Walter Good fellow—Some Beminiscences of a Collector 341


stock. In spite of all your instructions, more often than not immediately

afterwards, when lifting the cages they turn them upside-down.

Perhaps one of the greatest worries to contend with is panic at night

among the birds, which sometimes occurs night after night. It is

usually impossible to do anything, for a light taken among them only

adds to it and disturbs still more. It sometimes sounds as if not one

will be alive in the morning. At such times sleep for me is quite out of

the question for the rest of the night. It is so seldom a cause can be

found. Sometimes it is due to rats or other vermin, and occasionally

I have been troubled by snakes. In the Formosan forests minks were

my bugbears and came night after night to my Mikado Pheasants,

and of all birds in a panic pheasants most easily damage themselves.

In spite of various kinds of traps I only once succeeded in catching

one, and it turned out to be an entirely new species.


The journey to the coast from Quito takes the best part of two days,

so I engaged a luggage-van and travelled in it with the birds. The

night is spent at Riobamba, where all the passengers alight and join

the train again in the morning ; meanwhile the train goes back a few

miles up the line to water, where it stops the night, as it seems, under

the very snows of Chimborazo. The highest part of the line is crossed

about here at 12,000 feet. I slept in the van as the doors had to be kept

open a little way for ventilation, and bitterly cold it was ; but by

covering the cages with tent-flies, etc., I did not lose one bird. The

marmosets and a squirrel monkey I had with me under my blankets

on the floor, and much squabbling there was to get the best places before

they finally settled down.


After passing through the Panama Canal with the collection we

encountered one night a very sudden storm. On the Royal Mail boat

they had given me the second-class smoking room for my birds and,

it being hot, the windows had been left open. Many of the cages were

thrown down in wild confusion before I could get there, and a few birds

were killed and two or three escaped and were not seen again ; but

in spite of all this I managed to land in London nearly forty species of

tanagers almost, if not all, new to aviculture, ranging in size from the

big Hooded Tanagers, Ruthraupis, to the small Violet group, Euphonia .


Among these tanagers two species changed their colour in



