"Wagtail" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in Suffolk comes the news that a water-wagtail has built its nest in a milk-can. We resolutely refrain ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... a wagtail into her room, and locked herself in, leaving the cardinal to storm that he was obliged to go. When the fair Imperia found herself alone, seated before the fire, and without her little priest, she exclaimed, snapping angrily the gold links of her chain, ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... of the Wagtail, in Wapping, four men and a woman were drinking beer and discussing diseases. It was not a pretty subject, and the company was certainly not a handsome one. It was a dark November evening, and the dingy lighting of the bar seemed ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... curious fact, and one, I believe, not hitherto noticed by naturalists, that the cuckoo deposits its egg in the nests of the titlark, robin, and wagtail by means of its foot. If the bird sat on the nest while the egg was laid, the weight of its body would crush the nest and cause it to be forsaken, and thus one of the ends of Providence would be defeated. I have found the eggs of the cuckoo in ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... lugubris, Temminck. French, "Bergeronette Yarrellii."[11]—The Pied Wagtail has probably been better known to some of my readers as Motacilla Yarrellii, but, according to the rules of nomenclature before alluded to, Motacilla lugubris of Temminck seems to have superseded the probably ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith |
