LIFE HISTORY OF THE QUETZAL—SKUTCH 269 
conception when he knows only the forests of the North Temperate 
Zone, or even those of the lowland Tropics. Each larger tree upholds 
a mass of vegetation which must be estimated, not in pounds or in 
hundredweight, but in tons. In the dense covering of mosses are 
rooted ferns, herbs, shrubs, and even trees of fair size. Especially 
noteworthy are the orchids of myriad kinds, the cavendishias and 
related ericaceous shrubs, with their glossy leaves and heads of pink 
and white blossoms. The undergrowth is often dense, with tangles of 
slender-stemmed bamboos, ferns in bewilding variety, and shrubs and 
herbs, including many elegant members of the acanthus family and 
the Gesneriaceae. 
Subtropical forest of this type appears essential to the existence of 
the quetzal. While the bird will often venture beyond the forest 
to forage and nest in adjacent clearings, it is not known to occur in 
districts from which the heavy woodland has been shorn. The almost 
total destruction of the original forest over the central plateau of 
Costa Rica and nearly all of the altos or central highlands of Guate- 
mala is responsible for the disappearance of the quetzal from these 
regions, no less than the unremitting persecution of commercial plume 
collectors and less expert trophy hunters. But happily for the bird 
and those who admire it, there still exist, in the northern parts of the 
departments of Alta Vera Paz and El Quiché in Guatemala, but above 
all in Honduras and southern Costa Rica, great areas of subtropical 
forest on mountains so rugged and difficult of access that they must 
long defy the devastating invasions of man. Recent well-organized 
attempts at road making through some of these mountains serve merely 
to emphasize the difficulties of conquering them. As I write, I look 
over the broad, forest-mantled flanks of the Talamancan Cordillera 
and like to think that for many centuries they will remain the inviolate 
home of the quetzal, the Costa Rican bellbird, the black-faced solitaire, 
the Costa Rican chlorophonia, and all the birds that dwell with them 
in the subtropical mountains. Doubtless quetzals must continue to owe 
their existence more to the inaccessibility of their haunts than to 
human laws, which, as that decreed a dozen years or so ago in Guate- 
mala for their protection, are usually not made until the creature 
they would save becomes rare almost to the vanishing point. 
APPEARANCE OF THE QUETZAL 
Although a formal account of the plumage of the quetzal may be 
found in Ridgway’s “Birds of North and Middle America” and other 
standard works of descriptive ornithology, I shall give here, with only 
slight verbal changes, a word picture that I wrote in my journal on 
April 28, 1938, when I had the living birds daily before me: “The 
male is a supremely lovely bird; the most beautiful, all things con- 
