"Wagtail" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... certainly give half the force to his leap. It is in this action that he is put among the motacillae, or wagtails; but the ornithologists have no real business to put him among them. The swing of the long tail feathers in the true wagtail is entirely consequent on its motion, not impulsive of it—the tremulous shake is after alighting. But the robin leaps with wing, tail, and foot, all in time, and all helping each other. Leaps, I say; and you check at the word; and ought to check: you look at a bird ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... dimpled water slippeth, Full of laughter, on its way, And her wing the wagtail dippeth, Running by the brink at play; When the poplar leaves atremble Turn their edges to the light, And the far-up clouds resemble Veils of gauze most clear and white; And the sunbeams fall and flatter Woodland moss and branches brown. And ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... is oftenest indulged in late in the afternoon or after sundown. Over the woods, hid from view, the ecstatic singer warbles his finest strain. In this song you instantly detect his relationship to the water-wagtail,—erroneously called water-thrush,—whose song is likewise a sudden burst, full and ringing, and with a tone of youthful joyousness in it, as if the bird had just had some unexpected good fortune. For nearly ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... but he knew bird, beast, insect, and tree, with a friendly hearty intimacy, such as Cockney writers ascribe to peasants, but which they never have. While he used the homeliest names, a dish-washer for a wagtail, cuckoo's bread-and-cheese for wood-sorrel (partly I believe to tease me), he knew them thoroughly, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a pettifogging cult about that says you ought to know these things; moreover, children keep on asking one. We always answer at random and say it's a wagtail or a flowering shrike or a female magnolia. We were brought up in the country and learned that first principle of good manners, which is to let birds and flowers and animals go on about their own affairs without pestering them by asking them their names and addresses. Surely ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley |
