BRAZILIAN BIRDS DO NOT MIGRATE 373 



tropical America. And indeed the feathered races nowhere find a 

 richer field for their developement than here, where the vegetable 

 world revels in luxuriant growth ; and myriads of insects, 

 peopling the forest, the field, and the water, furnish each kind 

 according to its wants with an inexhaustible supply of food. 

 The circumstance that man but thinly inhabits these wilds, is 

 another reason which favours the multiplication of the feathered 

 tribes ; for, in Europe also, birds would no doubt be far more 

 numerous, if the farmer, the sportsman, and so many other 

 enemies were not continually thinning their ranks. To these 

 elements of destruction they are far less exposed in tropical 

 America, and being comparatively but little disturbed, they 

 reign, as it were, over the forest and the open field, over the 

 mountain and the plain, over the river and the lake. 



It is evident that, in countries where a uniform temperature 

 renders winter and summer almost undistinguishable, the birds 

 are not compelled to wide migrations. Thus, in Brazil, the 

 swallow and the cuckoo are sedentary, the storks never leave 

 the land where they breed, and the singing birds tune their 

 notes the whole year round. The search for food or other local 

 causes alone compel the Brazilian birds to wander from one 

 district to another. Thus the rainy season produces in the vast 

 forests a damp coolness uncongenial to their feathered tenants ; 

 "Who then eagerly seek the open country, where the bananas, 

 oranges, and guavas, laden with ripe fruit, invite them to an 

 abundant banquet. This is the time for the Brazilian settler 

 to seize his rifle, and to shoot without trouble a number of the 

 finest birds : — parrots, toucans, cotingas — that are almost inac- 

 cessible at other seasons. The war he wages with the winged 

 visitors of his plantation and garden, is partly for the sake of 

 their delicate flesh, but chiefly for the protection of his property, 

 *as the parrots are particularly fond of maize, while the cassiques 

 and the toucans have a predilection for guavas and bananas, 

 land the finches for the rice field. At this time also the Indians 

 provide themselves with the beautifully coloured feathers of the 

 iaras, which serve them to plume their arrows, and to decorate 

 their persons, for these birds, otherwise so shy, are then attracted 

 far beyond the skirts of the forest by the favourite fruits of the 

 Sapucaya (Lecythis ollaria) or of the prickly spinea. 



Thus man knows how to profit by the annual wanderings of 



