Todd-Carriker: Birds of Santa Marta Region, Colombia. 21 



size which it reaches in the eastern and central Andes. All the 

 finches of the paramo feed on the seeds of this plant, but the abun- 

 dant seeds of the grasses form the bulk of their food. Above the 

 snow-line there is nothing to be seen on the ridges and slopes except 

 masses of broken rock. 



Historical Review of Santa Marta Ornithology. 



Early Collections. — Apparently this region did not begin to figure in 

 ornithological literature until as late as 1847, when Lafresnaye de- 

 scribed two new species, Cardinalis granadensis and Dcndroplcx pici- 

 rostris, from specimens brought back by the French traveller A. De- 

 lattre, and supposed to have come from Rio Hacha. But it is an open 

 question whether Delattre himself actually collected these specimens 

 or others credited to him at Rio Hacha, since there is no direct evi- 

 dence (known to the writer) going to show that he ever visited this 

 point at all. The type-specimen of Trochilus floriceps, described by 

 Gould a few years later (1853), appears to have been brought to Eu- 

 rope as a curiosity by an orchid-collector who had entered the Sierra 

 Nevada. At just about this time, however, so-called Santa Marta 

 specimens began coming into the natural history establishment of the 

 brothers Jules and Edouard Verreaux, through whom they soon 

 reached the working ornithologists of that day. It does not certainly 

 appear who collected these specimens, many of which, bearing the 

 characteristic Verreaux labels, still exist in the various museums of 

 Europe and America. It may possibly have been one Fontainier, whose 

 name occurs in connection with several of the early published Santa 

 Marta records, and for whom Bonaparte named a supposed new 

 species of Accipitcr. At any rate, specimens from this source have 

 been the chief basis of numerous references scattered through the 

 papers of Bonaparte, Sclater, and various other authors, down even to 

 more recent years. A number of new forms were described, based 

 on this material, while there are also a few records attributed to other 

 parties, such as Bonnecourt and Bouchard. A collation of the avail- 

 able records shows that down to the year 1871 no less than seventy- 

 five species had been recorded from the region in question. With but 

 one or two exceptions these were all Tropical Zone forms, most of 

 which, it is true, have subsequently been found more or less commonly 



