1894
March 9
(No 4)
Trinidad, B.W.I.
Moruga Rest House.
but the creatures which made them were for the
most part hidden from our view in the dense foliage
and Chapman's assurances that one was a Pipra,
another a Thamnophilus, a third an Ostinops etc only
added to, instead of dispelled, my utter bewilderment
and confusion of mind. I tried fixing my attention
on one sound until I thought I had mastered it
but a few minutes later Chapman would pronounce
what seemed to me the same sound to be the voice
of another and very different species. After awhile
I gave it up and simply wandered on steeping
my senses in the extraordinary beauty of the scene
and letting the bird sounds pass in one ear and 
out at the other. Of course there are a few notes
which were sufficiently impressive or distinct from the
[delete][?][/delete] rest to be easily remembered. One of these
was the cooing of a Dove (Leptoptila) which came
at times from a dozen different point in the
forest. It is a single rolling cooo very deep and
impressive and forming, as Chapman truly observed,
a background for all the other sounds. Another
was the rich warble of Cyclorhis flavipectus which
I first heard and mastered in the garden at
Port-of-Spain and which reminds me by turns of
the warble of our Bluebird and of a snatch of
the Orchard Oriole's song. Then there was the incisive,
emphatic [delete]quest[/delete] qu'est ce dit of Pitangus and 
the bright, glancing song of Troglodytes rufulus, like,
and yet unlike, the song or our T. aidon. By degrees,
also, but very slowly, I mastered some fo the common
notes of the rich vocabularies of Ostinops & Cassicus.