igo ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE 



goatsuckers, cuckoos, humming-birds, swallows, 

 finches, tanagers, troupials, tyrant-birds, and wood- 

 hewers of several species. 



Here, despite my continual watchfulness, it was 

 as in England — the birds that were absent yesterday 

 and for the past six months were present to-day, 

 and singing all about us. It was, indeed, the rarest 

 thing to witness the arrival of any bird; so rare, that 

 on one occasion it was a matter of great joy to me 

 when, walking on the north side of our plantation 

 one spring day, I spied a small bird slowly and 

 laboriously flying towards me over the plain, and 

 recognised it at a distance as the very bird I had been 

 waiting and watching for, the briUiant little scarlet 

 tyrant-bird — most brilliant in colouring and most 

 musical in its small bell-like voice of all our little 

 birds. Arrived at the trees, he alighted and was 

 doubtless glad to reach his summer home and refuge 

 — that oasis of trees on the wide grassy desert. 



When the time came, in February, March and 

 April, for the migrants to return to the north, it was 

 a different matter. The birds, as I have said, were 

 then manifestly in a state of disquiet: one saw from 

 their behaviour how they were moved — one may say 

 driven — reluctantly from their place by that strange 

 influence, that fear, which affected them in different 

 degrees, so that from the time migration began it 

 was well-nigh three months before it ended with the 

 departure of those that feared most to go and clung 

 most tenaciously to their leafy homes. 



Let me give one instance of this reluctance of the 



