114 TROPICAL WILD LIFE IN BRITISH GUIANA 



company and swayed all night on one leg in the center of 

 the great Mazaruni. The nighthawks, reversing things, spent 

 their days on the ground, but the poor-nie-ones, as I discov- 

 ered many years ago. kept, like the owls, to the thicker 

 branches of low trees. 



Crouched in the heart of a great hollow tree I learned 

 that tropical swifts sought shelter from both heat and rain 

 in the same place where they roosted. It was a wonderful 

 sight to see the bats leaving as the swifts eddied downward 

 through the foliage, silhouetted against the afterglow. At 

 mid-day there was always much squeaking of bats and chat- 

 tering of swifts as the birds whirled downward for their siesta 

 and disturbed the slumbers of the flittermice. 



Hummingbirds, like butterflies, roosted, perched to the 

 tips of very slender twigs, usually in some shrub or vine bare 

 of leaves, and they made no secret of their couch, but sat and 

 twittered volubly to the world before they followed the 

 habit of the great harpy eagles and tucked their heads behind 

 their absurd wings. They roosted singly, each atom of feath- 

 ers isolated in the great closed amphitheater of the jungle's 

 mid-growth, never more than two or three on one shrub. Anis 

 on the contrary, crowded to roost in a dense mob, sometimes 

 two and three deep, as if there were not room enough in this 

 tropical universe. Toucans, like most birds which nested in 

 holes, preferred to roost outside, where they folded them- 

 selves up like a paper parcel, first the monstrous beak laid 

 lengthways along the center of the back, then the inner edge 

 of the wings flapped up against it for side packing, and 

 lastly the gaudy, hinged tail folded back over all. Thus the 

 rain was not shunted off but apparently was aided in soak- 

 ing the plumage; the bird became a feathered ball, and all 

 the nocturnal requirements of these strange birds were ful- 

 filled which is the same as saying that we haven't the faint- 

 est idea why this remarkable habit exists ! 



Neither do we know why kiskadees and most other fly- 

 catchers roosted singly or at most, two or three in a tree, 



