10 
Annual Reports of Academy of 
larger trees, fallen and rotting giants covered with parasitic plants, 
with lianas three inches in diameter to the size of small wires, trailing 
the ground from the higher limbs of the trees and the slippery soil 
under all, made successful snares that only too often brought us 
to earth with a realization of their hidden powers. Trails there 
were in many directions and these we followed in much of our 
hunting, but upon shooting a bird another trail must be cut in 
order to retrieve it and more than once did I have to call Henry, 
our faithful Indian boy, to cut me out when I had all but secured 
a fallen specimen. Henry with his machete, that indispensable 
daily companion of the Central American Indian, was with us 
always and served us well. The hills, the valleys, the streams 
and the clearings were scoured and combed, yielding daily their 
quota of birds, beats, and insects to the collection. Fish were 
collected in all of the streams encountered, either with a small 
mesh seine that we took for the purpose, or by exploding dynamite 
in the deeper holes and eddys. Three species of freshwater fish new 
to science were thus secured. Many specimens of reptiles were 
shot during the daytime; and at night, others attracted by the 
use of electric torches or acetylene lamps, were caught in butterfly 
nets, and all were preserved entire in formaldehyde. 
Eastern Nicaragua like all tropical-forest countries has a wet 
and a dry season, March, April and most of May constitute the so- 
called dry season, while the balance of the year is given over to the 
wet. The Eden Mining Company has for a number of years kept 
a careful record of precipitation and finds the average rainfall for 
the year to be 145 inches. The daily temperature varies between 
80 and 95 degrees in the shade, but in the sun it is very much 
higher; at night it is generally cool enough to require a thin blanket. 
Hardly a day passed that we did not have showers, sometimes al¬ 
most continuous, with here and there a dash of sunshine, yet this 
was the dry season. Our clothing while in the bush was nearly 
always wet, either from the heavy showers or from perspiration 
due to the steamy heat. This excessively damp atmosphere made 
the drying of bird and mammal skins and the preserving of insects, 
a painstaking operation, for a humming-bird skin that would be 
fairly dry in two or three days here at home, would show very 
little signs of drying in two weeks at Eden. A supply of very light 
wooden trays, knocked down, to be put together in a few minutes, 
