28 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1955 



curator of zoology, leader of the expedition, Dr. Edward W. Baker, 

 acarologist, on detail from the U. S. Department of Agriculture, and 

 Dr. Roy Lyman Sexton, physician, of Washington, D. C, as medical 

 consultant and photographer, assisted by his son, Roy Lyman Sexton, 

 Jr., as microphotographic specialist. Traveling by auto and truck, 

 except for a short plane flight from Leopoldville to Stanleyville, they 

 spent some 50 days in the Belgian Congo and the mandate territory 

 of Ruanda-Urundi ; 4 days in Uganda on the way to the head of navi- 

 gation on the Nile at Juda ; and 19 days in the Sudan and Egypt, the 

 descent of the Nile being made by steamer and by train around the 

 cataracts. The expedition concluded its travel at Cairo on June 17, 

 1955, the collections having been forwarded by train from Kampala, 

 Uganda, to the port of Mombassa, British East Africa, for shipment 

 to Washington. Through the courtesy of the Institute des Pares 

 Nationaux in Brussels and particularly its president. Dr. Victor van 

 Straelen, permission was given for photographing many of the larger 

 big-game mammals inhabiting the Garamba, Albert, and Kagera Na- 

 tional Parks on the route of the expedition. Scientifically profitable 

 visits were made also to the leading goological, medical, and agricul- 

 tural research stations operated by the government, including those 

 at Leopoldville, Yangambi, Nioka, Lwiro, and Bukavu. 



At the end of December 1954, Dr. Alexander Wetmore, research 

 associate, returned to Panama to continue the ornithological survey of 

 the Republic. Until late in January he was located at the Juan Mina 

 field station of the Gorgas Memorial Laboratory for Tropical Medi- 

 cine on the Rio Chagres, a short distance below JNIadden Dam, an area 

 on the Caribbean drainage, which, through the formation of Gatun 

 Lake, has become especially favorable for birds that choose a fresh- 

 water habitat, as well as those that frequent forest. 



Late in January, accompanied by Mrs. Wetmore, Dr. Wetmore 

 drove by jeep to El Volcan in the mountains of western Chiriqui to 

 remain until the end of March. The Finca Palo Santo of Don Pablo 

 Brackney was again made available for a base, and from here he 

 worked into the lower Temperate Zone on Cerro Picacho on the Con- 

 tinental Divide and also covered the lower and middle slopes of the 

 great Chiriqui Volcano. In February the party located at the finca 

 of Alois Hartmami at Santa Clara, visited also last year, and from 

 here it was possible, through use of a jeep, to make valuable collections 

 across to the Panamanian-Costa Rican frontier near El Sereno. Here 

 the forest on the Panamanian side still remains only on the hills and 

 in the steeper valleys, as in the more accessible areas timber has been 

 cut. Studies made later from the small settlement of Cerro Punta, 

 located at 6,100 feet elevation toward the Continental Divide, were 

 especially interesting since this place gave access to high, heavily 



