Image from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
Contributed by Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley.
| www.biodiversitylibrary.org
Transcription
to 3 feet. She is very shy.
As a young bird was reaching for a worm in my hand, B who was in
the act of carrying a worm to the other one, suddenly ran back and
knocked over the one I was feeding, still holding the worm in his beak
and then carrying it to the one which he was feeding. B is rather
easily excited and is startled by my movements, at present.
Comparison of young ones.
12:09. Just before noon I sat on the ground 6 feet from the soft-
food dish. The 2 youngsters came out and I handed them worms. Both
of them have a reddish brown tinge on their backs that neither adult
has. The lighter one (with the more prominent eye stripes) shows a
little more confidence than the other, looks smaller and I would
guess to be the female. B, although the key man of the family, and
who has been my principal aid in gaining the confidence of all the
broods, sometimes is a disturbing element at the critical moment; for
when he sees me trying to feed the young, he prefers to take the food
himself and give it to them. Thus when, in B's absence, by the exercise
of more patience than I really have, I have one of the youngsters
taking an exploratory peck at my fingers, along comes B and grabs
the worm. This time, when he observed my success from a distance,
he ran up rapidly and gobbled the worms himself, turning his back on
the youngsters waiting expectantly with open bills.
Nova begins to see the light.
While this was going on, Nova was seen peering out stealthily
from the bushes about 20 feet away. I kept superhumanly still and
she came and ate heartily from the dish 6 feet away in brilliant
sun-light, standing facing me. Unfortunately her beetling brows
cast such dense shadows that I could not be certain of her eye color,
though the impression was gained that they were redder than Greenie's
or the young birds'. However this observation is of little value.
Compared with B.
I have several times thought that she was fully as large as B and
that her bill was even longer and heavier, and this impression was
not dispelled by the close view. On leaving she took food in her