not a swallow at 

 all. Still the name sticks, and will stick, in 

 spite of all protests, and the best thing that 

 naturalists can do is to gracefully submit to 

 the inevitable. Our chimney-swallow is a 

 native of this country, and before the clays 

 of houses it built its nest in hollow trees. 

 Now it has entirely changed its habits in 

 the settled part of our country, and taken 

 entirely to chimneys. Inside of these the 

 nests are built of twigs, glued together by 

 the mucus secreted by the bird. 



In another swift this glutinous secretion 

 reaches a pecuniary importance ; for it fur- 

 nishes the celebrated edible birds'- nests of the 

 Chinese markets, about which until recently 

 but little has been really known. Most of 

 the nests are gathered on the northern coast 

 of Borneo, where the swifts make their homes 

 in caves. The nest-gatherers, by the light of 

 a torch, pull the nests off the rocky walls 

 with a four-tined fork fixed on a large pole. 

 Then the nests are sorted, — the best tied 

 together with rattan, the poorer strung to- 

 gether. It takes about thirty of the best 

 nests to make a pound, and these are worth 

 about seven dollars a pound. The nests, too, 

 have been subjected to a chemical and micro- 

 scopical examination, and it is found that it 

 was not of a vegetable nature, but consisted 



almost solely of strings of mucine plastered together ; and the probability is 

 that this, like the ' glue ' of the chimney-swallow, is secreted by the glands 

 in the mouth of the bird. 



The whole interest that surrounds those gems of the air, the humming- 



Fig. 451. — Quesal, or paradise trogon 

 (Pharomacrus mocinno), male and 

 female. 



