"but it was even stranger to the ear than to the eye. Squeaking, 
croaking, whistling, rattling, clucking and cooing sounds 
came from every direction above and around me, but the 
creatures which made them were for the most part hidden 
from our view in the danse foliage and Chapman’s assurances 
that one was a Piura , 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, 
t 
but a few minutes later Chapman would pronounce -what seemed 
to me the same sound to be the voice of another and very dif¬ 
ferent 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 were a few notes which were 
sufficiently impressive cr distinct from the rest to be 
easily remembered. One of these was the cooing of a Dove 
( Leptoptila ) which came at times from a dozen different 
points 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 
