62 
Allen’s naturalist’s library. 
feature is common to the two families. Just as the male 
Hornbills feed their females in the nest, so, it would appear, 
do the Hoopoes. It is true that the male does not plaster the 
female in the tree, like the Hornbill does, but there is plenty 
of evidence that the male Hoopoe brings all the food to the 
female, though the latter occasionally comes out and takes a 
flight before returning. 
The note of the Hoopoe, as observed in China by Swinhoe, 
“ is produced by puffing out the sides of the neck, and ham- 
mering on the ground at the production of each note, thereby 
exhausting the air at the end of the series of three notes, 
which make up its song. Before it repeats the call, it repeats 
the puffing of the neck with a slight gurgling noise. When it 
is able to strike its bill, the sound is the correct hoo-}ioo-hoo, 
but when perched on a rope, and only jerking out the song 
with nods of the head, the notes most resemble the syllables 
hoh-hoh-hoh.” 
Eggs. — Four to seven in number ; grey or greenish-olive or 
stone-colour, without spots. When first laid, they are of a pale 
greenish-blue colour, which soon fades. Axis, o-g-i'i inch; 
diam., o'7. 
THE KINGFISHERS. SUB-ORDER HALCYONES. 
Birds of ungainly form but mostly of brilliant plumage, the 
Kingfishers are found in nearly every part of the world. They 
are most numerous in the Old World, as America possesses but 
one genus, Ce^yk, of which the Belted Kingfisher, Ceryk akyon, 
is the type, but the genus ranges throughout the New World, 
from the liigh north even down to Chili. 
In the Old World there is scarcely a country that docs not 
possess a Kingfisher of some sort or another, belonging to one of 
the two types recognised in the Family, which is divided into 
Fish-eating Kingfishers (Akedininm) and Insect- or Reptile- 
eating Kingfishers {paceloiiinm). The former have a long thin 
bill, much compressed, fit for cleaving the water, and generally, 
but not always, a short rudder-like tail. This is, indeed, by 
no means an universal characteristic, and among the Insect- 
