VOICES OF TROPICAL BIEDS — FUERTES. 801 



\Yhile riding along the mountain trails, and are the unending goal of 

 many a sweltering still hunt through the mosquito- full but otherwise 

 Sabbath-still forest. For me, at least, a deep, humid mountain 

 forest never ceases to have a hushing, even oppressive, effect. Awed 

 and tense, I find myself a foreign and discordant note in the giant 

 stillness. With this half-guilty feeling, and hushed by the stern 

 green silence, hypnotized, as it were, into a sort of subjective identity 

 with the Sunday-like vacuum of sound and keyed to a nervous ex- 

 pectancy in tune with the heavy odorous stillness, the sudden singing 

 of any of these brilliant-voiced wood wrens is sufficiently startling 

 to make one recoil, lumpy-throated, and it is often more than a 

 mere second -or two before the readjustment into the normal frame of 

 mind can be made. 



The wrens of the genus Thryoj)hilus^ which are closely allied to our 

 Carolina wren, deserve a high place in the scale of singers. I think 

 the Colombian species ^ are the most versatile and surprising singers 

 in the entire family ; and this is indeed high praise, for few, if any, 

 birds of their size can surpass the wrens in volume and brilliancy of 



tone. 



II. TINAMOUS, PARTRIDGES, AND SOLITAIRES. 



In the Tropics, as in more familiar scenes, the bird songs of the 

 fields are frank, pastoral, and prevalent. With us, the meadowlark, 

 field sparrow, vesper, and song sparrows pipe often and openly, and 

 from May to October their notes are almost constantly in the air. 

 But the forest birds are more reluctant singers, and their rare notes 

 are all mystery, romance, and reclusive shyness. The field sparrow 

 will sit on a dock stalk and sing, looking you in the eyes ; the veery 

 will quietly fade away when your presence is discovered. 



So it is, even to a more marked degree, in the Tropics. In the open 

 pastures and on the bushy slopes of the Andes one hears the shrill 

 piping of the "four-wing" cuckoo {Diplopterus) ^ the insistent 

 kekklng of the spurwing plover, the dry, phcebelike fret of the 

 spinetails {Synallaxis) ^ the lisping insect songs of grassquits, and, 

 from the bordering forest edge, the leisurely whistling of orioles. 

 But enter the forest, and all is of another world. For a long time, 

 perhaps, as you make your way through the heavy hush of its 

 darkened ways, no sound strikes the ear but the drip of water from 

 spongy moss clumps on broad leaves. You feel yourself to be the 

 only animate thing in your universe. All at once, perhaps far off 

 through the forest, perhaps close behind you, you hear the strangely 

 moving whinny of a tinamou. I think no sound I have ever heard 

 has more deeply reached into me and taken hold. Whether it is the 



1 Thri/opMlus lujalhus, T. Icucotis, and T. albipcctus bogutensis. 



