“There you go then—a big one,” cried the lad, as with a rushing, heavy beating sound of its wings, a great bird flow directly over their heads, uttering a hoarse cry, and with its huge curved bill bearing a curious, nearly square, excrescence on the top, plainly seen as the bird approached.
“Why didn’t you shoot?” cried Frank, as the bird went off unscathed. “Why, I believe, I could have hit that.”
“For the simple reason that I did not want to encumber myself with a bird I have had before.”
“Oh, I see. There are lots of those about here, and I’ve found their nests.”
“What sort of a nest is it?” asked Ned. “Anything like a magpie’s?”
“No!” cried Frank; “not a bit. Big as they are, they build like a tomtit does, right in a hollow tree, but the one I saw had only laid one egg, and a tomtit lays lots. It was in the trunk of a great worm-eaten tree, and the hen bird was shut in, for the cock had filled the entrance-hole with clay, all but a bit big enough for the hen to put out her beak to be fed. What’s that?”
Murray had fired and brought down a gaily-feathered bird, green, scarlet, and orange, and with a sharp wedge-shaped beak fringed with sharp bristles.
“A barbet,” said Murray, giving the bird to one of the men to carry; “but like your hornbill, too common to be worth preserving.”
Other birds fell to Murray’s gun as they went on. A trogon was the next, a thickly-feathered soft-looking bird, yoke-toed like a cuckoo, and bearing great resemblance in shape to the nightjar of the English woods, but wonderfully different in plumage; for, whereas the latter is of a soft blending of greys and browns, like the wings of some woodland moths, this trogon’s back was of a cinnamon brown, and its breast of a light rosy-scarlet blending off into white crossed with fine dark-pencilled stripes.
The next was rather a common bird, though none the less beautiful in its claret-coloured plumage; but the striking part of the bird was its gaily-coloured beak of orange and vivid blue.