S. Porter—A West Indian Diary



101



Amongst the sombre greenery, the brilliant plumage of this little

warbler makes it resemble a golden ball hovering about in the gloom

of the woods. The birds must have been breeding when I was in

Jamaica, for I saw many adult birds feeding their young, which were

less gold in colour than their parents and had chestnut markings on

the breast.


The Palm Swift ( Tachornis phoenicohia). —This is one of the

commonest birds about Kingston. It was the first bird which attracted

my attention on leaving the ship, for flocks consisting of many hundreds

were flying low around the sheds on the wharves. I suppose that the

sugar stored there is a great attraction to various bees and flies, etc.,

which the birds were catching. The birds fly with such swiftness

that it would be impossible to identify them were it not for the very

conspicuous white band across the back. Nothing seems to disturb

the birds ; they fly in and out amongst the hundreds of noisy natives,

trucks of sugar, and motor cars which keep coming and going all

the time.


In the afternoons when the sun gets hot the birds stop their

peregrinations, and do not appear again until the early morning. These

birds make their nests at the base of the palm fronds, of a kind of

felt which the bird manufactures by a mixture of its own saliva and

cotton down from the seed pods of various trees. With these birds

flying round the sheds was a much larger Swift of a dull brown colour,

which I could not identify.


The Jamaica Tody ( Todus todus). —This exquisite little creature is

locally designated “ the Robin ”, but a bird more unlike a Robin

would be hard to imagine. The Todies comprise a small family of very

peculiar little birds confined to three of the West Indian islands. They

are brilliant pale green in colour with a vivid scarlet throat, a very

long and flattened bill, and long hairs or whiskers which spring from

the base of the bill. The total length of these birds, including the

long bill, is only 4 inches.


Gosse in his Birds of Jamaica tells of a specimen which he kept in

captivity for some time and which lived on small flying insects in his

room. In an ordinary cage I think it would be impossible to keep

these tiny birds alive.



