VOICES OP TROPICAL BIRDS FUERTES. 3l7 



Hoot-oot . . . hoot-oot in perfect time — hoot-oot (blank), hoot-oot 

 (blank), almost indefinitely. It was a pervasive sonnd, about as loud 

 as and very like the individual toots of a screech owl, and was given 

 to the invariable accompaniment of the twitching tail, and with the 

 neck humped up and the bill directed downward. 



Every student in the Tropics hopes he may soon meet with trogons, 

 at once the most beautiful and the most mysterious of all the varied 

 tropical birds. Nothing could exceed the richness of their contrasting 

 blood-red under parts, white and black tails, and resplendent emer- 

 ald-green heads and backs. The large Pharomacnis trogons, of 

 which the famed quetzal is a type, with their delicate yet richly 

 gorgeous and pendulous mantle of feathers, are, for sheer beauty, 

 among nature's truly great triumphs, and can not fail to force deep 

 appreciation from the most calloused or mercenary collector. P. 

 antisianus has a loud, rolling call, which I put in my notes as " whee 

 oo, corre o," done in a round, velvety whistle. When, after quite a 

 long time spent in imitating the unknown note, in the soggy tree-fern 

 forest at the ridge of the coast Andes, this magnificent ruby and 

 emerald creature came swinging toward me in deeply undulating 

 waves and perched alertly in full sight not far away, I found it hard 

 to breathe so great was my excitement and joy. We never found it 

 a common bird and only three were seen in all our travel in Colombia. 



A close congener of antisianus, the golden-headed trogon, fails in 

 elegance before this distinguished beauty, though a marvel, never- 

 theless. Its notes are more commonplace, too, being merely booming 

 hoots, not very loud but quite pervasive. The little banded trogons, 

 with pink breasts, as well as the yellow-breasted ones, have very 

 characteristic calls, so like each other that I never learned to distin- 

 guish the various species. They all sit quietly on some slender perch 

 or vine stem, and do their rolling call ruk, ruk, uk, uk, uk, k, k, k, k, 

 all on the same note. Here again the tail seems to be indispensable 

 to the performance, and jerks sharply forward under the perch with 

 each syllable. More than once this motion became the index to the 

 authorship of the strangely pervasive and ventriloquistic sound. 



One other group of birds has this quiet fashion of softly hooting 

 from some low perch in the thicker and more watered parts of the 

 forest. The curious racket-tailed motmots have what I call the most 

 velvety of all bird notes. It is usually a single short " oot," pitched 

 about five tones below w^here one can whistle. This note is very 

 gentle, though fairly loud, and I think that some persons who do not 

 hear low vibrations very well would often fail to notice it at a short 

 distance. Most of the natives have sound names for motmots, and 

 the Maya Indians of Yucatan call the brilliant little Eumomota " toh," 

 and, as an appreciation of this interest, he has come to nest and 



