Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Either of two South American birds (Rupicola rupicola or R. peruvianus) having a distinctive crest and bright-orange or reddish plumage in the male.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun a tropical kind of bird, of the genus
Rupicola
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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A male Andean cock-of-the-rock (Rupicola peruviana) displays in the cloud forest to attract a nearby female.
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The cloud forest supports a wide diversity of fauna with such notable species as turkey vulture Cathartes aura, Andean guan Penelope montagnii, scarlet-fronted parakeet Aratinga wagleri, lyre-tailed nightjar Uropsalis lyra, marvellous spatuletail Loddigesia mirabilis (VU), cock-of-the-rock Rupicola peruviana, carbonated flower-piercer Diglossa carbonaria and hepatic tanager Piranga flava (Mittermeier, de Macedo and Luscombe, 1975).
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A day or two after, my hunter brought me a specimen of the green gaper (Calyptomena viridis), which is like a small cock-of-the-rock, but entirely of the most vivid green, delicately marked on the wings with black bars.
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Now, as I have said in a former chapter, these are wise little birds, more interesting -- I had almost said more beautiful -- in their wisdom, or wisdom-simulating instincts, than the quatzel in its resplendent green, or the cock-of-the-rock in its vivid scarlet and orange mantle.
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A day or two after, my hunter brought me a specimen of the green gaper (Calyptomena viridis), which is like a small cock-of-the-rock, but entirely of the most vivid green, delicately marked on the wings with black bars.
The Malay Archipelago, the land of the orang-utan and the bird of paradise; a narrative of travel, with studies of man and nature — Volume 1 Alfred Russel Wallace 1868
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Such are the rapid descent of the snipe, the soaring and singing of the lark, and the dances of the cock-of-the-rock and of many other birds.
Darwinism (1889) Alfred Russel Wallace 1868
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The elegant crested bird called cock-of-the-rock, admirably described by
Wanderings in South America Charles Waterton 1823
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However, I find now that no exact period can be fixed; for in December 1824 an Indian in the River Demerara gave me a young cock-of-the-rock not a month old, and it had just been brought from the Macoushi country.
Wanderings in South America Charles Waterton 1823
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But the rest of the time, I was in my laid-back explorer mode, including my drive with Kurt up the abandoned Mindo-Quito road, where thanks to his telescopic "view-scope," we saw several roadside orchids and the cock-of-the-rock.
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Ten minutes out on one of our expeditions up an abandoned road, a brilliantly red cock-of-the-rock eyed us imperiously from a tree branch 15 metres away.
MaryW commented on the word cock-of-the-rock
Tim Birkhead, Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird (New York: Walker & Co., 2012), pp. 19-20.May 30, 2016