BIRD LIFE OF BARTICA 93 



known to us. To emphasize by reiterating what I have wi'it- 

 ten, in other words we drag a tiny dredge along the ocean 

 bed, and painfully draw to the surface a few fragmentary 

 organisms, which often burst in our rarified element. We 

 see a company of fluttering forms high overhead — one to 

 two hundred feet above the ground — and our guns bring- 

 down a swirling, bedraggled flufl^ which was a bird, whose 

 throat uttered one of the strange songs which we just heard, 

 whose nest and eggs or young are somewhere far aloft. We 

 hold in our hand an instant's cross-section of an exceedingly 

 interesting life, which in the jungle played a part full of 

 significance. And we realize that until we offset gravitation 

 and establish stations of observation in the tops of some of 

 these giant trees, our ignorance of this roof of the jungle 

 must remain complete. 



Future work will reveal some very interesting facts in 

 regard to the home ranges of jungle birds. For the first 

 week or two all seemed more or less confused, and the time 

 and place of meeting with definite species a matter of luck. 

 But little by little clarity came from the twilight, and I be- 

 gan to perceive system and regularity. A certain bend in 

 the trail always revealed a quartet of white-capped mana- 

 kins, regardless of their breeding season, and toward dusk 

 I was certain of finding them working their way toward a 

 dense tangle of bush ropes. In the mid-day heat, on the 

 contrary, they almost invariably perched in a certain medium 

 tree, open to the east at the edge of the jungle. Parrots 

 were even more definite about the time and place of roosting, 

 but tlieir feeding habits were less sure. The wandering 

 flocks of small birds seemed to be the least definite, they 

 appeared to wander at will, but comparing accumulated 

 notes I began to see a certain rliythm of direction, an orien- 

 tation to points of the compass and to the beginning and the 

 end of the day which assuredly had some meaning. When 

 I think of the searchers for carrion, of the weaving flight 

 of swifts insect-hunting in the open sky, of the followers of 



