LONG BILLS OF TOUCANS 461 



movement amongst the foliage, fly off to the more in- 

 accessible parts of the forest. Solitary Toucans are some- 

 times met with at the same season, hopping silently up 

 and down the larger boughs, and peering into crevices of 

 the tree-trunks. They moult in the months from March to 

 June, some individuals earlier, others later. This season 

 of enforced quiet being passed, they make their appear- 

 ance suddenly in the dry forest, near Ega, in large flocks, 

 probably, assemblages of birds gathered together from 

 the neighbouring Ygapo forests, which are then flooded 

 and cold. The birds have now become exceedingly tame, 

 and the troops travel with heavy laborious flight from 

 bough to bough amongst the lower trees. They thus 

 become an easy prey to hunters, and every one at Ega, 

 who can get a gun of any sort and a few charges of powder 

 and shot, or a blow-pipe, goes daily to the woods to kill 

 a few brace for dinner ; for, as already observed, the 

 people of Ega live almost exclusively on stewed and roasted 

 Toucans during the months of June and July. The birds 

 are then very fat, and the meat exceedingly sweet and 

 tender. I did not meet with Cuvier's Toucan on the 

 Lower Amazons ; in that region, the sulphur and white- 

 breasted Toucan (Ramphastos Vitellinus) seems to take 

 its place, this latter species, on the other hand, being 

 quite unknown on the Upper Amazons. It is probable 

 they are local modifications of one and the same 

 stock. 



No one, on seeing a Toucan, can help asking what is 

 the use of the enormous bill, which, in some species, 

 attains a length of seven inches, and a width of more 

 than two inches. A few remarks on this subject may 

 be here introduced. The early naturalists, having seen 

 only the bill of a Toucan, which was esteemed as a mar- 

 vellous production by the virtuosi of the sixteenth and 

 seventeenth centuries, concluded that the bird must have 

 belonged to the aquatic and web-footed order, as this 

 contains so many species of remarkable development of 

 beak, adapted for seizing fish. Some travellers also re- 

 lated fabulous stories of Toucans resorting to the banks 

 of rivers to feed on fish, and these accounts also en- 

 couraged the erroneous views of the habits of the birds, 

 which, for a long time, prevailed. Toucans, however, 

 are now well known to be eminently arboreal birds, and 

 to belong to a group (including trogons, parrots, and 



