Page:Natural History, Birds.djvu/56

Rh or yellow; set off, especially on the broad and lengthened tail, with variations of black and white, in the most delicate and elaborate pencillings.

The Trogons have the toes set as in the climbing birds, two before and two behind, yet they have not the habit or power of climbing; the feet are short and feeble. The wings also are short, but pointed; the quill-feathers are rigid, but the general plumage is very soft and plumose. The beak is short, somewhat conical, robust; the tip and generally the edges are notched or toothed; the gape is wide. The general form is full and plump, to which the dense and soft character of the plumage contributes; the head is rather large; the tail is long and ample; the feathers are graduated, regularly decreasing in length outward, and in one genus (Calurus) the tail-coverts are enormously developed, so as to conceal the tail, and depend in narrow flowing plumes of great length.

The food of the Trogons consists principally of insects. "They seize," observes Mr. Gould, in his splendid Monograph of this Family, "the flitting insect on the wing, which their wide gape enables them to do with facility; while their feeble tarsi and feet are such as to qualify them merely for resting on the branches as a post of observation whence to mark their prey as it passes, and to which, having given chase, to return. . . . Denizens of the intertropical regions of the Old and New World, they shroud their glories in the deep and gloomy recesses of the forest, avoiding the light of day and the observation of man; dazzled by the brightness of the