3l8 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I50 



call softly until they are assembled again. In uninhabited areas, where 

 they are more common, and may be tame, a male sometimes steps 

 out with crest raised, head erect, and feathers fluffed to bow quickly 

 with extended neck. 



Sometimes I have found them feeding beneath berry-bearing trees 

 on the drupes dropped or knocked down by other birds or by 

 monkeys. It is common to observe their scratchings on the forest 

 floor, often over considerable areas. Rarely in early morning I have 

 seen them venture out on an open sand bank to the edge of a river 

 to drink. 



Their presence and abundance are known mainly from their loud, 

 rapid calls heard most often at dusk or at dawn, occasionally on 

 moonlight nights, and less often in the earlier hours of the forenoon. 

 The notes may be written perro-mulato, perro-mulato, repeated with- 

 out a break, sometimes for several minutes for a total of several 

 hundred times. These notes, audible for half a kilometer or more, 

 give them their common country name of perro mulato — mulatto dog 

 — ^throughout the whole of eastern Panama. Others, mainly those 

 living along the Caribbean, have likened the notes to corcoro-vado, 

 and from this call them corcorovado. In 1963 in the eastern San 

 Bias, where I heard them frequently, the call there seemed nearer 

 to this rendition than to the other with which I had been long familiar 

 at numerous localities on the Pacific slope. In addition they are 

 known everywhere by the common appellation of gallito monte. The 

 Cuna Indians call them ucuru. 



Chapman (My Tropical Air Castle, 1929, pp. 275-276) found 

 from observations of two captive birds, presumed to be a pair, that 

 the call heard so commonly is a duet, in which the two alternate in 

 perfect time. In Chapman's rendition of the call as corcoro vado 

 the second bird was responsible for the last two syllables. Some 

 observations of my own verify this, as at Boca de Paya in Darien one 

 evening I heard one wood quail start with a loud Mu-u-u-latto 

 repeated several times until suddenly the call changed to the usual 

 perro mu-u-latto, undoubtedly when a companion joined. In 1963, 

 near Armila, San Bias, when the female of a pair was taken for a 

 specimen, the remaining bird called corcoro — for several evenings, 

 until in a week or so this changed again to the full corcoro-vado so that 

 we believed that another mate had been obtained. 



The species has a wide distribution from southwestern Costa Rica 

 through Panama to northern Colombia and Venezuela, and south, east 

 of the Andes, through Ecuador and Peru to eastern Bolivia and 

 Brazil. Two geographic races are found in Panama. 



