A BI-MONTHLY MAGAZINE 



DEVOTED TO THE STUDY AND PROTECTION OF BIRDS 



Official Organ of The Audubon Societies 



Vol. XV November— December, 1913 No. 6 



Impressions of the Voices of Tropical Birds 



By LOUIS AGASSIZ FUERTES 



Illustrated by the author 

 FIRST PAPER— THE WRENS 



[Editor's Note. — Readers of Bird-Lore who have been privileged to hear Mr. 

 Fuertes imitale the calls and songs of birds are well aware that his ornithological talents 

 are not confined to his exceptional ability to portray their forms, but that he possesses 

 also a keen, accurate, and sympathetic ear, with a gift for interpretation which enables 

 him to reproduce birds' voices with surprising accuracy. 



During recent years, as the artist of various American Museum expeditions to 

 tropical America, ]\Ir. Fuertes has met many species of tropical birds in life, and his 

 impressions of their songs will be given in a series of papers, of which the present is the 

 tirst.— F. M. C] 



ROUGHLY speaking, Wrens' songs improve in direct ratio with the 

 humidity and darkness of their haunts. This, at least, is the vi\-id 

 impression one gets from a field acquaintance with the tropical genera, 

 Heleodytes, Donacobius, Thryothorus, Henicorhina and Pheugopedius. 



So far as I have been able to discover, all the Cactus Wrens except Heleo- 

 dytes hicolor (which also differs in several other respects), are possessed of only 

 a harsh, vigorous, and impertinent scold — a sort of angry, chattering noise, 

 more or less closely imitated by pressing the tongue against the roof of the 

 mouth and forcing the air out of a small opening behind the back teeth! All 

 the speckle-breasted Cactus Wrens species have this note, and, so far as I 

 know, no other that approaches a song, much less a Wren song. Our own 

 southwestern species simply repeats a lazy, cross rrrr, rrrr, rrrr, while the Mexi- 

 can bird, Heleodytes zonatus, seems to try to yell "brak-a-co-ax," rapidly 

 repeated, but still in the unmistakable Cactus Wren burr. If song is of any 

 value as a philogenetic character, Heleodytes hicolor certainly deserves to be 

 lifted out of the prying and ill-natured group it now graces, and set down 

 somewhere near the big Wren-Thrashers of the genus Donacobius* for it shares 



*Donacobius is a Wren-like Thrasher or Thrashcr-like Wren which is usually placed 

 in the family Mimidae. 



