“The kinglet has great confidence in mankind. With no sign of fear even when within hearing of the footsteps and conversation of persons walking about, it continues its evolutions, its hunting, its zee-zee-zee. It will let one come close, almost near enough to reach out a hand and take hold of it. But the knowing little creature, although it appears not to see you because it is so busy, darts suddenly away and mounts to the upper branches to carry on its work at a safer distance.” [[220]]
CHAPTER XXIX
SWALLOWS
“We have whole tribes of helpers that devote themselves to the patient search for insect eggs in the cracks of tree bark and in piles of dead leaves, for larvæ between the scales of buds and in the worm-holes in wood, and for insects lurking in narrow crevices where they hide from their pursuers. These invaluable assistants of ours embrace the magpies, nuthatches, wrynecks, climbers, tomtits, wrens, kinglets, and many others. In the kind of hunting here referred to the bird is not obliged to chase the game, to vie with it in swiftness; it is enough to know how to find it in its hiding-place. For this a sharp eye and a slender beak are necessary; wings are only of secondary importance.
“But now we come to other species of birds that hunt in the air, chase their game on the wing, pursuing gnats and flies and butterflies, moths and mosquitoes and beetles. They require a short beak, but one that opens very wide and is pretty sure to catch insects as they fly—a beak, in fine, that may be depended on to work almost of itself and without an instant’s pause in the bird’s flight; a beak that, above all, is so sticky inside that as soon as an insect’s wing grazes this viscous lining it is caught [[221]]fast in the glue-like substance. The beak of the bat, that other hunter of insects on the wing, the bat’s beak, I say, opening from ear to ear, may serve as a model in respect to the width of its opening. But above all else the hunter must have swift wings that never tire, that can fly as fast as the prey which is trying so hard to escape, that can follow the bewildering zigzags of a moth manœuvering to save its life. A cleft beak that opens wide and wings that are strong and tireless—such must be the equipment of the bird that pursues its prey in the open air.
White-bellied Swallow
“Chief among these hunters is the swallow, which may be called the daylight bat, as the bat is the twilight swallow. Both chase flying insects, following them in their endless dodgings and doublings and snapping them up with yawning beak, then passing on without an instant’s delay to the pursuit of others. But how much more pleasing in appearance, how much swifter in flight is the swallow than that hunter, the sad-looking bat! While we may compare their work and their way of hunting, we cannot compare them in anything else. Buffon quotes Guéneau de Montbéliard as saying:
“ ‘The air is the swallow’s appropriate element, and it is the nature of the bird to be ever on the wing. It eats flying, bathes flying, and sometimes [[222]]even feeds its young when flying. It glides through the air with no effort, with perfect ease, conscious of being in its own domain. It explores aërial space in all its dimensions, as if to enjoy it to the utmost, and its delight in the act is expressed by little cries of rapture. It may be seen giving chase to flying insects and following with supple agility their evasive and tortuous course; or it may leave one to pursue another and snap up a third in passing; or, again, it lightly skims the surface of land and water to catch any that may be gathered there for the sake of coolness and moisture; or, finally, it may in its turn be driven to flee with all speed before the lightning-like onset of some bird of prey. Always in full control of its movements even when flying at topmost speed, it is continually changing its course, describing in the air a bewildering maze whose paths cross, interlace, recede from and approach one another, meet, wind, ascend, descend, interweave, and mingle in a thousand different ways and after a plan so complicated as to defy representation to the eye by the art of drawing and scarcely to lend itself to description for the imagination through the medium of speech.’