THE START 35 



he sings, and then falling back to earth. The color of the 

 bird and the character of his performance attract the at- 

 tention of every observer, bird, beast, or man, within reach 

 of vision. 



The red-backed tyrant is utterly unlike any of his kind 

 in the United States, and until I looked him up in Sclater 

 and Hudson's ornithology I never dreamed that he be- 

 longed to this family. He — for only the male is so brightly 

 colored — is coal-black with a dull-red back. I saw these 

 birds on December i near Barilloche, out on the bare Pata- 

 gonian plains. They behaved like pipits or longspurs, 

 running actively over the ground in the same manner and 

 showing the same restlessness and the same kind of flight. 

 But whereas pipits are inconspicuous, the red-backs at 

 once attracted attention by the contrast between their 

 bold coloring and the grayish or yellowish tones of the 

 ground along which they ran. The silver-bill tyrant, how- 

 ever, is much more conspicuous; I saw it in the same 

 neighborhood as the red-back and also in many other 

 places. The male is jet-black, with white bill and wings. 

 He runs about on the ground like a pipit, but also frequently 

 perches on some bush to go through a strange flight-song 

 performance. He perches motionless, bolt upright, and 

 even then his black coloring advertises him for a quarter 

 of a mile round about. But every few minutes he springs 

 up into the air to the height of twenty or thirty feet, the 

 white wings flashing in contrast to the black body, screams 

 and gyrates, and then instantly returns to his former post 

 and resumes his erect pose of waiting. It is hard to im- 

 agine a more conspicuous bird than the silver-bill; but 

 the next and last tyrant flycatcher of which I shall speak 



