Panama 205 



a little lighter, you will see a white-faced monkey sipping 

 his eye opener. The great blossom contains rain water, 

 some nectar, no doubt, the mixture generously spiced with 

 drowned insects, so that the draught is surely nourishing. 

 He is only one of a dozen or more that spent the night 

 roosting near by. A pair of marmosets bicker on a great 

 vine. Now it is light enough for the howling monkeys high 

 overhead to open their roaring competition. Each one, 

 great and small, sounds certainly as if pre-eminence in 

 roaring had suddenly become a most ardently desired at- 

 tainment. 



Wild figs, so-called (they are not figs at all), begin to 

 sound lil<:e giant raindrops hitting the jungle floor. This 

 means that the Pavos are up feeding in the tall tree and 

 shaking off more fruit than they devour. These great birds, 

 locally called' turkeys, are in truth not distantly related to 

 those birds. Ornithologists will recall them as Penelope. 

 Now the colony of oropendulas awakens, enormous orioles, 

 their great nests swinging, not from the breeze, for the 

 morning is dead still, but as the birds hop in or out and thus 

 set them in motion. They keep up a constant musical clat- 

 ter, quite like the janghng of a peal of bells, and Panama- 

 nians declare they are talking Chinese. What they do they 

 certainly do incessantly. 



Coatis, their long tails erect and curved and their long 

 Paul Pry noses sniffing about the lawns, jump for a cricket 

 or mumble a fallen fig with equal gusto. As with all the 

 tribe of the raccoons and bears, their appetite is as liberally 

 omnivorous as my own. Perhaps this morning, as often 

 happens, there will be a short, sharp shower of rain and 

 everything will become hushed and still, and as the shower 



