Don Silverio, as he walked by the river after sunset, and watched its bright, impetuous current dash over the stones and shingle whilst two kingfishers flashed along its surface.
Kingfishers may be found about ponds, lakes, rivers, the seaside or small creeks; anywhere that small fish may be obtained.
You will notice that all Kingfishers have the two outer toes on each foot joined together for about two thirds of their length.
A good illustration of this fact has already been afforded by those kingfishers in which either the tail alone or the whole upper surface of the plumage differs in the same manner in the two sexes.
Very rarely a nest is made in the hollow trunk of a tree; but wherever the home is, the kingfishers become strongly attached to it, returning again and again to the spot that has cost them so much labor to excavate.
Kingfishers possess this power; they throw up the undigested fishbones, and curiously enough, as it would appear, form them into a nest.
Mr. Gould, however, is of opinion that kingfishers drill their own holes.
Some naturalists have said that kingfishers do not make their own holes, but use those already made by other animals.
I did not think that there were any kingfishers or herons about, and so was very surprised when one morning, on going down to feed the fish, I found a kingfisher under the net, flying up and down the pond trying to get out.
Kingfishers have, in my experience, been the worst offenders.
On one occasion I caught four kingfishers during a period of three weeks, all of which had in some way got under some herring net, which was pegged out carefully over a rearing pond containing trout fry.
I am quite sure that wherever any one begins to rear fish there he will find that kingfishers are fairly common.
Notwithstanding their very evil proclivities, both herons andkingfishers are very interesting.
Birds which are originally immigrants from North America: Podicipedidae, with the flightless Centropelma on Lake Titicaca; Ceryle, the only genus of kingfishers in the New World; all the Oscines.
But the kingfishers cared nothing for her appearance.
The kingfishers were always in a hurry, and their colours were fussy and discordant.
There were little yellow-breasted kingfishers no larger than a wren, and great red-breasted kingfishers with blue backs and tufted heads.
Only eight of the one hundred and eighty or more known Kingfishers are found in America, the remaining species being confined to the Old World where they are most numerous in the Malay Archipelago.
The shy kingfishers love the big pool below the weir, but it is not often they are seen unless the watcher has the faculty for making himself invisible against his background and is able to remain motionless.
An uncommonly good place for fishing it is, this Hook, as the kingfishers have found out, for they are yearly increasing, and apparently do not mind the gay tide of summer company that invades their haunts.
I have seenkingfishers swallow minnows alive and whole, but that fish is too large for him to manage!
Already four little baby kingfishers have pecked their way out of the white shells.
The herons and kingfishers were here as well, but not so many of them as on the Danube.
There was a fringe of ice along the edges of the streams, and the kingfishers and the ospreys had both flown to where the waters would remain open throughout the year.
And the kingfishers and the ospreys told us the same things.
The gray wagtail is common and a source of constant irritation when one is hunting the little forest kingfishers along small fresh-water streams.
A large number of white-throated kingfishers nested in the banks of the Baco River, Mindoro, during our stay at Balete in April, 1905, while other pairs excavated holes in masses of earth held among the roots of overturned trees.
The little Kingfishers were quite as pretty as their parents, and Mr. and Mrs. Kingfisher were exceedingly proud of them.
Butcher-birds, rollers and white-breasted kingfishers secure their victims on the ground, dropping on to them silently from their watchtowers.
A pair of white-breasted kingfishers at work during the early stages of nest construction affords an interesting spectacle.
Externally, which is almost all we can at present say, kingfishers present a great uniformity of structure.
The first thing I noticed about the birds--an observation confirmed later on many waters--was that each pair of kingfishers have their own particular pools, over which they exercise unquestioned lordship.
There may be a dozen pairs of birds on a single stream; but, so far as I have been able to observe, each family has a certain stretch of water on which no other kingfishers are allowed to fish.
Across the stream was a clay bank, near the top of which a hole as wide as a tea-cup showed where a pair of kingfishers had dug their long tunnel.
There is one brood of kingfishers the less," I thought, with my glasses focused on the hole.
Female kingfishersare often equally brilliant with the male, and they build in holes in banks.
In most kingfishers the nest is in a deep hole in the ground; in Tanysiptera it is said to be in a hole in the nests of termites, or sometimes in crevices under overhanging rocks.
It has just a hard-earth floor like the cabins of the American pioneers, but the little kingfishers are perfectly contented and happy; for their meals are very plentiful, fairly regular, and the fish are always fresh.
Each pair of kingfishers lays claim to the part of the creek in the neighborhood of their nest, as their fishing preserve, and woe betide any other kingfisher that trespasses!
Human fishermen and hunters give it out sometimes that kingfishers eat big fish that might otherwise be caught with a hook or a seine, but the fact is these birds catch only minnows and little shallow-water fish.
Do you know what I felt like saying, back there in Chapter IX, when we were speaking of kingfishers, and how certain parties had given it out that kingfishers eat big fish that otherwise might be caught with a hook or a seine?
The large number of stuffed kingfishers under glass shades that one sees in houses of all descriptions, in town and country, but most frequently in the parlours of country cottages and inns, tell a melancholy story.
Practical naturalists may say that kingfishers would be far more difficult to procure than other birds, and that it would be almost impossible to convey them to England.
Some time ago a young man showed me three stuffed kingfishers in a case, and informed me that he had shot them at a place (which he named) quite close to London.
But outside of the town I saw no kingfishers and no rare species at all, and comparatively few birds of any kind.
Kingfishers are carefully preserved, in spite of their destructiveness, but one must draw the line at herons.
Of other birds which are becoming scarcer year by year in England, the kingfishers are not uncommon in these parts; you will often see the brilliant little fellow dart past you as you walk by the stream in summer.
Strings of dark ibis, of duck, and storks; small kingfishers all bejeweled, and greater kingfishers in black and white.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "kingfishers" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
