COLLECTING WAYS AND COLLECTING DAYS. 353 
and then the up-and-down motion of the head would stop and the bird 
would shift its position a little. Thus moving round the trunk, it 
_ at last came full into sight. To our astonishment we saw then it was a 
barbet and, as we thought, the common Cyanops asiatica. To make 
certain, however, H. brought it down with a reduced charge of No. 10 
shot, and our delight may be imagined when it proved to be, not 
C. asiatica, but the much rarer C. zcognita of Hume. Subsequently 
I found this bird not uncommon on this Taungjah pass. Its note is 
altogether indistinguishable from that of its near allies, Cyanops 
asiatica and C.davisoni, if indeed these two latter are not one and 
the same bird. The curious woodpecker-like action in hammering 
at the bark of a tree I have not observed in any other species of 
barbet. 
Having strung up C. ecognita on the bird-stick, we proceeded on our 
way, collecting as we went. At one very steep spot on the hill-side I got 
into a flock of that curious shrike-thrush, Gampsorhynchus torquatus ; 
they were flitting about on all sides uttering their curious grating note 
and threading their way with incredible rapidity through the stems of 
a thick clump of bamboos. The ground down which I had to climb 
was like the side of a house, and after innumerable shots I only managed 
to secure one specimen, but that was a beauty, scarcely damaged at all 
by the shot. Collecting on steep hill-sides, whether the quarry is birds 
or insects, is very trying work for the temper. 1 know nothing so good 
or so bad, as the case may be viewed, for bringing out an eloquent, if 
not elegant, flow of language. After I had recovered my bird and got 
up to the road again, H. said I had uttered frightful anathemas, 
However, the year before, on this very spot, he acknowledged he had 
been quite as bad. He was going to the Thaungyin in May and was 
collecting butterflies and other insects for me. Now this road in the 
end of April and the beginning of May that year simply swarmed with 
numbers of that magnificent morphine butterfly, Stictophthalma louisa. 
He had caught some half dozen, but just at this spot, where I had now 
got G. torquatus, there were some twenty or thirty Stctophthalmas 
_ floating about up and down the hill,and H. found himself as busy as 
he could possibly be for a few minutes trundling up and down the steep 
hill-side and making himself very hot and wet. He had just struck at 
a Stictophthalma that had disappeared with a whop into the centre of a 
