i8o THE BOOK OF BIRDS 



are especially interesting, even apart from its amazingly 

 beautiful colouring. One is its tongue, which is long and 

 slender and hollow, and can be shot out suddenly to a 

 surprising extent. This, of course, is to allow of the bird 

 reaching its food, which is often hidden out of sight in the 

 heart of some deep-belled flower. 



The other thing is the strength of its tiny wings. This 

 is seen, not in long travel-flights over land and sea (though, 

 as we have seen, some of the tribe do travel far from their 

 regular homes), but in their power of hovering. 



Those of you who have only seen Humming-Birds 

 stuffed, in a glass case — even though it be the magnificent 

 collection at South Kensington Museum — can have no idea 

 of the swift movement of their wings when alive in the 

 forest. But if you have ever watched, as I have watched 

 in my Hertfordshire garden, the flight of their moth name- 

 sake, the humming-bird hawk-moth,^ suspended as it seems 

 by invisible threads over some favourite flower, darting its 

 long tongue or trunk into the honeyed heart of the blossom, 

 you will have a very good idea of how a Humming-Bird 

 hovers. Like this moth, its wings are beating so rapidly 

 that they seem only to quiver — indeed you cannot see more 

 than a grey film or mist on either side of the body. And 

 when the bird moves elsewhere it glides off, and by so swift 



1 Since writing the above sentence, I have come across a passage in that 

 well-known book of travel, The Naturcdist on the Amazons, in which the author 

 says : " Several times I have shot by mistake a humming-bird hawk-moth instead 

 of a bird. It was only after many days' experience that I learned to distinguish 

 one from the other when on the wing." And he quotes an amusing story of how 

 Gould the naturalist had quite a stormy dispute with a gentleman who declared 

 that Humming-Birds were found in England, for he had seen one flying about 

 in Devonshire (of course, it was the humming-bird hawk-moth). Many of the 

 natives in the Amazon forests, and even some of the white residents, believed 

 that this moth changes into the bird, in the same way as a caterpillar becomes 

 a butterfly.— H. G. G. 



