By the Rev. A. C. Smith. 



213 



, sight of food, you may see it suddenly stop, hover with expanded 

 ilwings for a moment, and then drop like a stone into the water, 

 I from which it will as quickly emerge with its quivering victim, 

 j firmly held between the mandibles of its beak ; and this it will 

 either at once devour, or else beat to death against a stone and then 

 swallow whole. And yet with this plunging propensity, and this 

 fearlessness in precipitating itself into deep water from which it 

 always emerges unscathed, it is essentially a land bird, and has no 

 affinity with the water fowl, with which Bewick and some of the 

 ! older naturalists classed it : neither can it seek the water on a 

 rough stormy day ; for the fishing manoeuvres above recorded to 

 be successful, calm quiet weather is necessary, when the water is 

 neither thickened by rain, nor ruffled by wind, but as the elements 

 are not always so propitious to its piscatory expeditions, the King- 

 fisher, (like the true birds of prey,) will gorge itself voraciously at one 

 time, and then retire to digest its heavy meal at leisure : another 

 habit too it possesses in common with the rapacious birds, viz., 

 that it reproduces in castings or small pellets, the fish bones and 

 other indigestible parts of the living creatures it has swallowed, 

 and these pellets in time cover the floor of the hole in the bank in 

 which it dwells, and form the nest on which it deposits its beautiful 

 transparent white eggs. On no bird have the old heathen poets 

 and naturalists exercised their fancy more than on the Kingfisher, 

 and among other strange tales they used to fable that this bird 

 would sit on its floating nest for the seven days of incubation, and 

 that it had such power t>ver the winds and waves, that though in 

 the depth of winter, a perfect calm always reigned during that 

 period, when mariners might cross the sea in perfect safety : and 

 hence came the well known saying " Halcyon days/' which has 

 passed into a proverb for any short season of tranquillity. 



HIRUNDINIDiE (The Swallows).. 



This family certainly contains the most conspicuous of our sum- 

 mer birds, and with their first appearance we are accustomed to 

 associate the departure of winter and the approach of summer, and 

 therefore we are naturally predisposed in their favour : but not 



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