49 >The Roller-like Birds 



occasional crustaceans ; while the food of the others, which are variously known 

 as Wood, Long-tailed, and Laughing Kingfishers, consists of crustaceans, insects, 

 small reptiles, small mammals, and perhaps now and then a young bird. The 

 attitude assumed by these birds is, however, quite characteristic throughout 

 the group, it being their habit to sit motionless watching for their prey, to dart 

 after it and seize it on the wing, and to return to their original position to swallow 

 it. A favorite position of the fish-eating forms is a stub, some overhanging 

 bough, or projecting stone, whence they keep a sharp lookout for their finny 

 prey, or to hang on vibrating wings over the water, into which they plunge with 

 closed pinions. The omnivorous forms also select some vantage point whence 

 they dart after their prey. The flight of the Kingfishers is usually direct and 

 strong, though not often prolonged for any great distance. In the matter of 

 nesting there is diversity corresponding to their other habits. The fish-eating 

 forms nest mostly in holes which they excavate for themselves in banks usually 

 along streams, while the forest- or brush-haunting forms nest mainly in natural 

 cavities in trees. The eggs of all, however, are uniformly white and unspotted. 



The members of this family are distributed, though somewhat unevenly, 

 throughout the entire world except in Arctic and Antarctic regions. Their 

 center of distribution according to Wallace is the eastern half of the Malay Archi- 

 pelago, from which point they decrease rapidly in numbers, Australia possessing 

 but thirteen species and the entire New World only about a dozen. This last 

 statement, as Wallace adds, " leads to the conclusion that America long existed 

 without Kingfishers; and that in comparatively recent times perhaps during 

 the Miocene or Pliocene period a species of the Old World genus (Ceryle) 

 found its way into North America, and, spreading rapidly southward along the 

 great river valleys, has become differentiated in South America into the few 

 closely allied forms that alone inhabit that vast country the richest in the 

 world in fresh-water fish, and apparently the best fitted to sustain a varied and 

 numerous body of Kingfishers." 



The Kingfishers are birds of classical renown and many are the legends and 

 myths concerning them, as attested by the following extract from the pen of 

 Mr. Alfred Newton, the talented English ornithologist: "The Kingfisher is the 

 subject of a variety of legends and superstitions, both classical and mediaeval. Of 

 the latter, one of the most curious is that, having been originally a plain gray bird, 

 it acquired its present bright colors by flying toward the sun on its liberation 

 from Noah's Ark, where its upper surface assumed the hue of the sky above it 

 and its lower plumage was scorched by the heat of the setting orb to the tint it 

 now bears. More than this, the Kingfisher was supposed to possess many vir- 

 tues. Its dried body would avert thunderbolts, and if kept in a wardrobe, 

 would preserve from moths the woolen stuffs therein laid, or hung by a thread 

 to the ceiling of a chamber would point with its bill to the quarter whence the 

 wind blew. All the readers of Ovid know how the faithful but unfortunate 

 Ceyx and Alcyone were changed into Kingfishers birds which bred at the 

 winter solstice, when through the influence of ^Eolus, the wind god and father 

 of the fond wife, all gales were hushed and the sea calmed so that their floating 



