FROM GULLS TO KINGFISHERS
Our scientific arrangement introduces next the gull family, followed
by a series of groups that seems to the layman most miscellaneous. The
gulls are a world-wide family of sea birds, seen also near bodies of
water in the interior of continents, especially northward, which live
on fish and floating edibles. They are mostly glistening white, often
marked with black about the head and wings, except the big brownish
skuas that live by robbing other gulls of their catch and their nests
of young. A very distinct group in the family are the smaller terns,
whose slender forms, long wings, and graceful flight give them the
suitable name of "sea swallows." Another distinct lot is that of
the low-flying black "skimmers." All these birds normally breed on
sandbanks near shore, laying four handsomely variegated eggs in a mere
shallow of earth, but a good many nest in colonies on the margin of
fresh-water lakes. The gulls serve well as scavengers, but are not good
to eat.
Related to the gulls, but very different in appearance, are the small,
dark-colored, quaint auks, guillemots and puffins of northern coasts,
that look like miniature penguins, for they stand erect on two big
feet. They are fishers, with great skill in swimming and diving, and
breed in companies of thousands, sometimes, on the ledges of the
sea-fronting cliffs of Labrador, northern Scotland, Alaska, and Arctic
islands. The extinct "great auk" of the North Atlantic coasts was a
giant of this race.
Passing the sand grouse of Africa and Russia, we come to the pigeons,
represented in a bewildering variety of forms in every part of the
world. The United States has several species--the common wood dove, or
mourning dove, the extinct "wild pigeon," once here in millions, the
banded pigeon of the Pacific Coast, and several kinds of ground doves
in the southwest. The rock dove, which is the original of the domestic
varieties, is still wild in Europe, together with several other
species; and the Orient abounds in representatives of the family, some
of them large and extremely handsome, especially in the division called
fruit pigeons. To this family belonged that famous bird of the past,
the "dodo" of Mauritius.
There follow two big groups, the cuckoos and plantain eaters, and the
parrots, which together have the peculiarity of two toes in front and
two behind, instead of the customary three toes in front and one,
or perhaps none, behind; the woodpeckers have the same "yoke-toed"
arrangement, but are distinct otherwise. The cuckoos are mainly
Oriental and very varied, although all show the slender form, long
tail, and long curved beak that we see in our two American species, the
black-billed and yellow-billed; the most aberrant one in our country
is the queer, lizard-catching road runner of southern California. None
of the cuckoos seems a good nest maker. The nests of our common ones
are loose platforms of twigs, and both species often drop eggs in
each other's cradles; but they, in common with almost all the other
cuckoos of the world, do at least incubate their eggs and care for
the nestlings, instead of leaving that task to some foster parent, as
does the similar cuckoo of Europe. The most extraordinary feature of
this parasitic habit is the fact that the cuckoo often, if not always,
first lays its egg in any convenient place, and then, taking it in its
beak, carries it to another bird's nest and puts the egg into it. This
accounts for the frequent finding of a cuckoo's egg in nests into which
so large a bird could not have crept.
To record the fact that about 500 different kinds of parrots are
catalogued will be a sufficient explanation of their dismissal with a
few general remarks. The larger number and most striking examples--the
great cockatoos for instance--belong to Australia and the Malayan
islands, but the Indian region, Africa, and tropical America abound in
parrots. Probably the northernmost of the whole family is our Carolina
parakeet, which formerly ranged in summer even to the Great Lakes,
but now is almost exterminated even from the great swamps of the Gulf
Coast. Of the two kinds most often seen in cages--a custom that is
almost prehistoric in antiquity--the gray parrot is African, and the
green or green and yellow "Amazons" come from South America.
Parrots are gregarious, nest in holes in trees, although a few live
in holes in the ground or among loose rocks, and feed on all sorts
of vegetable productions, including some very hard fruits cracked in
their powerful bills, as is the habit of the gorgeous macaws of Central
and South America. The lories of Australia are provided with tongues
brushlike at the tip, and besides eating seeds they lick the honey out
of the blossoms of the eucalyptus and other flowering trees, and in so
doing effect the cross-fertilization of these trees in a country which
has no bees to do that service.
Passing the brilliant rollers of the Old World, and the motmots and
little gemlike todies of the New, we come to the extensive tribe of
kingfishers, of which our blue and white example is a very modest
specimen--but the only one we have, while 150 other species are counted
in the rest of the world, most of them in the Austro-Malayan region
and in Africa. They vary immensely in size, colors, food and habits.
A large section are not "fishers" at all, but dwell in wooded places,
and subsist on insects caught on the wing, and on reptiles, mice, etc.,
like birds of prey. Few groups are so diversified and entertaining as
this one. Related to them are the bee-eaters, hoopoes, hornbills and
others that bring us to the owls, a suborder of which contains the
great nightjar family to which our whippoorwills and nighthawks belong,
with the swifts and humming birds as near relations. Then come the
woodpeckers, much alike all over the world (but absent from Australia),
followed by the gorgeous trogons of Mexico and some other tropical
beauties.