90 TROPICAL WILD LIFE IN BRITISH GUIANA 



trills, chirps and bellows to their sources, was infinitely sat- 

 isfying. A percentage of one in five, successfully solved, 

 was about all that one could expect. 



Bird voices were the dominant ones, far excelling in 

 numbers and in unusualness all the others combined.^ One 

 missed the sweet, simple songs and warbles of our northern 

 woods. When, very rarely, a thrush uttered a phrase, it 

 seemed wholly out of place. Sudden startling outpourings 

 of sound were the rule perhaps a single scream or wail, the 

 trill of a tinamou or the sweet crescendo of a woodhewer, 

 the solid silver resonating call of the goldbird or the incom- 

 parable anvils of the bellbird. Frogs and toads were a close 

 second in every respect in the matter of voice, but the mam- 

 mals were dumb or else spoke in whispers or scents. 



As in the East, where the early morning resounded to 

 the concerted calls of pheasants and the laughing chorus of 

 gibbons, so here we were awakened by the chachalacas and 

 the red howling monkeys the "hanaquas and baboons" of 

 the natives. Again and again I was startled by similar par- 

 allels between the two great tropics, separated by so many 

 hundreds of miles of open ocean. 



From whatever aspect we consider it, the tropical jun- 

 gle is very wonderful; a storehouse full of secrets at which 

 we can merely guess. To solve even the easiest requires 

 punishingly hard labor of body and mind, hours of quiet 

 watching and slow creeping through dense tangles. But 

 there is no more inspiring and completely satisfying feeling 

 in the world than to roll into one's hammock at night, with 

 note-book, photographic plate or sketch book filled with a 

 sincere, however slight, addition to our knowledge of the 

 evolution of life on this planet. 



