Kingfisher
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Kingfisher. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a family of birds represented in temperate North America by the belted kingfisher. One hundred eighty species are known in the Malay Archipelago, some of them being forest birds living on insects and snails. Our North American bird is, however, typical of the family. It lives a solitary life, sitting on an overhanging dead limb on the wooded shore of a stream or pond, apparently studying its own portrait in the water, but in reality watching for dinner. It is thirteen inches in length. Its upperparts are bluish gray, wings tipped with white and underparts chiefly white. The epithet "belted" is derived from a band of blue across the breast. The head bears a prominent crest. The nest is placed at the end of a six-foot burrow dug with foot and bill in a sandy bank. Five to eight white eggs are hidden in the burrow, which also serves as a nightly shelter for the family early in the season. As soon as the young are old enough the family breaks up, each individual fishing its own portion of shore. The kingfisher's chief food is minnows, which it catches crosswise in its bill by plunging into the water either from the wing or from an overhanging perch. If disturbed it flies with a loud rattling scream to a perch further along the shore. If followed this operation may be repeated until the further limit of its district is reached, when it flies back by a wide detour to the other end of its range. William J. Long, in his Wilderness Ways, records some interesting observations of this quaint old fisherman and his cranky methods. According to Mr. Long it warns game of the approach of a hunter and spoils many a coveted shot at moose, bear, or deer. The poet Lowell, who was a close student of birds, says, "Kingfishers have sometimes puzzled me . . . perched at high noon in a pine, springing their watchman's rattle when they flitted away from my curiosity, and seeming to shove their top-heavy heads along as a man does a wheelborrow." The jackass kingfisher, or laughing kingfisher, is a large brown species, seventeen inches long. It takes its name from a harsh braying jackass-like cry. It is at home in the dry plains of Australia, and nests in the sand. It does not frequent water, and is not a fisherman. It lives on insects, lizards, small snakes, etc. See Halcyon
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the genus Alcedo. The common kingfisher, A. ispida, is blue above, greener on the mantle and scapulars, with beautiful rich cobalt on the back, rump, and upper tail coverts; a spot in front of the eye, the eye coverts and under parts are rufous; the head is blue, barred with black; the wings blue, with spots of brighter cobalt on the coverts; the throat and a patch on each side of the neck are white; the cheeks and sides of the breast are blue; the bill black, the feet red. The female and young are like the male, but are red at the base of the under mandible. Seen on the upper part of the Thames and other rivers in the S. of England perched over the water, into which it darts from time to time, bringing back a fish or a water insect. It bores a hole in the ground, makes a nest of fish bones, and lays six or seven eggs.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The birds themselves behave exactly as described: the belted kingfisher still hunts minnows from a dead limb and still digs a burrow in a sand bank, and the common kingfisher still nests on a floor of fish bones. Names have moved: Collier's A. ispida of 1921 is now treated as Alcedo atthis, the belted bird is Megaceryle alcyon rather than a member of Alcedo, the "jackass kingfisher" is the laughing kookaburra, Dacelo novaeguineae, of eastern Australian woodland rather than dry plains, and the family Aiton's called one is now usually split into three (Alcedinidae, Halcyonidae, Cerylidae), with roughly 115 species worldwide, not 180 in the Malay Archipelago alone. One authority has aged badly: when Aiton's quoted William J. Long in 1910 on the kingfisher warning moose and deer of hunters, Long had already been denounced as the leading "nature faker" in the public quarrel of 1903-07 in which John Burroughs and Theodore Roosevelt attacked writers who put invented reasoning into wild animals. British kingfishers, common enough on the Thames in 1921 to be taken for granted, later suffered from river pollution and hard winters and are now a protected species monitored by annual survey.
Written for this edition, 2026.