BRITISH GUIANA (1) 107 
Much bedraggled, but with the trogon dry and undisturbed, I 
continued on my way. 
I emerged from the forest, and as IJ made my way across the 
settlement clearing I passed a small hut that I had seen many 
times before. It was a low solidly built place, half sunk in the 
ground, encroached upon by grass, and apparently abandoned and 
forgotten. Prisoners had been engaged in cutting back the grass 
and other vegetation from this section of the plantation, and they 
had set fire to the dried clippings, some of which were around 
the door of the shed. When I was about two hundred and fifty 
yards away there was a nerve-shattering explosion, and on looking 
round I found that the structure had disappeared into space. The 
prison staff were mystified as well as terrified, for no one knew 
that the shed was an explosive dump. It eventually transpired that 
a large stock of dynamite had been kept there when the place 
was under construction, and the present staff knew nothing about 
it. Grass had grown through the space under the door and had 
become dry and so the advancing flames had crept through and 
set the whole lot off. 
In creeping quietly through the forest I soon got to know the 
call of the trogons—a sound vaguely resembling the yelping cry 
of a puppy. There are many species in America—nearly all being 
confined to the tropical forests—and like the trogons of Africa 
and Asia, all are extremely beautiful. They are nowhere plentiful 
and are usually found singly or in pairs. My chances of catching 
any in the uppermost branches of the trees of the virgin forest, 
where they fed on berries, were, I thought, extremely slight, but 
following a trogon call one day I caught a glimpse of the bird as 
it appeared to settle on a tree trunk. On closer inspection I saw 
that it was clinging to a globular termites’ nest attached to the 
trunk about thirty feet from the ground, and was hammering in 
woodpecker-like fashion, but more slowly, at a cavity in the nest. 
Taking a hint from this, I found other trogons doing the same 
thing. This habit intrigued me as I was under the impression that 
the South American trogons were entirely frugivorous. I am 
unable to say whether they were eating the termites, but in each 
case the cavities were small and never enlarged sufficiently for a 
bird to enter, though I have read that the South American trogons 
