It is only on emerging from the dense woods and coming into the vicinity of the lakes and pasture of the low country, that birds become visible in great quantities.  In the close jungle one occasionally hears the call of the copper-smith[1], or the strokes of the great orange-coloured woodpecker[2] as it beats the decaying trees in search of insects, whilst clinging to the bark with its finely-pointed claws, and leaning for support upon the short stiff feathers of its tail.  And on the lofty branches of the higher trees, the hornbill[3] (the toucan of the East), with its enormous double casque, sits to watch the motions of the tiny reptiles and smaller birds on which it preys, tossing them into the air when seized, and catching them in its gigantic mandibles as they fall.[4] The remarkable excrescence on the beak of this extraordinary bird may serve to explain the statement of the Minorite friar Odoric, of Portenau in Friuli, who travelled in Ceylon in the fourteenth century, and brought suspicion on the veracity of his narrative by asserting that he had there seen “birds with two heads."[5]

[Footnote 1:  The greater red-headed Barbet (Megalaima indica, Lath.; M. Philippensis, var.  A. Lath.), the incessant din of which resembles the blows of a smith hammering a cauldron.]

[Footnote 2:  Brachypternus aurantius, Linn.]

[Footnote 3:  Buceros pica, Scop.; B. Malaharicus, Jerd.  The natives assert that B. pica builds in holes in the trees, and that when incubation has fairly commenced, the female takes her seat on the eggs, and the male closes up the orifice by which she entered, leaving only a small aperture through which he feeds his partner, whilst she successfully guards their treasures from the monkey tribes; her formidable bill nearly filling the entire entrance.  See a paper by Edgar L. Layard, Esq. Mag.  Nat.  Hist. March, 1853.  Dr. Horsfield had previously observed the same habit in a species of Buceros in Java. (See HORSFIELD and MOORE’S Catal.  Birds, E.I.  Comp.  Mus. vol. ii.) It is curious that a similar trait, though necessarily from very different instincts, is exhibited by the termites, who literally build a cell round the great progenitrix of the community, and feed her through apertures.]

[Footnote 4:  The hornbill is also frugivorous, and the natives assert that when endeavouring to detach a fruit, if the stem is too tough to be severed by his mandibles, he flings himself off the branch so as to add the weight of his body to the pressure of his beak.  The hornbill abounds in Cuttack, and bears there the name of “Kuchila-Kai,” or Kuchila-eater, from its partiality for the fruit of the Strychnus nuxvomica.  The natives regard its flesh as a sovereign specific for rheumatic affections.—­Asiat.  Res. ch. xv. p. 184.]

[Footnote 5:  Itinerarius FRATRIS ODORICI, de Foro Julii de Portu-vahonis, &c.—­HAKLUYT, vol. ii. p. 39.]