IMPRESSIONS OF THE VOICES OF TROPICAL BIRDS.^ 



By Louis Agassiz Fuertes: 



[With IG plates.] 

 I. THE WRENS. 



Roughly speaking, wrens' songs improve in direct ratio with the 

 hnmidity and darkness of their haunts. This, at least, is the vivid 

 impression one gets from a field acquaintance with the tropical 

 genera, lieleodytes, Donacohius^ Thryothorus, Henicorhina, and 

 Pheugopedius. 



So far as I have been able to discover, all the cactus wrens except 

 Helcodytes hicolor (which also cliifers in several other respects), are 

 possessed of only a harsh, vigorous, and impertinent scold — a sort 

 of angry, chattering noise, more or less closely imitated by pressing 

 the tongue against the roof of the mouth and forcing the air out of 

 a small opening behind the back teeth. All the speckle-breasted 

 cactus wrens species have this note, and, so far as I know, no other 

 that approaches a song, much less a wren song. Our own south- 

 western species simply repeats a lazy, cross nvr, n^rr, rrrr, while the 

 Mexican bird, Heleodytes zonatus^ seems to try to yell "brak-a-co-ax," 

 rapidly repeated, but still in the unmistakable cactus wren burr. If 

 song is of any value as a philogenetic character, Heleodytes h'lcolor 

 certainly deserves to be lifted out of the prying and ill-natured group 

 it now graces, and set down somewhere near the big wren-thrashers 

 of the genus Donacobms^ for it shares with them a loud, liquid song, 

 which is not given by the male alone, but by both sexes at the same 

 time. 



This countersinging by the female, so far as I am aware, is not 

 generally known among birds, but it is certainly practiced by this 

 species, as well as by all forms I know of Pheugopedius^ Henicorhina, 



1 Reprinted by permission from Bird-Lore, vol. 15, no. 6, vol. 16, nos. 1, 2, ?,, 5, 6. 

 - Illustrated by the author. 



3 DonacoMiis is a wren-like thrasher or thrasber-like wren which is usually placed in 

 the family Mimidaj. 



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