plays a large part in the costumes of the true tree-top perchers. (Vide, in our 

 northern American fauna, the Indigo Bunting and the Bluebird.) With it are 

 combined red, green, yellow, and all the other bright colors, in sharp ruptive 

 patches, picturing, in general, the sunlit forest crown seen from above. One 

 step below these 'perchers in air' live the skulking tree- top birds, as it were 

 the rails and gallinules of the forest's crown. These live among and beneath 

 the outermost leaves, immersed in a deep bath of green light; and many, though 

 not all of them, are mainly or wholly green. Such, preeminently, are the 

 parrots, those queer and splendid geniuses of the tropic woods. They crawl 

 about through the forest's crown, and comparatively seldom sit on bare, 

 high perches. When they do so they are of course inconspicuous enough 

 against the tree-tops; but many of them lack the finer developments of sky- 

 matching and more generalized background-matching costume. Instead 

 they are attired to match the leaves and flowers among which they are feed- 

 ing. They are obliteratively shaded, almost all of them, but faintly, in keep- 

 ing with the diffuseness of their usual leaf-dimmed illumination, and their 

 acrobatic feeding-habits, which put them into all sorts of irregular positions 

 relative to the sky-light. There is almost certainly a significant connection, 

 too, between their habit of feeding head-downward, and their gayly blossom- 

 colored tails. Poked up above the feeding parrot's line of watchfulness, and 

 often into the stratum of gaudy flowers and fruits, this tail must have the 

 best possible disguise if its owner is not to be pounced upon from above by 

 some swift hawk. So it is done out into brilliantly disruptive and oblitera- 

 tive spots and patches of rich flower- and fruit- and sky- and sunlit- foliage- 

 colors, — "conspicuously ornamented," as people used to say. In fact, it is 

 doubtless, under the normal, appropriate conditions, a very mask of masks. 

 Fitly colored for inconspicuousness above the 'green-bath' region, it is 

 scarcely less so for the midmost recesses of that region itself, because the all- 

 suffusing greenness greatly dims the brightest contrasting hues, bringing the 

 red, yellow or purple patches of a gaudy-motley bird nearly or quite into 

 unison with the variations of interior vegetation colors. Thus it is not strange 



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