PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE WEST INDIES.. 51 



" The voice of the Buceros hicornis/' says Wallace, " can be plain- 

 ly heard at a distance of a mile, so that the amazement of travelers 

 visiting its haunts seems explicable enough. Its screams may be de- 

 scribed as something ^between the bray of a jackass and the shriek of 

 a locomotive, and are not surpassed in power by any sound that an 

 animal is capable of making. They re-echo through the hills to such 

 a degree that it is difficult to assign the noise to a bird, and are some- 

 times kept up so continuously as to become absolutely unbearable." 



The condor and the harpy eagle have not found their way across 

 the Caribbean Sea, but the West Indies boast three varieties of fish 

 eagles, several species of mountain falcons, and a curious singing 

 owl, the oriya, that chants its serenades in the plaintive strain of 

 the whip-poor-will, and is dreaded by the Porto Rico darkeys as a bird 

 of ill-omen : 



" Grita Toriya : Veuga aniigo, 

 Venga coumigo a mi patria, 

 Venga te-digo ! " 



Small hooting owls abound, and there are four species of sparrow 

 hawks, one of them not much larger than a finch. 



It is probably the smallest bird of prey, and there is no doubt 

 that one species of West Indian humming bird is the smallest bird on 

 earth, the Vei^vain colibri, of Jamaica, that hides its nest under an 

 orange leaf, and, though an insect-eater, could be easily overpowered 

 by an able-bodied bumblebee. In beauty some of the south Cuban 

 species rival those of the Amazon Valley, and frequent every flower- 

 ing shrub from the jungles of the coast lands to the highland meadows 

 of the Sierra Maestra. In Hayti there are parklike plateaus where 

 they often appear in swarms at a time of the year when the forests of 

 the foothills are drenched by the afternoon cloudbursts of the rainy 

 season, and on some of the smaller Antilles they are seen only during 

 the flowering period of special plants. 



In the solitudes of the Morne Range (San Domingo) mountain 

 ravens rear their brood in the crevices of steep rocks, and fiercely 

 attack birds of prey, not excepting the black-crested eagle, that now 

 and then visits the sierras in quest of conies. But the winged con- 

 stables of the highlands rarely leave their mountain reservation. Of 

 Abd-el-Wahab, the Arabian heretic, it used to be said that " Moham- 

 medan zealots shrank in affright from his superior fanaticism," and 

 on the midway terraces of the Dominican sierras the persecution 

 mania of the giant crow yields to that of the great shrike, the Laniiis 

 rufus, that operates pairwise and assails all winged come;^ with ab- 

 solutely reckless courage. 



The raven of the Mornes seems to be identical with the cosmo- 

 politan forager that is found in the uplands of the eastern continent 



