i66 Bird - Lore 



more than twice the length of any continuous song I have ever heard, the 

 Winter Wren being second with twenty-eight seconds. But in this broken 

 song there are surely many opportunities to catch the thimblefiil of breath 

 a Wren can hold, while the Chamaza song was one long, unbroken, and con- 

 stantly increasing sound. 



Eventually, my singer came so near that I was afraid of scaring it away 

 by the imperfection of my imitation, which required a full breath out, an 

 in^breath to full lung-capacity, and then the last bit of breath I could expel 

 to accomplish even a forty-second song! So I sat silent, tense and eager, 

 hoping almost against hope that the mystery-bird would reveal himself. 

 Suddenly, almost at my heels, a song began. Very soft and throaty at first, 

 gradually rising and filling, the steady throbbing crescendo proceeded until 

 I was so thrilled that I was afraid I couldn't stand it any longer. I dared 

 not move, as I was in plain sight, on the edge of a scar in the earth from a 

 recently uprooted tree. Finally, though, the tension was relaxed; the song 

 ceased. Where would it be next time? In front of me? Or would the singer 

 see me and depart for good, still a mystery? Even as I was thinking these 

 things, a ghostly-silent little shadow sped dangling past me and came to a 

 halt about thirty feet away, half lost in the dark fog, on the far side of the 

 raw little clearing. In awful anxiety lest he become swallowed up in the mist 

 and lost to me, and with a great effort not to lose the dim impression of the 

 faintly-seen bird, I moved slightly for a better view. My long watch was 

 futile, for my spirit bird disappeared. I sat awhile and mourned, with a great 

 deal of invective in my heart. But soon realizing that this was futile, I decided 

 to practise the song I had learned. Imagine my surprise, after the first 

 attempt, to hear, close by, the loud wip-wip of yesterday, and to see it 

 followed almost immediately by another ghost-bird, which had the grace to 

 alight or stop running (I couldn't be positive which) within range and in sight. 

 This proved to be C. turdina. Although we often heard the curious pro- 

 tracted song later, when we went to the top of the range, we never again 

 caught sight of this little-known bird, and this specimen remains unique in 

 the whole South American collection. 



The several species of true Ant-thrush, Formicarius, all have characteristic 

 notes, combined with the same skiilking, rail-like habits of the foregoing. 

 The recently described Colombian form of F. rufipectus has two sharp whistles, 

 the last a semitone above the first. This, in our experience, was never varied. 

 F. analis connectens, from the lower forest zone of the eastern foot above 

 Villavicencio, had a song the exact reverse of that of Grallaria hypoleuca; 

 a loud note on G, followed, after a rest, by a close descending scale of three or 

 four semitones. Formicarius, like Grallaria, has a sort of clucking quality 

 when heard near at hand. 



Few brush-birds have more distinctive notes than the Ant-shrikes or 

 Thamnophilus and their relatives. The commonest one we encountered, 



