66 A JAGUAR-HUNT ON THE TAQUARY 



plover did not pay any heed to the fish ; but the black 

 carrion vultures feasted on them ia the mud ; and in the 

 pools that were not dry, small alligators, the jacare-tinga, 

 were feasting also. In many places the stench from the 

 dead fish was unpleasant. 



Then for miles we rode through a beautiful open 

 forest of tall, slender caranda palms, with other trees 

 scattered among them. Green parakeets with black 

 heads chattered as they flew ; noisy green and red 

 parrots cKmbed among the palms ; and huge macaws, 

 some entirely blue, others almost entirely red, screamed 

 loudly as they perched in the trees or took wing at our 

 approach. If one was wounded, its cries kept its com- 

 panions circling around overhead. The naturahsts found 

 the bird fauna totally different from that which they 

 had been collecting in the hill-country near Corumba, 

 seventy or eighty miles distant ; and birds swarmed, 

 both species and individuals. South America has the 

 most extensive and most varied avifauna of all the 

 continents. On the other hand, its mammalian fauna, 

 although very interesting, is rather poor in number of 

 species and individuals and in the size of the beasts. It 

 possesses more mammals that are unique and distinctive 

 in type than does any other continent save Australia ; 

 and they are of higher and much more varied types than 

 in Australia. But there is nothing approaching the 

 majesty, beauty, and swarming mass of the great 

 mammahan Mfe of Africa, and in a less degree of 

 tropical Asia ; indeed, it does not even approach the 

 similar mammahan hfe of North America and northern 

 Eurasia, poor though this is compared with the seething 

 vitality of tropical hfe in the Old World. During a 

 geologically recent period, a period extending into that 

 which saw man spread over the world in substantially 



