THE KINGFISHER. 
I 13 
Flutters when noon-heats are near, 
Glad the shelving banks to shun, 
Red and steaming in the sun, 
Where the shrew-mouse with pale throat 
Burrows, and the speckled stoat.” 
Paracelsus. 
And Broderip, in speaking of an angler’s bird companions, the summer snipes and 
the swift, darting by him like 
“An arrow from a Tartar’s bow,” 
introduces the Kingfisher with a striking phrase to describe its flight; as exact 
as poetical—it “ shoots by like a meteor.” Mr. Wood gives a pleasant account 
of the difficulty of removing this bird’s nest.* “Until Mr. Gould succeeded in 
removing the nest entire, no one had been able to perform such a feat, and so 
well-known to all bird-nesters is the difficulty of the task, that a legend was, and 
perhaps is still, current in various parts of England, that the authorities of the 
British Museum had offered a reward of ^"ioo to any one who would deposit in 
their collection a perfect nest of the Kingfisher. The chief difficulty was, of course, 
to prevent the earth from falling into the nest and becoming mixed with the 
delicate bones of which it was composed. In order to obviate such a mishap, 
Mr. Gould introduced a quantity of cotton-wool into the burrow, pushing it to 
the extremity with a fishing-rod. He then dug down upon the nest and captured 
the female, who was sitting upon eight eggs. With very great care he removed 
the fragile nest and transferred it to the British Museum. 
The Kingfishers being, as a rule, tropical birds, he who would know more of 
their habits and dispersion cannot do better than consult that delightful book, Wallace’s 
“Malay Archipelago.” Thus, in the Isle of Lombock, a little violet and orange species 
(Ceyx rufidorsa ) “darted rapidly along like a flame of fire.” In the Moluccas, again, 
he found no less than sixteen species, among them the most brilliantly coloured 
birds in existence. In New Guinea similarly were discovered sixteen species, among 
them “a red and blue Tanysiptera, the most beautiful of that beautiful genus.” In 
Amboyna the same naturalist obtained a few specimens of another bird of this 
most beautiful family. “ They belong chiefly,” he adds, “ to that division of the 
family of Kingfishers termed King-hunters, living chiefly on insects and small 
land molluscs which they dart down upon and pick up from the ground, just as a 
Kingfisher picks a fish out of the water. They are confined to a very limited area, 
comprising the Moluccas, New Guinea, and Northern Australia” (p. 298, ed. 1877). 
* “ Homes without Hands,” p. 60. 
