Crossword-Solution: TOURACOS 8 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 10

There are also three quite peculiar African families, the Musophagidæ or plantain-eaters, including the elegant crested touracos; the curious little finch-like colies (Coliidæ), and the Irrisoridæ, insect-eating birds allied to the hoopoes but with glossy metallic plumage and arboreal habits.

Ibises screamed to their mates to hurry up to view the column of strangers, and touracos argued with one another with all the guttural harshness of a group of Egyptian fellahs, plantain-eaters, sunbirds, grey parrots, green parroquets, and a few white-collared eagles either darted by or sailed across the leafy gulf, or sat drowsily perched in the haze upon aspiring branches.

There were parrots, ibis, touracos, parraquets, sunbirds, swifts, finches, shrikes, whip-poor-wills, hoopoes, owls, guinea fowl, blackbirds, weavers, kingfishers, divers, fish eagles, kites, wagtails, bee-eaters, pipits, sandpipers, cockatoos, hornbills, jays, barbets, woodpeckers, pigeons, and unknown minute tribes, and millions of large and small bats.

The equatorial parts of Africa and South America, for example, are very similar in climate and are both covered with luxuriant forests, yet their animal life is widely different; elephants, apes, leopards, guinea-fowls and touracos in the one, are replaced by tapirs, prehensile-tailed monkeys, jaguars, curassows and toucans in the other.

The crested bird overhead is one of the beautiful green touracos (_Turacus macrorhynchus_), belonging to the Musophagidæ, or plantain-eaters, a family wholly African, and most abundant in the western sub-region.