قراءة كتاب Bird Watching

تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"

‏اللغة: English
Bird Watching

Bird Watching

تقييمك:
0
No votes yet
المؤلف:
دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
الصفحة رقم: 7

so pleasantly. This is answered by a similar cry, quite near, and I now see, for the first time, another bird advancing quickly to the calling one, who also advances to meet it. They approach each other, and standing side by side, with, perhaps, a foot between them, but looking different ways, each in the direction in which it has been advancing, both of them assume, at the same time, a particular and very curious posture, worth waiting days to see. First they draw themselves tall-ly up on their long, yellow, stilt-like legs, then curving the neck with a slow and formal motion, they bend the head downwards—yet still holding it at a height—and stop thus, set and rigid, the beak pointing to the ground. Having stood like this for some seconds, they assume the normal attitude. This wonderful pose, conceived and made in a vein of stiff formality, but to which the great, glaring, yellow eye gives a look of wildness, almost of insanity, has in it, both during its development and when its acme has been reached, something quite per se, and in vain to describe. But again one is reminded of what is past and old-fashioned, of chivalry and knight-errantry, of scutcheons and heraldic devices, of Don Quixote and the Baron of Bradwardine."

It is not only when two birds are by themselves that these or other attitudes are assumed. They will often break out, so to speak, amongst three or four birds running or chasing each other about. All at once one will stop, stiffen into one of them—that especially where the head is lowered till the beak touches, or nearly touches, the ground—and remain so for a formal period. But all such runnings and chasings are, at this time, but a part of the business of pairing, and one divines at once that such attitudes are of a sexual character. The above are a few of the gestures or antics of the great plover or stone-curlew during the spring. I have seen others, but either they were less salient, or, owing to the great distance, I was not able to taste them properly, for which reason, and on account of space, I will not further dwell upon them. What I would again draw attention to, as being, perhaps, of interest, is that here we have a bird with distinct nuptial (sexual) and social (non-sexual) forms of display or antics, and that the former as well as the latter are equally indulged in by both sexes.


Pages