Bower-Birds
The bower-birds of Australia owe their name to their singular habit of making bowers in which to play! These bowers are built of sticks and long pieces of grass, arranged in such a way that they meet at the top so as to form a kind of avenue, and are often three feet long. Stranger still, they are ornamented with stones, brightly colored shells, and the blue tail-feathers of parrakeets, which the birds carefully fasten up among the sticks, evidently in order to make the bower look pretty. Then, when it is finished, they run through it, round and round, over and over again, chasing one another, and seeming to enjoy their game immensely.
There is one of these birds, found in Papua, which builds a hut about two feet high instead of a bower, and then makes a sort of garden in front of it. This garden is decorated with bright-colored flowers and berries, and as soon as they fade the bird throws them away and puts fresh ones in their place! It is called the gardener-bird.
The Starling
This bird is almost as well known as the sparrow in Europe. You may see it on the lawn, every now and then plunging its beak into the ground, and pulling out a grub or a worm; and it is fond of building a great untidy-looking nest in water-pipes and other places where it is not wanted. It is beginning to be well known also in America, for colonies are established near New York City.
Starlings in Europe often travel about the country in great flocks, which frequently consist of several thousand birds. Sometimes, too, several of these flocks join together at night, and then separate again next morning. We have seen a little copse so full of roosting starlings that every branch of every tree was occupied from end to end, while thousands more kept flying in, and trying to turn the first comers off their perches! And they made so much noise that we could hear them chattering and quarreling when we were more than a mile away.
Each flight of starlings seems to have its leader whose orders are instantly obeyed, for every bird in the whole flock swerves, and wheels, and turns at the same moment—a maneuver seen equally in the vast migratory flocks of red-winged blackbirds which gather in autumn on every American marsh and are gradually spreading inland. A few years hence the bird may be seen all over the United States.
Starlings are useful birds, although they certainly steal a great deal of fruit; for if it were not for their labors—together with those of certain other birds—our corn and vegetable crops would certainly be destroyed by the mischievous grubs which live at the roots. So we ought to look on the fruit which starlings take as wages paid them for their work.
FINCHES AND WEAVER-BIRDS.