OPEN CLEARING AND SECONDGROWTH 



65 



eight of the blackbirds had estabhshed themselves, but the 

 yellow-heads, always associated with them on the coast, had 

 not yet found their way hither. Four kingfishers drew sus- 

 tenance from the little creek, the great grey and the great 

 green, the pygmy and the spotted. Ground doves were ubiq- 

 uitous and perhaps the most abundant of the clearing birds, 

 but their favorite haunts were the sandy roads, where they 

 trotted along in droves, two species of them, the grey and 

 the talpacoti ground doves. Here, too, the white-necked 

 nighthawks came at twilight and called their lonesome wlio- 

 are-you, and performed their weird dances in the moonlight, 

 sometimes fifty or more together. 



Passing down to the banks of the JNIazaruni and the 

 extent of sand and muddy beach exposed at low tide, we 

 sin-prised the great-billed terns occasionally flying over, or 

 stopping to snatch at the host of winged termites rising from 

 some dead stump. Snakebirds perched along the edge or 

 dropped off and swam half-immersed. Five herons and an 

 ibis fished along shore, the cocoi, little blue and agami her- 

 ons, American and snowy egrets and the curious Guiana 

 ibises. Two swallows were essentially fluvicoline, the varie- 

 gated and the half-belted, but their frequent excursions to 

 the clearing in pursuit of insect food, gave them a right to 

 inchision in our hst. 



There remained the dense shrubbery and the second- 

 growth itself, and indeed the rubber trees also, where these 

 had waxed tall and strong. In such places there dwelt an 

 interesting assemblage of more than twenty-five species of 

 birds found nowhere else in this region. The only subdivi- 

 sions I can make are superficial and unequal. One was a 

 bird of prey, one wholly terrestrial, and another nocturnal. 

 The first was the four-banded sparrowhawk, which hunted 

 both in the rubber and the secondgrowth. The ground bird 

 was the pileated tinamou whose plaintive trill rang out night 

 and morning. The bird of night was the giant goatsucker 

 or poor-me-one. 



