Crossword-Solution: SUNBIRDS 8 letters, 3 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 11

Owing to the great preponderance among the birds, of parrots, pigeons, kingfishers, and sunbirds, almost all of gay or delicate colours, and many adorned with the most gorgeous plumage, and to the numbers of very large and showy butterflies which are almost everywhere to be met with, the forests of the Moluccas offer to the naturalist a very striking example of the luxuriance and beauty of animal life in the tropics.

The great city roared without; Orestes plotted, and Cyril counterplotted, and the fate of a continent hung--or seemed to hang--trembling in the balance; but the turmoil of it no more troubled those lazy Titans within, than did the roll and rattle of the carriage-wheels disturb the parakeets and sunbirds which peopled, under an awning of gilded wire, the inner court of Pelagia’s house.

The plum-necked parrots swung from fruit to fruit; The yellow sunbirds whirred from bloom to bloom, The timid lizards on the lattice basked Fearless, the squirrels ran to feed from hand, For all was peace: the shy black snake, that gives Fortune to households, sunned his sleepy coils Under the moon-flowers, where the musk-deer played, And brown-eyed monkeys chattered to the crows.

Most of the cock sunbirds cast off their workaday plumage and assumed their splendid metallic purple wedding garment in November and December, a few, however, do not attain their full glory until January.

The bulbuls tinkle more blithely, the purple sunbirds sing more lustily; the _kutur_, _kutur_, _kuturuk_ of the green barbets is uttered more vociferously; the nuthatches now put their whole soul into their loud, sharp _tee-tee-tee-tee_, the hoopoes call _uk-uk-uk_ more vigorously.