66 Birds Every Child Should Know 
shorter than the sparrow. His cousin, the 
Blackburnian warbler, a much rarer bird, 
with a colour scheme of black, white, and 
beautiful rich orange, not salmon flame, can be 
named instantly by the large amount of white 
in his tail feathers. There are so few brilliantly 
coloured birds that find their way to us from the 
tropics, that it should not take any boy or girl 
longer to learn them than it does to learn the 
first multiplication table. In Cuba the red- 
start is known as “El Candelita” — ^the little 
candle flame that flashes in the deep, dark, trop- 
ical forest. 
Who would believe that this small firebrand, 
half glowing, half charred, whirling about 
through the trees, as if blown by the wind, is 
a cousin of the sombre oven-bird that walks 
so daintily and leisurely over the ground? The 
redstart keeps perpetually in motion that he 
may seize gnats and other gauzy winged mouth- 
fuls in mid-air — not as the flycatchers do, by wait- 
ing on a fence rail or limb of a tree for a dinner to 
fly past, then dashing out and seizing it, but 
by flitting about constantly in search of insect 
prey. The bristles at the base of his bill pre- 
vent many an insect from getting past it. He 
rests on the trees only long enough to snatch a 
morsel, then away he goes again. No wonder 
the Spaniards call all the gaily coloured, trop- 
ical wood warblers “Mariposas” — butterflies. 
