194 THE ODYSSEY OF AN ANIMAL COLLECTOR 
make one perspire freely and to quickly bring on a feeling of 
exhaustion. Changing into something dry was my chief form of 
recreation, but it meant only a few minutes’ comfort. 
Our first captures were some Gray-headed Negro-finches, an 
Allied Hornbill, a Black-and-white Casqued Hornbill—a large 
quaint-looking species which had only quite recently been re- 
corded as far west as the Gold Coast—and some Red-headed 
Parrots—a species which is rare in captivity. But trapping was 
exceedingly difficult and bird-life comparatively scarce. 
Soon after our arrival here I suddenly developed a temperature 
and became almost delirious. The local District Commissioner 
‘phoned the doctor at Kumasi, who motored out and gave me an 
injection. This was my first real dose of malaria since I started 
collecting and it was certainly a knockout. I was much weakened 
but eventually went on with the job. 
My chief interest here, as in the Cameroons, was the forest- 
dwelling species of sunbirds. These included the exquisite Superb 
Sunbird and the Buff-throated Sunbird. The latter was new to me 
and being very distinctly marked I was keen to add a few speci- 
mens to my collection. It has a forehead of metallic green, a dark 
brown back, throat buff, and the rest of the under side chestnut. 
At certain seasons the forest species feed exclusively on the blooms 
of Bombax or Silk Cotton Trees, which grow to a great height 
and have branchless trunks studded with thorny protuberances. 
I came across one immense tree with an unusually fine crop of 
flowers that had attracted a host of sunbirds, which from the 
ground looked like a swarm of bees busily at work. Unfortu- 
nately bombax trees flower before the leaves form, so there is not 
enough shade for the setting of nets in them; but this is not the 
only difficulty. The tree, just mentioned, seemed so difficult and 
dangerous to climb that I offered a substantial reward to some 
forest-dwelling natives if they would go up and fix a rope to the 
first branch, so that I could climb it more easily myself, but they 
refused to make the attempt. Not to be outdone, I got a native 
blacksmith to make a number of iron spikes, but the driving of 
these into the trunk was infinitely more difficult than I had im- 
agined. The humid heat of the Gold Coast is trying enough at 
