1894
March 9
Trinidad, B.W.W.
Moruga Rest House.
  We left Port-of-Spain on the 7.12 train this
morning and reached Princestown at about eleven.
For the greater part of the way the railroad
traverses a perfectly level country bordering the
coast and planted with sugar cane, with occasional
small patches or broad belts of swampy woods
which, at a distance, resemble closely the
forests of out South Atlantic States. Indeed 
where this sugar cane was not too well grown
or the palms too numerous it was by no
means difficult to imagine myself in Georgia or
South Carolina near Charleston.
  The Black and Turkey Buzzards sailing about
everywhere helped to illusion but this was
destroyed at once by the close view of the
forest or of the smaller birds nearly all of
which were wholly new and strange to me.
  It would be idle to try to record half the
interesting species which Chapman pointed  out
and named to me. I was most impressed
with a large black Hawk, probably Urubitringa, which
sat perched in a large tree near the railroad,
by the beautiful Rose-breasted Troupals which
were flitting about in pairs or singly on most
of the larger plantations and which in flight
and general behavior reminded me of Red-winged
Blackbirds, and by the strikingly colored White-
headed Widows (Arundinicola leucophala) of which I
saw several flying from tree to tree or from
clod to clod in the recently ploughed fields.