wryneck

1 I have lingered long over the wryneck, but have still a story to relate of this bird—not a fairy tale this time, but true.

2 Now the spring visitors—as the cuckoo, the swallow, and wryneck—appear in Surrey considerably sooner than they do farther west.

3 Snake′-bird, a darter: the wryneck; Snake′-eel, a long Mediterranean eel, its tail without a tail-fin.—adj.

4 The chief food of the wrynecks consists of ants, which they pick up with their delicately tapered tongues.

5 I have heard the wryneck calling in the oak at the end of the garden every morning this season before rising, and suspect, from his constant presence, that a nest will be built close by.

6 Says the author quoted above: "When the sitting bird is interfered with, she defends her treasures with great courage, hissing like a wryneck, and vigorously striking at her aggressor with her sharp bill."

7 He added that on a previous bird watching trip he had seen a migratory wryneck hit by a train.

8 All at once he remembered that he knew, or had known formerly, the wryneck very well, but he had never learnt its name.

9 When far off they uttered cries which reminded me of that of the wryneck, and which I at first thought came from a little auk.

10 Last year the wryneck was a scarce bird in this neighbourhood; in all my walks I heard but two or three, and at long intervals.

11 Those wrynecks, by the way, are abundant but hard to see.

12 In the book was a Latin recipe for drying the poor wryneck, and using him as a philtre which should compel the love of any person desired.

13 The wryneck and the woodpecker may be mentioned; and a still better instance is afforded by the small, gem-like kingfisher—the only British bird which can properly be described as gem-like.

14 It was no bird, no wryneck, but a being that once, long, long, long ago, in that same beautiful place, had been a village boy—a free, careless, glad-hearted boy, like many another.

15 The wryneck was thought to build the nest, and hatch and feed the young of the cuckoo.

16 Pied and golden-backed woodpeckers, companies of nuthatches, and, here and there, a wryneck move about on the trunks and branches, looking into every cranny for insects.

17 The sound is unlike any other, but that is nothing, since the same can be said of the wryneck and cuckoo and grasshopper warbler.

18 As love goddesses were "Fates", however, the wryneck may have been connected with the belief that the perpetrator of a murder, or a death spell, could be detected when he approached his victim's corpse.

19 During the talk that followed I asked him if he knew the wryneck, and if it ever nested in his orchard.

20 The wryneck's 'kie-kie-kie,' the last syllable plaintively prolonged, is not like the call or songs of other birds; it reminds one of the peacock's strange scream, not in its actual sound, but its singularity.

1 斜颈

torticollis stiff neck wry-necked

2 啄木鸟科

flicker woodpecker sapsucker piculet goldenback green woodpecker pileated woodpecker