60 TROPICAL WILD LIFE IN BRITISH GUIANA 



With the destruction of the jungle went its animal life. 

 "No voice of goldbird or woodhewer rang out, no heliconias 

 fluttered past, no accouri or monkey fled at our approach. 

 One day a small ground dove swung by, circled about and 

 alighted on a dead stub, craning its neck at the strange sight, 

 and the following day it was feeding on the seeds fallen from 

 a weed pile which the coolie workmen had left. After some 

 such inconspicuous fashion the new world of life was inau- 

 gurated. How the word was passed miles down river, or far 

 off to other clearings we shall probably never know, but 

 doves, tanagers, grassfinches, kingfishers, rails, orioles and 

 kiskadees soon gathered, found certain definite niches for 

 themselves and settled down permanently. 



If we had had time and strength we could doubtless 

 have duplicated the evidences of this peculiar new type of 

 fauna in every group of the animal kingdom, but birds were 

 the beings which we studied most intensely. Within sight 

 of Kalacoon House we noted sixty-five species which in no 

 sense could be termed jungle birds. They were never ob- 

 served within the jungle and with very few exceptions were 

 recent arrivals, their presence being coincident with and 

 quite dependent on the clearing and secondgrowth. 



Kalacoon House itself yielded the first examples of 

 adaptation to new conditions. When we arrived we found 

 a small colony of grey-breasted martins firmly established. 

 They were roosting and nesting indoors, gaining admittance 

 by means of broken window panes, and several of the shel- 

 tered tops of posts below stairs also held nests. We put 

 up a bird box on the summit of a pole and at once a battle 

 ensued for its use, the successful pair breeding immediately. 

 In a single, isolated palm tree in the front compound were 

 five nests. Four were of successive broods of moriche ori- 

 oles, the fourth being still in use. The fifth was the nest of 

 a palm tanager. The palm and blue tanagers were almost 

 as domestic as the martins, flying in and out of the house 

 all day, picking spiders from the beams overhead. 



