_Tyrannus Dominicensis._
_Muscicapa Dominicensis_, +Linn.+—Aud. pl. 170.
_Tyrannus griseus_, +Vieill.+ Ois. de l’Am. 46.
_Tyrannus Dominicensis_, +Bonap.+
[48] Length 9¹⁄₂ inches, expanse 14¹⁄₂, tail 3⁸⁄₁₀, flexure 4⁵⁄₈,
rictus 1¹⁄₄, tarsus ⁹⁄₁₀, middle toe ³⁄₄. Irides dark hazel.
Intestine 8 inches: two cæca very minute, about ¹⁄₈ inch long, and
no thicker than a pin, at 1 inch from the cloaca. Sexes exactly
alike.
The history of this bird shall be mainly told by my valued friend
Mr. Hill. “It is along the sea-side savannas and pastures, and among
the adjacent hills and valleys, that the migratory flocks of the Grey
Petchary swarm at the beginning of September. Occasional showers have
given a partial freshness to the lowland landscape; the fields have
begun to look grassy and green, and the trees to brighten with verdure,
when numbers of these birds appear congregated on the trees around the
cattle ponds, and about the open meadows, hawking the insect-swarms
that fill the air at sun-down. No sooner do the migrant visitors appear
on our shores, than the several birds of the species, that breed with
us, quit their nestling trees, and disappear from their customary beat.
They join the stranger flocks, and gather about the places to which the
migratory visitors resort, and never resume their ordinary abodes till
the breeding season returns.
The migrant visitors do not appear among us many days before they
become exceedingly fat: they are then eagerly sought after by the
sportsman, who follows the flocks to their favourite haunts, and
slaughters them by dozens. The Petchary is not exclusively an
insect-feeder;—the sweet wild berries tempt him. In September the
pimenta begins to fill and ripen, and in these groves the birds may
always be found, not so much gathered in flocks as thickly dispersed
about. It is, however, at sunset that they exclusively congregate;
when insect life is busiest on the wing. Wherever the stirring swarms
abound, they may be seen ranged in dense lines on the bare branch of
some advantageous tree. By the end of September, the migrant Petcharies
quit us, leaving with us most of those which bred with us.”
“The Petchary is among the earliest breeders of the year. As early
as the month of January the mated pairs are already in possession of
some lofty and commanding tree, sounding at day-dawn that ceaseless
shriek, composed of a repetition of some three or four shrill notes,
very similar to the words _pecheery—pecheery—pe-chēēr-ry_, from which
they receive their name. To this locality they remain constant till
the autumn. They then quit these haunts, and congregate about the
lowland ponds. At some hour or two before sunset, they assemble in
considerable numbers to prey upon the insects that hover about these
watering-places. They are then observed unceasingly winging upward and
downward, and athwart the waters, twittering and shrieking, but never
flying far. They dart off from some exposed twig, where they had sat
eight or ten in a row, and return to it again, devouring there, the
prey they have caught. Their evolutions are rapid; their positions of
flight are constantly and hurriedly changing; they shew at one while
all the outer, and at another all the inner plumage; and they fly,
checking their speed suddenly, and turning at the smallest imaginable
angle. There are times when the Petchary starts off in a straight line
from his perch, and glides with motionless wings, as light and buoyant
as a gossamer, from one tree to another. When he descends to pick an
insect from the surface of the water, his downward course is as if he
were tumbling, and when he rises in a line upward, he ascends with a
curious lift of the wings, as if he were thrown up in the air, and were
endeavouring to recover himself from the impetus.
“The congregated flocks disappear entirely before the month of October
is out. It is only in some five or six weeks of the year that they
are reconciled to association in communities. At all other times they
restrict their company to their mates, and permit no other bird to
divide with them their solitary trees.
“From the window of the room in which I am writing, I look out upon a
very lofty cocoa-nut tree, in the possession of a pair of Petcharies.
Long before the voice of any other bird is heard in the morning, even
when daylight is but faintly gleaming, the shrill unvarying cry of
these birds is reiterated from their aerie on the tree-top. Perched on
this vantage-height, they scream defiance to every inhabitant around
them, and sally forth to wage war on all the birds that venture near.
None but the Swallow dares to take the circuit of their nestling tree.
At a signal from one of the birds, perhaps the female, when a Carrion
Vulture is sweeping near, or a Hawk is approaching, the mate flings
himself upwards in the air, and having gained an elevation equal to
that of the bird he intends to attack, he starts off in a horizontal
line, with nicely balanced wings, and hovering for a moment, descends
upon the intruder’s back, shrieking all the while, as he sinks and
rises, and repeats his attacks with vehemence. The Carrion Vulture,
that seldom courses the air but with gliding motion now flaps his wings
eagerly, and pitches downward at every stroke his assailant makes at
him, and tries to dodge him. In this way he pursues him, and frequently
brings him to the ground.
“The Hawk is beset by all birds of any power of wing, but the boldest,
and, judging from the continued exertion he makes to escape, the most
effective of his assailants is the Petchary. It is not with feelings of
contempt the Hawk regards this foe:—he hurries away from him with rapid
flight, and hastily seeks to gain some resting place; but as he takes
a direct course from one exposed tree to another equally ill-suited,
he is seen again submitting to the infliction of a renewed visit from
his pertinacious assailant, till he is constrained to soar upward, and
speed away, wearied by the buffets of his adversary.
“The appearance of the Petchary, when he erects the feathers of his
crest, or opens those of his forehead, and shews glimpses of his fiery
crown is fierce, vindictive, and desperate. His eye is deeply dark,
and his bill, although it greatly resembles, in its robust make, that
of the Raven, is even of sturdier proportions than that bird’s; the
bristles are black, and amazingly strong.
“The Petchary has been known to make prey of the Humming-bird, as it
hovers over the blossom of the garden. When he seizes it, he kills it
by repeated blows, struck on the branch where he devours it. I have
remarked him, beside, beating over little spaces of a field, like a
Hawk, and reconnoitring the flowers beneath him; searching also along
the blossoms of a hedge-bank, and striking so violently into the
herbage for insects, that he has been turned over as he grabbed his
prey, and seemed saved from breaking his neck in his vehemence, only by
the recoil of the herbage.
“His nest in this part of the island has seldom been found in any other
trees than those of the palm-kind. Amid the web of fibres that encircle
the footstalk of each branch of the cocoa-nut, he weaves a nest, lined
with cotton, wool, and grass. The eggs are four or five, of an ivory
colour, blotched with deep purple spots, intermingled with brown
specks, with the clusters thickening at the greater end. The Eagle,
flapping his pinions as he shrieks from his rock when the tempest-cloud
passes by, is not a more striking picture than this little bird, when,
with his anxieties all centred in the cradle of his young ones, he
stands in ‘his pride of place,’ on the limb of his palm, towering high
above all other trees, and battling with the breeze that rocks it, and,
rush after rush as the wind sweeps onward, flutters his wings with
every jerk of the branches, and screams like a fury.”
I have little to add to the above detail. With us at the western end
of the Island, the Grey Petchary is wholly migratory, not one having
been seen by us from October to April. If its migrations be, as I
have reason to think, not northward and southward, but eastward and
westward, this fact is easily accounted for, from the greater nearness
of our part to Central America, where they probably winter. This
species is found in St. Domingo, but not, as it appears, in Cuba,
where it seems to be represented by _T. Magnirostris_, D’Orb., nor
has it been recognised, except accidentally, in North America. Even
its wintering about Spanish Town, seems to be not constant, for from
communications made to me by Mr. Hill, the present spring, I infer none
had been seen through the winter. In Westmoreland, I observed the first
individual after the winter, on the 30th of March, at the Short Cut of
Paradise-morass; and a day or two afterwards they were numerous there,
and were advancing to the eastward. Yet on the 16th of April, Mr. Hill
writes me, “It is worth remarking that, although Grey Petcharies have
been several days now with you, they have not made their appearance
here yet.” He adds the interesting note, afforded by some friends who
had in March visited the Pedro kays, that “the Grey Petchary, was seen
making its traverse by those rocks,” and that “the migratory birds that
visited those islets came from the west and departed to the eastward,
or, as it was otherwise expressed, they came from the Indian coast,
and proceeded on to the coast of Jamaica, coursing from southward and
westward to northward and eastward.” The dispersion of the arrived
migrants along the groves of Jamaica, seems to be very leisurely, for
a month after their appearance with us, Mr. Hill writes, on the 28th
of April, “This morning the Grey Petchary made his appearance on the
lofty cocoa-nut, _for the first time this season_. He is there now,
shivering his wings, on its flaunting limbs, unceasingly screaming
_pi-chee-ree-e_. He is turning about and proclaiming his arrival to
every quarter of the wind. He is Sir Oracle, and no dog must bark in
his neighbourhood.”
I have not observed in the vicinity of Bluefields, the predilection
alluded to by my friend of this bird for the Palm-tribe. Several pairs
have nested under my notice, but none of them were in palm-trees. Of
two which I procured for examination, one was from an upper limb of a
bitterwood-tree, of no great height, close to a friend’s door. It was
a cup made of the stalks and tendrils of either a small passion-flower
or a bryony, the spiral tendrils prettily arranged round the edge, and
was very neatly and thickly lined with black horse-hair. It contained
three young, newly hatched, and thinly clothed with a buff-coloured
down, and one egg. The other was from a hog-plum (_Spondias_). It was
a rather loose structure, smaller and less compact, composed almost
entirely of tendrils, which gave it a crisped appearance; a few stalks
entered into the frame, but there was no horse-hair within; but one
or two of the shining black frond-ribs of a fern, scarcely thicker
than hair. The eggs, three in number, were round-oval, 1 inch by ³⁄₄;
dull reddish-white, handsomely marked with spots and angular clouds of
red-brown, much resembling the sinuous outline of land on a terrestrial
globe.