BELTED KING FISHER. 
(C. al/cyon.) 
wings, dull blue with fine black shaft lines. Lower 
eyelid, spot before eye. Under parts white. Quiils and 
tail feathers black, speckled, blotched or barred on the 
inner webs with white. Wing coverts sprinkled with white. 
Feet dark. A long, thin, pointed crest. Plumage compact and 
oily to resist water, into which the birds constantly plunge after 
their finny prey. Length 12 to 13 inches. North America, 
common everywhere. This fine bird whose loud rattling notes are 
as familiar sounds along our streams as the noise of the mill-dam 
or the machinery, burrows to the depth of six or eight feet in the 
ground, and lays as many crystal white spheroidal eggs, at the 
enlarged extremity of the tunnel. 
iG PPER PARTS, broad pectoral bar and sides under the 
One of the girls began the lesson by reading the 
following quotation from Wilson Flagg: 
“The King Fisher is singularly grotesque in his 
appearance, though not without beauty of plumage. 
He is a mixture of the grotesque and the beautiful 
which, considered in connection with his singularity of 
habits, may account for the superstitions which attach 
to his history. He sits patiently, like an angler, on a 
post at the head of a wharf, or on the trunk of a tree 
that extends over the bank, and leaning obliquely with 
extended head and beak he watches for his finny prey. 
“There with the light blue sky above him and the 
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