316 ANNUAL REPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION^ 1915. 



closed, like jays and cuckoos, only more so. What with their looks, 

 their noises, and their actions no group of birds has more amusing 

 and interesting new sensations to offer than the toucans. 



The family of cuckoos has some very interesting developments in 

 the American Tropics. The little four-wing {Diplopterus) , heard in 

 the sunny river bottoms and lower brush}^ slopes — such places as a 

 brown thrasher would affect — has perhaps the most insistent voice 

 in his habitat. The commonest is an ascending couplet of notes a 

 semitone apart — E, F. This is a sharp, piercing whistle that gets 

 to be as much a part of the shimmering landscape as a hyla's notes do 

 of a northern meadow bog in March. Indeed, the four wing's fuller 

 song, which is a long, piercing note followed, after a short pause, by 

 an ascending series of shorter notes, awoke a strangely familiar chord 

 which I afterwards attached to the very similar pond toad call at 

 home. The name four wing arises from the curious overdevelop- 

 ment of the false wing or thumb plumes, which in this queer little 

 bird form a sharply defined and separately distensible fan of black 

 which the bird displays with a curious ducking motion. 



The larger brown cuckoos of the genus Piaya, which the natives 

 rather aptly call " squirrel birds" from their color and the slippery 

 way they glide through the branches, I have never heard call but 

 once, though they are fairly common throughout most of tropical 

 America. This one sat in a bare cecropia tree, and did a loud 

 rough kek, kek, kek, repeated 20 times or more, and I at first took 

 it for a big woodpecker. 



It is the little black, witchlike ani that is really the common 

 cuckoo of the open savannas, and abounds over the cattle ranges and 

 around the villages. There are a great many common native names 

 for these conspicuous little black whiners, the commonest being " gar- 

 rapatero," or tick eater. This name is almost universal, though in 

 Cuba and Porto Eico it bears, from its obsequious manner and its 

 great thin curved beak, the apt title of judio — or Jew. They are al- 

 most always in molt, and look shoddy and worn, and their peevishly 

 whined " ooo-eek " gets to be a mildly annoying accompaniment to 

 the day's work. 



The barbets and puff birds {Capito and Bucco) fall naturally into 

 this group, though they did not give us much to work on as to their 

 notes. Bucco was usually found perching quietly on some twig half- 

 way up in the trees along the roadside or pasture edges. All I re- 

 member of him is that he had a buzzing sort of scold, and could bite 

 a piece out of my finger when caught in the hand. 



The little spotted barbet, however {C. auratus), at Buena Vista, 

 on the eastern foot of the Andes, had a curious little toot that was the 

 despair of all of us till Mr. Chapman associated it with Capito. 



