104 the living animals of the world 
thousands upon thousands being killed every 
year in India alone, to supply the demands 
made by milliners for the decoration of 
ladies’ hats. 
Rollers frequent forest country, and 
travel in pairs or in small companies : some 
species are entirely insectivorous ; others eat 
also reptiles, frogs, beetles, worms, and grain. 
Four or five white eggs are laid in a nest 
made of roots, grass, hair, and feathers, and 
built in walls, under the eaves of buildings, 
or in holes of trees or banks. 
Equally beautiful as a whole, and far 
more widely known, are the KINGFISHERS. 
But just as the common cuckoo has come to 
overshadow the rest of its tribe, so the Com- 
mon Kingfisher eclipses all its congeners. 
For centuries a wealth of fable, held together 
by a modicum of fact, served to secure for 
this bird a peculiar interest; whilst to-day, 
though shorn of much of the importance 
with which these fables had invested it, 
this kingfisher is still esteemed one of the 
most interesting and beautiful of its tribe. 
Green and blue are the predominating 
colours of its upper- and bright chestnut- 
red of its under-surface; but owing to 
structural peculiarities of the feathers of the 
upper-parts, the reflection of the green and 
blue areas changes with the direction of the 
light from which the bird is viewed, in the 
same way that the peacock’s train-feathers 
change according as the light falls upon them. 
As is the rule where both sexes are brilliantly coloured, this bird breeds in a hole, which 
in the present species is generally excavated in the bank of a stream, but sometimes in an old 
gravel-pit or chalk-pit, a mile or even more from the water. Occasionally the crumbling soil 
under the roots of an old tree affords sufficient shelter. No nest is made, although what is 
equivalent to a nest is ultimately formed from the bird’s habit of ejecting the indigestible 
parts of its food on to the floor of the space in which the eggs are laid. In course of time this 
becomes a cup-shaped structure; but whether, as Professor Newton remarks, by the pleasure of 
the bird or the moisture of the soil, or both, is unknown. With care the nest may be 
removed entire, but the slightest jar reduces the whole to the collection of fish-bones and 
crustacean skeletons of which it was originally composed. There is a tradition, not yet 
extinct, to the effect that these “ nests ” are of great pecuniary value, and scarcely a year 
passes without the authorities at the British Museum being offered such a treasure, at 
prices varying from a few pounds to a hundred. The nest-chamber is approached by a tunnel 
sloping upwards, and varying from 8 inches to 3 feet in length, terminating in a chamber 
some 6 inches in diameter, in which the eggs are laid. These, from six to eight in number, 
have a pure white, shining shell, tinged with a most exquisite pink colour, which is lost when 
the eggs are blown. 
The young seem to be reared under very unsanitary conditions, for the ejected fish -bone.s 
and other hard parts are not reserved entirely for the nest, but gradually distributed along 
Photo by W, F, Piggott] \^Ltighton Buxteard 
KINGFISHERS AT HOME 
The pluirage of this bird is remarkable for the beauty of its iridescent 
hues 
