"Curlew" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... breathless air. Tired of listless dreaming Through the lazy day: Jovial wind of winter Turns us out to play! Sweep the golden reed-beds; Crisp the lazy dyke; Hunger into madness Every plunging pike. Fill the lake with wild-fowl; Fill the marsh with snipe; While on dreary moorlands Lonely curlew pipe. Through the black fir-forest Thunder harsh and dry, Shattering down the snow-flakes Off the curdled sky. Hark! The brave North-easter! Breast-high lies the scent, On by holt and headland, Over heath and bent. Chime, ye ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... course of the day we saw many geese, cranes, small birds common to the plains, and a few pheasants. We also observed a small plover or curlew of a brown color, about the size of a yellow-legged plover or jack-curlew, but of a different species. It first appeared near the mouth of Smith's River, but is so shy and vigilant that we were unable to shoot it. Both the broad ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... 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 down in the hollow a nest ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... 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 forward, his ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... the hills was a long dreary waste—treeless, awesome, desolate. Whiles, as we ran, a curlew would rise, and its long whirling cry rose in the night, filling the ears and leaving an emptiness afterwards in the silence, for things not canny to be filling. Once we startled a herd of red-deer feeding ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... 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
... Eyre said, "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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... ever such a God-forgotten place, Where the wild selector's children fly before a stranger's face. Home of tragedy applauded by the dingoes' dismal yell, Heaven of the shanty-keeper — fitting fiend for such a hell — And the wallaroos and wombats, and, of course, the curlew's call — And the lone sundowner tramping ever onward through ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... 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. Rush tells me I am never to get excited! You should hear Mrs. Galloway; duels and murder ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... and the long slopes 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 ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... is a Lincolnshire word for the cry of the curlew, and so by removing the comma after call we get an interpretation which perhaps improves the sense and certainly gets rid of a very un-Tennysonian cumbrousness in the second line. But Tennyson had never, he said, heard of that meaning of "gleams," ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... that the 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 ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... and all the frenzies of the life you have left 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 ten thousand years hence. It is as though you have ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... Bay. Natives seen. Passage through Bass Strait and along the South Coast to King George the Third's Sound. Transactions there. Voyage to the North-West Cape, and Survey of the Coast between the North-West Cape and Depuch Island, including the examinations of Exmouth Gulf, Curlew River, and Dampier's Archipelago. Loss of Anchors, and Interview with the Natives. Remarks upon Dampier's account of Rosemary Island, and of the Island upon ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... uttered a cry of guilt in his spirit; his face became ghastly, and his eyes full of horror: his lips quivered, and he' was about to upbraid his daughter with more harshness than usual, when a low whistle, resembling that of a curlew, was heard at a chink of the door. In a moment he gulped down another glass of spirits, and was on his feet: "Go, Denis, an' get the arms," said he to his brother, "while ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... of Duck 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 fowls was not at all cheerful or inspiring, ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... for 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... into the sedgy grass and the curlew continued to circle, vanishing and reappearing from behind the trees, always uttering those ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... perfumes. From the precipitous side of the 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 of this fountain, decorated with wild and sublime ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... father, and 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 ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... himself sitting alone among the Yorkshire hills.[129] For the first time, the silence of Nature round him, her freedom sealed to him, her glory opened to him. Peace at last; no roll of cart-wheel, nor mutter of sullen voices in the back shop; but curlew-cry in space of heaven, and welling of bell-toned streamlet by its shadowy rock. Freedom at last. Dead-wall, dark railing, fenced field, gated garden, all passed away like the dream, of a prisoner; ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... the slaughtered bird, And all his heart with ruth was stirred. The fowler's impious deed distressed His gentle sympathetic breast, And while the curlew's sad cries rang Within his ears, the hermit sang: "No fame be thine for endless time, Because, base outcast, of thy crime, Whose cruel hand was fain to slay One of this gentle pair at play!" E'en as he spoke his bosom wrought And ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... the year the only vegetable. And on the dresser, and before the fire, whole hecatombs of fragrant victims, which needed neither frankincense nor myrrh; Clovelly herrings and Torridge salmon, Exmoor mutton and Stow venison, stubble geese and woodcocks, curlew and snipe, hams of Hampshire, chitterlings of Taunton, and botargos of Cadiz, such as Pantagruel himself might have devoured. And Jack eyed them, as a ragged boy eyes the cakes in a pastrycook's window; and thought of the scraps from the commoners' ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... of his majesty's ship Curlew had boarded the Columbine about the 20th April, the master of which vessel had died a few weeks previously. The doctor on board the Columbine had received letters from Mr. Lander dated from king Obie's palace at Eboe, about three weeks after they had sailed from the ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... 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 ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... 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, ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... 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. Whitter, a draft. Whittle, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... sat thus a 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 cloth, insignia of his dignity, flapped lazily from ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... birds that way were flying, Heron and curlew overhead, With a mighty eagle westward floating, Every plume in their ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... good-for-nothing young spendthrift taken at the last moment "because he wrote a good hand," and a mixed crew, Hudson crossed the wide Atlantic for the last time. He sailed by way of Iceland, where "fresh fish and dainty fowl, partridges, curlew, plover, teale, and goose" much refreshed the already discontented crews, and the hot baths of Iceland delighted them. The men wanted to return to the pleasant land discovered in the last expedition, but the mysteries of the frozen North still called the old explorer, and he ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... and 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, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... deep mournful music were ringing, The curlew and plover in concert were singing; But the melody died 'midst derision and laughter, As the hosts of ungodly rushed on ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... precipitous ascent, and brings you a little after to the place of Hermiston, where it comes to an end in the back-yard before the coach-house. All beyond and about is the great field, of the hills; the plover, the curlew, and the lark cry there; the wind blows as it blows in a ship's rigging, hard and cold and pure; and the hill-tops huddle one behind another like a herd of cattle ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this resolution, a strict watch was set all along Gavin Muir; and it became 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 provisions were dropped amidst ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... Painted all the trees with scarlet, Stained the leaves with red and yellow; He it was who sent the snow-flake, Sifting, hissing through the forest, Froze the ponds, the lakes, the rivers, Drove the loon and sea-gull southward, Drove the cormorant and curlew To their nests of sedge and sea-tang In the realms of Shawondasee. Once the fierce Kabibonokka Issued from his lodge of snow-drifts From his home among the icebergs, And his hair, with snow besprinkled, Streamed behind him like a river, Like a black and wintry river, As he howled ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... But come, I'll set Your chair outside, where you can feel the sun; And hearken to the curlew; and be the first To welcome Jim and Phoebe as man ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... 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
... of the islands is an extensive orange-grove. As there were no difficulties in the navigation of the lake, Cornwood called Buck to the wheel, and joined the party on the outer deck. He pointed out the herons, curlew, cranes, paroquets, and other birds. When he said it was fine fishing in the lake, our sportsmen had their trolling lines overboard. Ten fine black bass were taken; and at "seven bells," a portion of them were on the breakfast table. We all took our meals at the same table on the Wetumpka, ...
— Down South - or, Yacht Adventure in Florida • Oliver Optic
... 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, ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... then, thy wish!" He whistled shrill, And he was answered from the hill; Wild as the scream of the curlew, From crag to crag the signal flew. Instant, through copse and heath, arose 200 Bonnets and spears and bended bows; On right, on left, above, below, Sprung up at once the lurking foe; From shingles gray their lances start, The bracken bush sends forth the dart, 205 ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... were a variety of lonely lakes, abrupt precipices, and extensive marshes; and as our travellers went along, the hum of the snipe, the feeble but mournful cry of the plover, and the wilder and more piercing whistle of the curlew, still deepened the melancholy dreariness of their situation, and added to their anxiety to press on towards the place of ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... to fly 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
... 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 place of ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... all the hounds of Cottesmore; and overhead rushed and whirled the skein of terrified wild-fowl, screaming, piping, clacking, croaking, filling the air with the hoarse rattle of their wings, while clear above all sounded the wild whistle of the curlew, and the trumpet note of ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... 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 ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... whistle heralds 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 of a shameful or wicked deed and fearful of detection. It is not night nor yet quite ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... And he was answered from the hill, Wild as the scream of the curlew, From crag to crag, ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... destroy the 'goose winter'. 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 ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... be in all—the familiar call, which is supposed to sound like 'More-pork,' is not the mopoke (or podargus) at all, but the hooting of a little rusty red feather-legged owl, known as the Boobook. Its double note is the opposite of the curlew, since the first syllable is dwelt upon and the second sharp. An Englishman hearing it for the first time, and not being told that the bird was a 'more-pork,' would call ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... better than the Baron's horse as they went past on the way to the post; the scarlet jacket glided along quickly, heading the others. Gold Star and Orbit were much fancied. Curlew, Halton, and Sniper had friends. Postman was the outsider, a two-hundred-to-one chance; only a few pounds went on him for the sake of ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... 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. ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... the city are ringing in the night; High above the gardens are the houses full of light; On the heathy Pentlands is the curlew flying free; And the broom is blowing bonnie ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whistling whisht 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
... away past through the furze-bushes. The light was coming up slowly over the leaden sea, and the waves seemed cowed by the steady flogging of the sleet. I heard the woods complaining from afar off, and the whistling curlew as he called overhead made me think of messengers of evil. Presently I came to a great range of rounded hills, which were covered by withered bracken. Certain gaps led through these hills to the beach, ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... their requirements. Nevertheless, in September, and even as early as August, they begin to arrive on the pampas, the golden plover often still wearing his black nuptial dress; singly and in pairs, in small flocks, and in clouds they come—curlew, godwit, plover, tatler, tringa—piping the wild notes to which the Greenlander listened in June, now to the gaucho herdsman on the green plains of La Plata, then to the wild Indian in his remote village; and soon, further ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... carrion-vultures, and many 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, ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... 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 ...
— Two Little Knights of Kentucky • Annie Fellows Johnston
... lighting up the clouds there with a dusky yellow; in the east there was a wilder glare of steely blue high up over the intense blackness on the back of Ben-an-Sloich; and the morning was still, for he heard, suddenly piercing the silence, the whistle of a curlew, and that became more and more remote as the unseen bird winged its flight far over the sea. He lit the candles, and made the necessary preparations for his journey; for he had some message to leave at Kinloch, at the head of Loch ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... blue and brown shadows in the mornings, and in the evenings grey and copper in all the little hollows. Oh, 'tis beautiful! and I can show her where the plovers lay their eggs, and I will take her to listen for the curlew's note coming out of the mist like a spirit whistler, and I can take her down to the rocks by Ogo Wylofen, too, where the seals are making their home. But, indeed, Will knows it all as well as I do, and he will like to show them all ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... 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
... 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 that we were obliged several times ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... 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 ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... formed by the melting snow, break sweetly on the ear, like the well-remembered voice of a long-absent friend. The whistling wings of wild-fowl, as they ever and anon desert the pools of water now open in the lake and hurry over the forest-trees, accord well with the shrill cry of the yellow-leg and curlew, and with the general wildness of the scene; while the reviving frogs chirrup gladly in the swamps to see the breaking up of winter and welcome back the spring. This is the spring I write of; and to have a correct idea of the ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... nineteen. Dad is a good farmer, but nothing 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 ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... 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 ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... the very good neighbours themsells (for they say folk suldna ca' them fairies) that used to be seen on every green knowe at e'en, are no half sae often visible in our days. I canna depone to having ever seen ane mysell, but, I ance heard ane whistle ahint me in the moss, as like a whaup [Curlew] as ae thing could be like anither. And mony ane my father saw when he used to come hame frae the fairs at e'en, wi' a drap drink ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... cushat and the curlew have left the hill, and yet ye are abroad. 'Tis time the maiden were at home and looking after ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... their sweet perfume fraught with recollections of home. As we emerged from the trees, a rattlesnake, as large as a man's arm, and more than four feet long, lay coiled on a rock, fiercely rattling and hissing at us; a gray hare, double the size of those in New England, leaped up from the tall ferns; curlew were screaming over our heads, and a whole host of little prairie dogs sat yelping at us at the mouths of their burrows on the dry plain beyond. Suddenly an antelope leaped up from the wild-sage bushes, gazed eagerly at us, and then, erecting his white tail, stretched ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... curlew, cry no more in the air, Or only to the waters of the West; Because your crying brings to my mind Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair That was shaken out over my breast: There is enough evil ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... stones which, grey with the lapse of ages, stands in lonely majesty upon the dreary moor, near which no sound is ever heard, save the distant and sullen roar of the ocean, as it breaks in sheets of foam on the rock-bound coast—the fitful cry of curlew, as it wings over them its solitary way—or the occasional low moaning of the wind, as, stealing through amidst the rocks, it seems to pour forth a mournful dirge for the shades of departed greatness:—when we look on a scene like this, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... 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 of the ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... predominated, however, in 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
... fagged out. The evening sunlight slanted warm across 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 ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... beautiful instrument, but good for no purpose except extracting worms from soft ground. If frost or drought hardens the ground, the snipe must starve or travel. Among the many "lang nebbit" birds that follow the same profession as the snipe, some, like the curlew and the ibis, have curved bills of prodigious length. I do not know the comparative advantages of the two forms, but no doubt each bird swears by its own pattern, as every golfer does by ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... at Sligo was treated in like manner by O'Connor Slygah; who, upon the protestants quitting their holds, promised them quarter, and to convey them safe over the Curlew mountains, to Roscommon. But he first imprisoned them in a most loathsome jail, allowing them only grains for their food. Afterward, when some papists were merry over their cups, who were come to congratulate their wicked brethren for their victory over these ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... of the balance of nature. A great deal could be learnt from the excellent work already done all over the continent with regard to the farmer's and forester's wild friends and foes. A migrating flight of curlew, snipe, plover or sandpipers is worth much more to the farmer alive than dead. But by no means every farmer knows the value ...
— Supplement to Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... returning 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 ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... nests are located on the ground in meadows or on the prairies, and three or four eggs are laid, of a buff or greenish buff color, covered with numerous spots of brownish black. Eggs of the common Curlew of Europe, have been very frequently used as belonging to this species, but the eggs of our species have a lighter and more greenish ground, and the spots are smaller and more numerous. ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... 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 ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... their uproar. The tigers ceased to roar and the elephants to scream; the bears raised their snouts from their foul banquets, and the wolves dropped from their jaws the remnants of human flesh. And when they disappeared, the hooting of the owl, and ghastly "ha! ha!" of the curlew, and the howling of the jackal died away in the far distance, leaving a ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton |
