THE HOOPOE.
The Hoopoe.
(Upupa epops.)
The Hoopoe is from base of bill 10 inches long. It is a fair bird with beautiful variegated plumage. Head, upper back, and breast pale rust-red; mantle, shining black, with white ornamentation; tail also black, with a crescent-shaped white band curving inwards towards the rump. The head is adorned with a bunch of feathers which the bird can erect or depress at pleasure. The feathers of this are light coloured, with black tips, but the tips of the longest feathers are black and white. Beak, long and slightly curved, thin, and adapted for picking. It lays four to seven eggs, greenish olive, or clay colour, but always of uniform colour, which it places on the mould in the holes of trees. The Hoopoe is the only bird that fouls its nest, and brings up its young in dirt and filth. On this account both mother and young have an evil odour, as some of the bird’s names indicate.
This national Hungarian bird is a migrant, and dwells chiefly on the borders of woods in the low bushes, and in the neighbourhood of pastures, where it is never weary of examining the droppings of the cows, from which it obtains beetles and maggots. It also catches gnats on the wing, and the leaping grasshoppers. It is a noisy bird, and its cry “Hup up”—from which its name is derived—is heard sounding vigorously from the branches. It is one of our most useful, and most brilliantly coloured birds, and should be protected.
For over two hundred years the Hoopoe has been recorded as a visitor to Great Britain, a more or less frequent one. Some years ago the late Mr. Howard Saunders told us that the head-keeper at Ashburnham Park, in Sussex, destroyed seven in one week, and that many a one has been slain in Kent, at the point where they alight after crossing the Channel. A few have, in spite of persecution contrived to breed in our country—in southern counties chiefly. Sometimes numbers come to England in the autumn, and it is generally an annual visitor in small numbers to Ireland. As it is a useful bird all should try to procure protection for it.