1891.] Geography and Travels. 733 
forming a little fishing village along the road leading up to it, were 
the sight among cocoa groves. The inhabitants of the place were an 
inhospitable lot, and, failing to make terms with them, we camped for 
the night on the beach, among our baggage. The next morning, con- 
cluding the port to be better fitted for our purpose than the inland 
town, we hired a little house just big enough to put a table into and 
to hang up our hammocks, and moved in, and, hiring an Indian boy 
as cook, were ready to look about us. The country along the coast 
was level and sandy, and much of it planted in cocoa groves, the rest 
showing ditches and banks made for irrigating rice, though the fields 
were now dry and grown up to grass and weeds, the last year having 
been too dry to raise rice. Troops of horses were feeding over these 
plains. Behind this level land the country rose up in low hills, which 
were rocky and covered with thick bushes. The only virgin forest in 
sight was several miles away, inland, and on steeper, higher hills. 
The birds shot in the cocoa groves about us proved to be distinct, 
many of them, from any we had as yet procured, though we afterwards 
found them to be identical with those of the great island of Luzon. 
There had been a gradual increase in the number of species of birds 
found nesting since February, but we now found nearly all species in 
the full tide of nesting. It seems strange that this should agree so 
closely with the nesting season in the north temperate regions. Bee- 
birds, kingfishers, cuckoos, shrikes, fruit-thrushes, orioles, fly-catchers, 
sun-birds, crows, starlings, pigeons, rails, herons, ducks, parrots, and 
cockatoos were all nesting. When the natives heard that we had cash 
to pay for such things, we were fairly besieged with boys and girls and 
women, with birds’ nests and eggs, and land and tree snails. The 
ladder leading up to our room usually had two or three people upon it, 
who would hold up their collections whenever any of us came in sight. 
The native name of the bird was always required, and the nest with 
the eggs as far as ‘possible. One day an old woman brought a basket 
- with a number of round, white eggs, new to us. She was required to - 
bring the nest to which the eggs belonged before being paid, but said 
the nest was a ‘‘ pogo,” and was then told to bring along the ‘‘ pogo.” 
A few days after we found that the eggs were those of the beautiful 
Merops bicolor, the prettiest of the two Philippine bee-eaters, and that 
they are laid in a hole in the ground, and this was the “ pogo ” we. 
had demanded of the old woman, 
The number of birds building nests in holes here seemed to me to 
be rather remarkable. Among these were the bee-eaters, kingfishers, 
Am. Nat.—August.—4. 

