"Curlew" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... done, if the ship had wings like a curlew, or a sea-gull; but, as it is, I think we are more likely ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... solitude—nothing but the undulating moors, broken up by great masses of limestone rock and occasional clumps and coverts of fir and pine; nothing but the blue line of the hills in the west; nothing but the grey northern skies overhead; nothing but the cry of the curlew and the bleating of the mountain sheep. It was in the midst of this that he met his senior employer—at the corner of a thin spinney which ran along the edge of a disused quarry. Mallalieu, as Stoner well knew, was a great man for walking on these moors, and he ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... of the golden plover, few of the wading birds resemble those of Europe. The snipe, the woodcock, the curlew, most of the sandpipers, together with the coot and the water-hen, are distinct from those of Europe, and are not only peculiar to America, but few of them have been found to the south of the line. One of the most ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... resist a sudden attack by a powerful iron-clad fleet. The supposed enemy was represented by the Channel Squadron, under the command of Vice-Admiral Baird, and consisting of H.M.S. Northumberland (flag ship), the Agincourt, Monarch, Iron Duke, and Curlew. The "general idea" of the operations was that a hostile fleet was known to be cruising in the vicinity, and that an attack on the Rock might be made. The squadron left Gibraltar and proceeded to the westward, returning ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... Gmelin. French, "Oedicneme criard," "Poule d'Aurigny."[17]—The Thick-knee, Stone Curlew, or Norfolk Plover, as it is called, though only an occasional visitant, is much more common than the Little Bustard; indeed, Mr. MacCulloch says that "it is by no means uncommon in winter. The French call it 'Poule d'Aurigny,' from which one might suppose it was more common ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... and low, And they come from the lonely heather, where the fur-edged fox-gloves blow, And the moor-grass sways to and fro, Where the yellow moor-birds sigh, And the sea-cooled wind sweeps by. Canst hear the curlew's whistle through the darkness wild and drear,— How they're calling, calling, ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... to the birds. After that, by way of giving a final bloom to his complexion, he took some hairs of a red bull, wrapt them in gold leaf, and glued them to the patient's skin. The ancients held that if a person suffering from jaundice looked sharply at a stone-curlew, and the bird looked steadily at him, he was cured of the disease. "Such is the nature," says Plutarch, "and such the temperament of the creature that it draws out and receives the malady which issues, like a stream, through ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... and hazel, and solaced by the tinkling music of a neighbouring rill. Thick underwood concealed the dell on all sides; grey lichen-covered boulders surrounded it; no sound disturbed it save the faint cry of the plover and curlew on the distant shore, or the flap of a hawk's wing as it soared overhead. Altogether it looked like a safe and sure retreat, but it did not prove to ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... dusk Geoffrey rode home. In forecast of winter, a bitter breeze sighed across the heather and set the harsh grasses moaning eerily. The sky was somber overhead; scarred fell and towering pike had faded to blurs of dingy gray, and the ghostly whistling of curlew emphasized the emptiness of the darkening moor. The evening's mood suited Geoffrey's, and he rode slowly with loose bridle. The bouquet of the brandy had awakened within him a longing that he dreaded, and though, hitherto, he had been too intent upon his task to trouble about ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... awaking, The fire's among the ling, The beechen hedge is breaking, The curlew's on the wing: Primroses are out, lad, On the high banks of Lee, And the sun stirs the trout, lad, From ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... watch for the coming of our foes. And when they be come, 'tis sure they will plant outposts and sentinels within the green, so be ye wary to smite outpost and sentinel suddenly and that none may hear within the camp nor take alarm; when 'tis done, cry you thrice like unto a curlew that we may know. Are all ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... yon lone vale his early youth was bred, Not solitary then—the bugle-horn Of fell Alecto often waked its windings, From where the brook joins the majestic river, To the wild northern bog, the curlew's haunt, Where oozes forth its first and feeble ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... the news was received that we were a day ahead, the race began in earnest, the captain of the "Curlew" entering heartily into the sport and doing his best to overhaul the speedy Yankee schooner. When about half way up to Rigolette, on the third day from Battle Harbor, as we were drifting slowly out of "Seal Bight," into which we had gone the previous night to escape the numerous icebergs ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... else. Do you know why he first sent me off to learn tailoring? I wanted to study drawing, and he had a cousin that'd made a lot of money tailoring out in Dakota, and he said tailoring was a lot like drawing, so he sent me down to a punk hole called Curlew, to work in a tailor shop. Up to that time I'd only had three months' schooling a year—walked to school two miles, through snow up to my knees—and Dad never would stand for my having a single ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... see to give cause for this. A flock of curlew were passing, wailing one to the other, across the sunset; a string of late gulls trailed athwart the sky; and a wedge of those beautiful little wild-duck known as wigeon was letting itself down to the shores of the inlet. Far out to sea ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... my body, but the sea-winds began to rise, and I felt a chill strike through me from my wet shooting-boots. High overhead gulls were wheeling and tossing like bits of white paper; from some distant marsh a solitary curlew called. Little by little the sun sank into the plain, and the zenith flushed with the after-glow. I watched the sky change from palest gold to pink and then to smouldering fire. Clouds of midges danced ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... at Plato, but never had he known crying curlew and misty mere and the fluttering wings of ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... "but I shall take very good care to run in before the squall comes, if there's any about. I don't think there will be, after all. I fancied I saw a flash of lightning about half an hour ago down in the south, but nothing has come of it. There are some curlew about, and the guillemots are in thousands. You don't seem to care about shooting ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... as we lay And watched the mirage-lifted wall Of coast, across the dreamy bay, And heard afar the curlew call, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... whistled shrill, And he was answered from the hill; Wild as the scream of the curlew, From crag to crag the ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... sky above them; a snowy cloud or two drifted up there,—a flight of lapwings now and then—a lone curlew. The long, squat white-washed house with its walled garden reflected in Isla Water glimmered before them in the hollow of the ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... whistlers" are curlew, or herringspear birds, thought to be storm-bringers when heard overhead at sea. You will find a story in Buckland's "Curiosities of Natural History" ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... as might have been expected, for it is short and scarcely more than sufficient to cover the ground. There are vast quantities of prickly pears, and myriads of grasshoppers, which afford food for a species of curlew which is in great numbers in the plain. He then proceeded up the river to the point of observation they had fixed on; from which he went two miles N. 15 degrees W. to a bluff point on the north side of the river: thence his course was ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... without goods, and quays overgrown with grass. Beyond Newport the country grows wilder. There is less cultivation, and behind every little shanty rises the great brown shoulder of the neighbouring mountain covered with rough, bent grass—or sedge, as it is called here. Grey plover and curlew scud across the road, a sign of hard weather, and near the rarer homesteads towers the hawk, looking for his prey. Now and again come glimpses of the bay, of the great island of Innisturk, of Clare Island, ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... sounds in the world, Mr. Yeats tells us are wind and water and the curlew: and of the curlew ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... think it is funny to pretend that you think I said curlew you are very much mistaken. I have a very great many things to do, more things than a little boy like you can count, and I can't spend all the morning with you. So I am going to write on this slate: "The curfew bell was rung at eight o'clock every ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... Cover, to, over with sand Sinna sheeostang. Cough, to Sack-quee. Count, to Oohaw'koo-oong[39]. Country A'whfee. Cow Mee Ooshee. Crab Gaannee. Crab, to crawl as a Hoyoong. Creep, to Haw'yoong. Crow, to O'tayoong. Crow Garrasee. Cry, to Nachoong. Curlew U'nguainan. Cut, to Cheeoong, or feeoong, or feejoong. Dance Oodooee, or Makatta. Dark Coorasing. Daughter Innago oongua, or ungua. Day (at Napakiang) Nit'chee[40]. —— (in the north of the island) I'sheeree. —— after to-morrow Asattee. —— the following Asa tinnacha. Daylight Heeroo. Dead ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... behind you, you are alone with the lonely hills and the wide sky and the elemental things that have been from the beginning and will outlast all the tortured drama of men. The very sounds of life—the whistle of the curlew, the bleating of the mountain sheep—add to the sense of primeval solitude. To these sounds the crags have echoed for a thousand and ten thousand years; to these sounds and to the rushing of the winds and the waters they will echo ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... stars, Or gnaw the bleached bones in savage rage That lie unburied by the grass-grown paths. The prairie dogs play sentinel by day And backward slips the badger to his den; The whir, the fatal strike of rattlesnake, A staring buzzard floating in the blue, And, now and then, the curlew's eerie call,— Lost, always lost, and seeking evermore. All else is mute and dormant; vacantly The sun looks down, the days run idly on, The breezes whirl the dust, which eddying falls Smothering the records of the westward caravans, Where silent heaps of wreck and nameless graves Make ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... from a brooding curlew, a faint sigh from a plover, and the wild rasping cry of a lapwing greeted them overhead. Yet there was a silence, a silence broken for a moment by the cries of the birds, but a silence thick and heavy. Between the ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... ship by mutual arrangement, and the whole of the crew had mustered to see him off and to express their sense of relief at his departure. After some years spent in long voyages, he had fancied a trip on a coaster as a change, and, the schooner Curlew having no use for a ship's carpenter, had shipped as cook. He had done his best, and the unpleasant epithets that followed him along the quay at Dunchurch as he followed in the wake of his sea-chest were the result. Master and mate nodded in grim appreciation ...
— Sailor's Knots (Entire Collection) • W.W. Jacobs
... Westlin, western. Wha, who. Whaizle, wheeze. Whalpet, whelped. Wham, whom. Whan, when. Whang, a shive. Whang, flog. Whar, whare, where. Wha's whose. Wha's, who is. Whase, whose. What for, whatfore, wherefore. Whatna, what. What reck, what matter; nevertheless. Whatt, whittled. Whaup, the curlew. Whaur, where. Wheep, v. penny-wheep. Wheep, jerk. Whid, a fib. Whiddin, scudding. Whids, gambols. Whigmeleeries, crotches. Whingin, whining. Whins, furze. Whirlygigums, flourishes. Whist, silence. Whissle, whistle. ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... seeming like the deer to move but slowly, but in reality running their hardest with a swinging relentless stride. There was something almost dreamlike in this strange procession as it moved on between green earth and blue heaven, with none to see it, as it appeared, but the white-winged curlew which whistled mournfully overhead. But presently a little group of horsemen appeared on the far side of the hounds, just six of them in all. The old huntsman was leading them, in his long skirted coat and double-peaked cap, as Dick had often seen him, with his little legs thrust ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... found all manner fruits in view and birds of every kind and hue, such as ringdove, nightingale and curlew; and the turtle and the cushat sang their love lays on the sprays. Therein were rills that ran with limpid wave and flowers suave; and bloom for whose perfume we crave and it was even as saith of it the poet in these ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... Below on the strand, As white as the pages I turn with my hand; And the curlew afar, From his storm-troubled lair, Laments with the cry Of a soul in despair. Our Father, forget not Our mariners' state; Their ships are so slender, ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... little away as though to watch a screaming curlew fly low down and vanish in the fog. From where he stood on slightly higher ground he looked down at her curiously, for in more than one sense she was a puzzle to him. There was a certain indefiniteness in her manner toward him which he felt a passionate desire to construe. She ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... they came, like the moan of the breeze brought from an infinite distance, like mutterings and groanings arisen from the very bowels of the earth. Then there were the splash or boom of the waves, the piping of the sea-wind, the cry of curlew, or black-backed gulls, all mingled in one great and tangled skein of sound that choked the voice of the speaker, and in their aggregate, ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... takes up his roost on the withered bough of one of our tallest trees, acquaints us that the sun has just dipped behind the hills, and that it is time to trudge homewards; while the plaintive notes of the curlew, and the wild and dismal screechings of the flying squirrel, skimming from branch to branch, whisper us to retire to our bedchambers. In the morning, again, the dull monotonous double note of the whee-whee, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... to eat and be done with it! And all the new plates come from Watchett, with the Watchett blue upon them, at the risk of the lives of everybody, and the capias from good Aunt Jane for stuffing a curlew with onion before he begins to get cold, and make a woodcock of him, and the way to turn the flap over in the inside of a ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... is the matter?" "That," said the Kangaroo, as she laid herself down to rest, "is the sound of the Curlew enjoying itself. They are sociable birds, and entertain a great deal. There is a party to-night, I suppose, and that is the expression of their enjoyment. I believe," she continued, with a suppressed yawn, "it's not so painful as it sounds. Willy Wagtail, who ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... almost impossible to convey any sustenance to the famishing pair; yet the thing was done, and wonderfully managed, not in the night-time, but in the open day. One shepherd would call to another, in the note of the curlew or the miresnipe, and without exciting suspicion, convey from the corner of his plaid the necessary refreshments, even down to a bottle of Nantz. The cave was never entered on such occasions; but the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... above this horizon. Of the hunters and fishermen who roamed the islands nearer shore, with the Chandeleurs, the storm-drowned Grand Gosiers and the deep- sea fishing grounds beyond, few knew the way hither, and fewer ever sailed it. At the sound of his gun the birds of the beach—sea-snipe, curlew, plover—showed the whites of their wings for an instant and fell to feeding again. Save when the swift Wilderness—you remember the revenue cutter?-chanced this way on her devious patrol, only the steamer of the light-house ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... go to sleep if he liked, at the fire. Joe went to sleep—HOW, I don't know. Then Dad sat beside him, and for long intervals would stare silently into the darkness. Sometimes a string of the vermin would hop past close to the fire, and another time a curlew would come near and screech its ghostly wail, but he never noticed them. Yet he seemed ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... mountain hung the graceful lianas, like floating draperies, forming magnificent canopies of verdure on the face of the rocks. The sea-birds, allured by the stillness of these retreats, resorted here to pass the night. At the hour of sunset we could perceive the curlew and the stint skimming along the seashore; the frigate-bird poised high in air; and the white bird of the tropic, which abandons, with the star of day, the solitudes of the Indian ocean. Virginia took pleasure in resting herself upon the border ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... or the shade of a venerable oak, in such a scene, and listen to the summer sounds of bees, grasshoppers, and ten thousand other insects, mingled with the more remote and solitary cries of the pewit and the curlew! Then, to think of the coach-horse, urged on his sultry stage, or the plough-boy and his teem, plunging in the depths of a burning fallow, or of our ancestors, in times of national famine, plucking up the wild ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... circumstances he is not an ungainly bird. Occasionally my casual observations are made afar off, with the medium of a telescope. Then the birds are seen behaving naturally, and without fear or self-consciousness. The other day the cute attitudes of a beach curlew interested me, as he stood upon a stone just awash, and ever and anon picked up a crab. A blue heron flapped down beside him, and the curlew skipped off to another rock. In a minute the heron straightened his neck, poised its long beak for striking, and brought up a wriggling fish, which ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... bag was fastened by an ordinary spring-catch, and, when he pressed this, fell open easily. He listened for a second or two, with a glance over his shoulder into the darkness behind. But nothing could be heard—nothing but the night-call of a curlew somewhere on the moor, far to his right. Holding the lamp a little higher in his left, he thrust his right hand into the bag, groped, ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... now only the necessary domestic animals are left. Among the cows, the starlings were shot into tatters, so that they crawled wingless, legless, maimed, into holes in the stone fences to die. If a respectable curlew sat by the water's edge mirroring his long bill, a rascal of a hunter lay behind a stone and sighted; and was there a water-puddle with rushes that could conceal a young duck, there immediately came a fully-armed ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... there is Uncle Mansie," said Jessie, as the two men climbed over the ship's rail and swarmed down into the boat. Then up went the brown sail, and the little Curlew sped blithely past the whaling ships and across the broad bay, and it was not long ere she was moored alongside our jetty and ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... stone-curlew, Charadrius oedicnemus, should be mentioned by the writers as a rare bird: it abounds in all the champaign parts of Hampshire and Sussex, and breeds, I think, all the summer, having young ones, I know, very late in the autumn. ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... stranger! Do you see this?" holding up his ponderous rifle with an ease that astonished me. "If you will go with me to the shooting-match, and see me knock out the bull's-eye with her a few times, you'll agree the old Soap-stick's worth something when Billy Curlew puts ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... stripped bare by the fire. She stood in a wide, desolate cup of the Cornish moor. To the south Ding-Dong Mine reared its shattered chimney-stack, toward the northwest Carn Galvas—that rock-piled fastness of dead giants—reared a gray head against the blue. A curlew piped; a lizard rustled into a tussock of grass where pink bog-heather and seeding cotton grasses splashed the sodden ground; a dragon-fly from the marsh stayed a moment upon Men-an-tol, and the jewel of his eyes was a ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... Post, Galen Albret, her father, and the head Factor of all this region, paced back and forth across the veranda of the factory, caressing his white beard; up by the stockade, young Achille Picard tuned his whistle to the note of the curlew; across the meadow from the church wandered Crane, the little Church of England missionary, peering from short-sighted pale blue eyes; beyond the coulee, Sarnier and his Indians chock-chock-chocked away at the seams of the long coast-trading bateau. The girl saw nothing, heard nothing. ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... Curlew is another "early free-cropping purple plum, habit erect, vigorous," also raised by Francis Rivers. Monarch is a late, good, and very saleable plum. It is said that 75 per cent. or more of the plums planted in recent years have been ...
— The Book of Pears and Plums • Edward Bartrum
... bark, and rising aloft in two or three vast rings, to stretch himself after his night's sleep, bung motionless, watching every lark which chirruped on the cliffs; while from the far-off Nile below, the awakening croak of pelicans, the clang of geese, the whistle of the godwit and curlew, came ringing up the windings of the glen; and last of all the voices of the monks rose chanting a morning hymn to some wild Eastern air; and a new day had begun in Seetis, like those which went before, and those which were ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... that way were flying, Heron and curlew overhead, With a mighty eagle westward floating, Every plume in their ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... opinion he was probably in part led by the article Donia or Clianthus, in Don's System of Gardening and Botany, vol. 2. p. 468, in which a third species of the genus is introduced, founded on a specimen in Mr. Lambert's Herbarium, said to have been discovered at Curlew River, by Captain King. This species, named Clianthus Dampieri by Cunningham, he characterises as having leaves of a slightly different form, but its principal distinction is in its having racemes instead of umbels; at the same time he confidently ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... knoll of one of the slopes, where the shadows of a tuft of marram grass above my head lay as thin black wire on the sand, were the dunes caught in part of their secret. There was no sound. I heard the outer world from which I had come only as the whistle of a curlew. It was far away now. To this place, the news I had heard on the quay that morning would have sounded the same as Waterloo, which was yesterday, or the Armada, which was the same day—wasn't it?—or the day before, or as the whistle of a curlew. Here we were outside time. Then ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... hundred times, as aimlessly blinking at the vast possibilities of the shining sea beyond, turning his back upon the nearer and more practicable mountains, lulled by the far-off beating of monotonous rollers, the lonely cry of the curlew and plover, the drowsy changes of alternate breaths of cool, fragrant reeds and warm, spicy sands that blew across his eyelids, and succumbed to sleep, as he had done a hundred times before. The narrow strips of colored ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... slugs and snails. One evening, as the moon shone over the hill, the woodcock, that for months had dwelt by day in the oak-scrub near the "set," and had fed at night in the swampy thickets by the rill, heard the voice of a curlew descending from the heights of the sky, and rose, on quick, glad pinions, far beyond the soaring of the lark, to join a great bird-army travelling north. Regularly, as the time for sleep drew nigh, the old inhabitants among the woodland birds—the thrushes, the robins, the finches, and the wrens—squabbled ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... two Indians, overtook us at this place. It may be mentioned as a proof of the dexterity of the Indians and the skill with which they steal upon their game that they had on the preceding day, with no other arms than a hatchet, killed two deer, a hawk, a curlew, and a sturgeon. Three of the Company's boats joined us in the course of the morning and we pursued our course up Hill River in company. The water in this river was so low and the rapids so bad ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... was a great solitariness—the murmur of a land where no man had come since the making of the world. Down in the sedges by the lake a blackcap sang sweetly, waesomely, the nightingale of Scotland. Far on the moors a curlew cried out that its soul was lost. Nameless things whinnied in the mist-filled hollows. On the low grounds there lay a white mist knee-deep, and Ralph Peden waded in it as in a shallow sea. So in due time he came near to the ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... southwestern horizon from Toppid Mountain, when the sky is clear after rain, you can trace the outline of the Curlew hills, our southern limit of view from Knocknarea. Up to the foot of the hills spreads a level country of pastures dappled with lakes, broken into a thousand fantastic inlets by the wasting of the limestone rock. The daisies are the stars in that green sky. Just beyond the ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... A curlew's note broke the silence, wild, mournful, unearthly. Meg shivered, and sat up straight. Judy's brow, grew damp, her eyes dilated, her ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... together, and late in the afternoon we landed at a spot near the mouth of the Musa River. We spent the evening shooting, and had splendid sport, our bag consisting of ducks of various species, pigeon, spur-winged plover, curlew, sandpipers, etc. We also saw wallaby, and numerous tracks of cassowary and wild pig. After some supper on the beach, the Kaili-kaili, Arifamu and Okeina carriers, numbering over one hundred, were drawn up in line, and Monckton told them that he did not want so many carriers. ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... Sparrow Hawk Bobolink White-headed Eagle Meadow Lark Great Horned Owl Bluejay Snowy Owl Ruffed Grouse Red-headed Woodpecker Great Blue Heron Golden-winged Woodpecker Bittern Barn-swallow Wilson's Snipe Whip-poor-will Long-biller Curlew Night Hawk Purple Gallinule Belted Kingfisher Canada Goose Kingbird Wood Duck Woodthrush Hooded Merganser Catbird Double-crested Cormorant White-bellied Nuthatch Arctic Tern Brown Creeper Great Northern Diver Bohemian Chatterer Stormy Petrel Great Northern ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... back to it now I can see the long stretch of beach burning in the fierce sunlight, the endless meadows, with the glimmer of water in the distance, the dunes, the twisted cedars, the leagues of scintillating ocean, rocking, rocking, always rocking. In the starlit nights the curlew came in from the sand-bars by twos and threes; I could hear their querulous call as I lay in bed thinking. All day long the little ring-necks whistled from the shore. The plover answered them from distant, lonely inland pools. The great white gulls drifted like feathers upon ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... sedgy grass and the curlew continued to circle, vanishing and reappearing from behind the trees, always uttering those shrill cries. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... The scarlet curlew breeds in innumerable quantities in the muddy islands on the coasts of Pomauron; the egrets and crabiers in the same place. They resort to the mud-flats at ebbing water, while thousands of sandpipers and plovers, with here and there a spoonbill and flamingo, ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... vivid vernal green, he disturbed the paddling moor-hens and put up a mallard from a clump of swaying reeds. Then he dressed and turned homeward, glowing, beside a sluggish stream which wound through a waste of heather where the curlew were whistling eerily. He had no cares to trouble him, and it was delightful to feel that he had nothing to do except to enjoy himself in what he considered the fairest country in the world, at ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... increasing the first voices of the night began to call—a 'possum squealed from the branches of a blue gum in the creek, and was answered by another somewhere near; and then the long, long mournful wail of a curlew cried out from the sunbaked plain beyond. Oh, the unutterable sense of loneliness that at times the long-drawn, penetrating cry of the curlew, resounding through the silence of the night amid the solitude of vast Australian plains, causes the solitary bushman ...
— "Five-Head" Creek; and Fish Drugging In The Pacific - 1901 • Louis Becke
... the earth—consecrated a great passion, to lift him out of himself. He sat and smoked, spiritually bemused, his brain running like a fountain with melodies of music and poetry, notes and words that sang in his ears and murmured on his lips without his hearing them. So a distant curlew thrilled him to a more ecstatic melancholy with its call through the moon-transfigured world, and he did not notice it. All the influences of the gentle night contributed to his inspired mood, but Love was the first violin in that orchestra under Nature's ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... the clarion shout— "Go where the winds of victory whirl you!" His eagle organ, petering out, Whines like a sick and muted curlew; A plaintive dirge supplants the paean That ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... looking very splendid in its black, white, and red plumage, in the bright light of the morning. It haunted the reach for some days, and was not shot. Among other visitors to this part of the river and its island during spring were a curlew, which fed for some time on the eyot during the early morning, and a pair of pheasants, one of which, an old-fashioned English cock bird, was subsequently captured unhurt. A flock of sandpipers remained there for some weeks, and during the summer ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... the wave is mute; No sound or ocean shock; No music save the trilling flute That marks the curlew flock. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... either side of you, very sombre-hued, yet less black-a-vised than more frequent bergs," where in the distance the mountains "loom up on its borders much less substantial, apparently, in fabric than so many spirals of blue turf smoke," and where the curlew's cry "can set a whole landscape to melancholy in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Island were in keeping with its general appearance, melancholy and depressing. The sepulchral boom of the bittern, the shriek of the curlew, the scream of the passing brent, the wrangling of quarrelsome teal, the sharp, querulous protest of the startled crane, were all beyond powers of written expression. The aspect of these mournful ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... the grinding of an axe. Cuckoos are all right; they sing in tune. Rooks are lovely; they do not pretend to tune. Seagulls again, and the plaintive creatures that pity themselves on moorlands, as the plover and the curlew, or the birds that lift up their voices and cry at eventide when there is an eager air blowing upon the mountains and the last yellow in the sky is fading—I have no words with which to praise the music of these people. Or listen to the chuckling of ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... Like curlew's wings flapped the white sails of the ship on the blue waters. Aspiro's eyes absorbed my mind and memory. The past was voiceless—the future clarion-toned. So we loosed our hold of the real past, and drifted toward an ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... the fleet more fast gunboats of the Curlew and Landrail type. I trust that the next estimates for the Navy will contain an ample provision for building gun vessels of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... the bush stirred the vast silence. For the first time, Lady Bridget heard the wail of the curlew—a long note, weirdly melancholy. It startled her out of her husband's arms. There were uncanny swishings of wings in the great gum tree on the other side of the creek. And now the clanking of the horses' ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... with a brace and a half of birds that looked very much like large snipe. So he thought them, but that question was set at rest by the zoologist, who pronounced them at once to be the American "Curlew" of Wilson (Numenius longirostris). Curlew or snipe, they were soon divested of the feathery coat, and placed in Lanty's frying-pan. Excellent eating they proved, having only the fault that there was not ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... the pale sunshine to light up the gloomy landscape, and to the east the bleak mountains stood, clear-cut and uniform in shagginess and savagery, against the cold, gray sky. The white balls of the bog cotton waved dismally in the light breeze, which curled the surface of a few pools, and drew a curlew or plover from his retreat, and sent him whistling dolefully, and beating the heavy air, as he swept towards mountain or lake. After half an hour's walking, painful to me, the ground gently rose, and ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... other birds have been observed to dance, spread their tails, chase one another, and perform many strange courting parades. A careful observer of birds, Mr. E. Selous, who is quoted by Havelock Ellis,[63] has found that all bird dances are not nuptial, but that some birds—the stone-curlew (or great plover), for example—have different kinds of dancing. The nuptial dances are taken part in by both the male and female, and are immediately followed by conjugation; but there are as well other dances or antics of a non-sexual character, which may be regarded as social, and these too ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... their faces and legs. The very birds seemed to shun these wastes, and no wonder, since they had an easy method of escaping from them;—at least I only heard the monotonous and plaintive cries of the lapwing and curlew, which my companions denominated the ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... a fine repentance indeed! What are you staring at, you fool? Here has been that wild curlew, Bess Ferguson, with an awful tale of how you have gambled and lost an hundred pounds, and half killed an unlucky cousin. Who the deuce is the man? A nice godchild you are! A proper rage I am in, and Dr. ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... lowly piping of the solitary curlew, the saucy burr of the grouse, the screech of the owl, the croaking of the raven, the flight of the magpie, the slowly flying heron, the noisy cock, the hungry seagull, the shrill note of the woodpecker, the sportive duck, all ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... owl, curlew and crested hern, Kingfisher, mallard, water-rail and tern, Chaffinch and greenfinch, warbler, stonechat, ruff, Pied wagtail, robin, fly-catcher and chough, Missel-thrush, magpie, sparrow-hawk, and jay, Built, those far ages gone, in this year's way. And the first man who walked ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... sweet mournful music were ringing, The curlew and plover in concert were singing; But the melody died 'midst derision and laughter, As the host of ungodly rush'd on to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Black-bellied Plover Golden Plover Semi-palmated Plover Belted Piping Plover Wilson Plover Piping Plover Killdeer Willett Greater Yellow Legs Summer Yellow Legs Turnstone Red Phalarope Northern Phalarope Avocet Oyster Catcher Long-billed Curlew Jack Curlew Hudsonian Godwit Sanderling Black-necked Stilt Dowitcher Knot Stilt Sandpiper Solitary Sandpiper Spotted Sandpiper Red-backed Sandpiper White-rumped Sandpiper ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... brase. Carcell. Crane in sawce. Partrych. Young Pocock. Venson baked. Coney. Fryed meat in paste. Pigeons. Lesh Lumbert. Byttor. A Frutor. Curlew. A Sutteltee. ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... shelvings and variegated with heather and fern. The air comes briskly and sweetly off the hills, pure from the elevation, and rustically scented by the upland plants; and even at the toll, you may hear the curlew calling on its mate. At certain seasons, when the gulls desert their surfy forelands, the birds of sea and mountain hunt and scream together in the same field by Fairmilehead. The winged, wild things intermix their wheelings, the sea-birds ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sky; Far off the black basaltic crags are heaved Against the desolate emptiness of space; But no sweet beam of sunset ever falls Athwart old Skidloe's cloudy crest—no soft And wistful glory of awakened dawn Lays on his haggard brows a touch of grace. Sometimes a lonely curlew skims across The seething torment of the dread abyss, And, shrieking, dips into the mist beyond; But, solitary and unchanged for aye, He towers amid the rude revolt of waves, His stony face seamed by a thousand years, And wrinkled with a million furrows, worn By the slow drip ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... Dedlow Marsh was also melancholy and depressing. The sepulchral boom of the bittern, the shriek of the curlew, the scream of passing brent, the wrangling of quarrelsome teal, the sharp, querulous protest of the startled crane, and syllabled complaint of the "killdeer" plover, were beyond the power of written expression. Nor was the aspect of these mournful fowls at all cheerful and inspiring. Certainly ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... beneath me were all golden-green on one side and gray shadow on the other. A haze lay low upon the farthest sky-line, out of which jutted the fantastic shapes of Belliver and Vixen Tor. Over the wide expanse there was no sound and no movement. One great gray bird, a gull or curlew, soared aloft in the blue heaven. He and I seemed to be the only living things between the huge arch of the sky and the desert beneath it. The barren scene, the sense of loneliness, and the mystery and urgency of my task all struck a chill into my heart. The boy was nowhere to be ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... melody. Farther ahead still it travelled, till the lonely dingo heard it as he prowled, and, sitting on his haunches, raised his throat towards the skies and poured forth a melancholy howl in unison, rousing the suspicions of the night curlew that everything was not as it should be, and inducing him in turn to give utterance to his cry, mournful and weird as the wail of an outcast soul, to warn his fellows to be on the alert, and to add to the unspeakably awe-inspiring solemnity ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... MacNicols,—Robert, Neil, Nicol, and Duncan,—were, it must be admitted, an idle and graceless set, living for the most part a hand-to-mouth, amphibious, curlew-like kind of life, and far more given to aimless voyages in boats not belonging to them than inclined to turn their hand to any honest labour. But this must be said in their excuse that no boy or lad born in the village of Erisaig could by any means whatsoever be brought ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... folds of his surplice caught the words and carried them far out to sea over the heads of the living—the sea where the others lay who had fought their last fight in that grim battle of the mist. A curlew circled low down overhead, calling again and again as if striving to convey some insistent message that none would understand. From the rocky shore near-by came the low murmur of the sea, the sound that has in it all the sorrow ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... from a splendid moon; on the left the riding lights of a visiting squadron of American warships; on the right the myriad slanted sails of the coral-fishers' boats, beating out toward Capri, with the curlew-calls of the fishermen floating back in shrill snatches to meet a jangle of bell and bugle from the fleet; in the immediate foreground a competent and accomplished family troupe of six Neapolitan troubadours —men, women and children—some of them playing guitars and all six of them, ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... intending to leave the room, for he was not quite sure that he could sustain this altitude, if he saw more of the man. But as his hand was on the knob, Curlew spoke again. ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... this required some studying of the printed directions before they could use it. The first time they tried it the plates were put in wrong, and the second time they forgot to remove the cap. There were other things in the box besides the camera: some beautiful pink curlew's wings, a handsomely marked snake skin, and some rare shells that had been picked up on the Gulf coast. Of course the boys had to examine each new treasure as it was discovered. One thing after another delayed them until it was dusk even on the porch where they stood, and in the woods ...
— Two Little Knights of Kentucky • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Then, after that, the sky soon becomes mottled with flying birds of many kinds: gray geese, laughing geese, waveys, and white geese, as well as great flocks of ducks of many kinds; also mud-hens, sawbills, waders, plovers, curlew, pelicans, swans, and cranes, both white and gray. Then another great flight of little birds as well as loons. And last of all may come the little husky geese that travel farther north to breed their young than do those of ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... patches of snow where the dense woods shut out the sunlight. On the other lay the silver expanse of the St. Lawrence, more like a lake than a river, with mile on mile southwestward of rush-grown marshes, where plover and curlew and duck and wild geese flocked to their favorite feeding-grounds three hundred years ago just as they do to-day. Northeastward, the three mouths of the St. Maurice poured their spring flood ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... "it wa'n't just the weather I'd pick to take the old Curlew out in; but when I see through the glasses what the white thing was that's poundin' around on Razor Back Ledges, and seen the distress signal run up—why, I couldn't stay ashore. There was others would have gone, I guess, if I hadn't. But there ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... many castes of hawks this day; the first flight was after a curlew; and the riding was so hard, so dangerous, from the broken nature of the ground, that the ladies gave it up, and were contented to view the sport from the eminence where ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... ceremony, the eagle is "Mother." She calls to her nestlings and upon her strong wings she bears the message of peace. Peace and its symbol, the clear, cloudless sky, are the theme of the principal songs. The curlew, in the early morning, stretches its neck and its wing as it sits on the roost, and utters a long note. The sound is considered an indication that ...
— Myths and Legends of the Great Plains • Unknown
... I knew him, was already "the oldest herd on the Pentlands," and had been all his days faithful to that curlew- scattering, sheep-collecting life. He remembered the droving days, when the drove roads, that now lie green and solitary through the heather, were thronged thoroughfares. He had himself often marched flocks into England, sleeping on the hillsides with his caravan; ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... strains divine,[FN216] Do thou gaze on our garden of goodly gifts * And all manner blooms that in wreaths entwine; See the birdies warble on every bough * Make melodious music the finest fine. And each Pippet pipes[FN217] and each Curlew cries * And Blackbird and Turtle with voice of pine; Ring-dove and Culver, and eke Hazar, * And Kata calling on Quail vicine; So fill with the mere and the cups make bright * With bestest liquor, that boon benign;— ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... and the worst kind of destruction - viz. that of falling into the hands of cannibals and savages, who would have seized on me with the same view as I would on a goat or turtle; and have thought it no more crime to kill and devour me than I did of a pigeon or a curlew. I would unjustly slander myself if I should say I was not sincerely thankful to my great Preserver, to whose singular protection I acknowledged, with great humanity, all these unknown deliverances were due, and without which I must ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... heir of William Mathews, deceased, filed a bill in Chancery concerning various tenements in Hatton, Shrawley, Rowington, Pinley and Clendon.[259] Hil., 16 Elizabeth, Hugo Walford, Quer., and Thomas Shakspere and Marie, his wife, defendants, concerning cottage and 5 acres of land in Norton Curlew. Easter, 20 James I., Thomas Shakespere, Quer., and John Hall and Joyce, his wife, defendants, of 12 acres of land in Rowington, which were sold to the said Thomas Shakespeare, 41 Elizabeth.[260] There was a license granted to a Thomas Shakespeare, aged ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... the approach of a nervous curlew, running and pausing, and stamping, its script—an erratic scrawl of fleurs-de-lis—on the easy sand. Halting on the verge of the water, it furtively picks up crabs as if it were a trespasser, conscious ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... your embrace you held the restless tide, And shared awhile great Ocean's power and pride. But now how sad, how dreary is the scene In which so much of life hath lately been! Your barren wastes untraversed by a sail, Your only voice the curlew's distant wail; With rocky limbs and furrowed brow you lie Like some lone corpse by living things passed by; Till Night in mercy spreads her clouded pall, And rising winds mourn at your funeral. Yes, ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... iris, all gray with the hovering, misty wings of moths—that was her fate—with the sky a canopy of fire above her, and the curlew calling through the kindling dusk, and the blue processional of the woods lining the corridors of ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... got it," said Uncle Jimmy. "The Curlew is about even with her, but they ain't one o' them that ...
— The Crime of the French Cafe and Other Stories • Nicholas Carter |
