Our Bird Friends And Foes

Excerpt from Our Bird Friends and Foes The bird branch of the animal tree, since forking off from its reptilian stem, has grown much and flowered beautifully. How much more admirable, for instance, is the soft plumage of the bird than the harsh body mail of the reptile. How much more pleasing by contrast are the notes of birds, some of them among the best music in the world, to the glum silence of reptiles, broken only by threatening hissing. Birds have a monopoly of feathers; every feathered animal is a bird. No bird lacks feathers; no other crea ture has them. Feathers not only have proved wonder fully adaptable in aiding the bird to fly, but they have developed as down and thickly set body plumage, that enable the bird to resist cold, to float like a cork on icy waters, and even to repose on the ice itself, enveloped in a thick downy mantle that shuts out the killing frost. Birds made a great and wonderful advance when they left behind that reptilian inheritance of cold blood, which bound them to the tropics, and began to develop a warm blooded circulation. Now their systems are so efficient in keeping up body temperature that birds are the warm est of all living things. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.