56 THE ODYSSEY OF AN ANIMAL COLLECTOR 
To be a successful trapper, especially when operating in a new 
field, one must forever be thinking up new ideas. Some will in- 
evitably misfire, but even in failure one invariably learns: some- 
thing about the habits of birds. After a week or two in the Col des 
Nuages I had not had a glimpse of Chaulet’s Cissa, nor heard a 
cry which might belong to one. Some of the lower forest levels 
were not difficult to walk through, and in fact one could see 
quite a distance through the trees, so I said to myself one day 
when wondering how one could ever possibly catch a tree-dwelling 
bird one had never seen: If I were a cissa flying through this forest 
what conspicuous perching-place would attract my attention? I 
covered a lot of ground and there was no such place. It became 
evident then that in this part of the forest there were no horizontal 
branches, they all slanted up at an angle of about forty-five de- 
grees. I could find no convenient perch for a hungry bird looking 
for ground-dwelling insects. The answer was simple. Why not 
make one? | 
In a quiet little forest glade—a sort of natural canopied avenue 
—where the view was uninterrupted for fifty yards or more, I 
slung a long pole horizontally between two trees, about four feet 
above the ground. As there was little undergrowth here it could 
be seen from most angles. On the ground a patch was cleared of 
leaves and sticks, not directly below the pole but at an angle of 
forty-five degrees so that it could be more easily seen, and on this 
a spring-net trap, baited with live meal-worms, was set. The frame- 
work of the trap was concealed with leaves so that all that re- 
mained visible was a cork to which some struggling meal-worms 
had been pinned by their tails. In the first instance it was the pole 
rather than the trap that would attract any birds, but half the 
battle in trapping any rare bird of no fixed abode is to get it 
to come in contact with one’s traps. Once on the pole, no bird 
could fail to be attracted by the patch below cleared of dead leaves 
with some meal-worms struggling in the middle of it. He would 
pounce down, give a sharp tug and over would fly the net, holding 
him captive beneath it. That, in fact, is the simple story of the 
capture of six Chaulet’s Cissas—a bird known to science till then 
by only one skin. They were caught singly over the period of a 
