454 Walter Goodfellow—Some Reminiscences of a Collector


the Naked-necked Fruit Crow (Gymnoderus fcetidus). It is rather

larger than a Jay, and in a dry skin may be black or greyish, but

in life it is covered with a fine powder which gives the

plumage a bloom like that on pothouse grapes. The wings

are lavender, but it is the head and neck which gives it

such a remarkable appearance. The crown is feathered and

velvety, dark Indian red, and at the base of this is a row of thick

nodules from which hang fleshy folds of skin to the shoulders, draped

in a wonderful manner, and shaded from white to bright cobalt blue.

I collected one skin of this bird years before on the Upper Amazon,

and a water-colour drawing was made of the head and neck while

still fresh. This was reproduced in The Ibis , and it is well worth

looking up. Of course, later all this bare skin fades and shrivels up,

so no conception can be formed as to what the bird looks like in life.

What a wonderful sight it would be in an aviary.


Swallow-billed Tanagers or Fruit Eaters (Procnias coerulea ) also

arrived about September, but unlike my experience with another

closely allied species (P. tersa), which frequents low bushes, this one

I saw always in high trees. I wanted some badly, but as I said about

the people in another part of South America, I could get no one here

to climb trees. These birds adapt themselves readily to cage life, and

are easy to keep. I had previously brought home P. tersa occidentalism

and never found it would even look at an insect, but readily eat any

kind of cut-up fruit. It has a very wide gape like a Swallow’s, but

larger in proportion. So it can take surprisingly large fruits. The male

is uniform cerulean blue, and has a black mask, the lower breast

white, and finely barred on the flanks with black. In some lights the

bird looks greenish-blue, and in others the richest cerulean imaginable.

The females are green with no mask, and yellow instead of white on

the breast.


Tinamous of various species were exceedingly numerous in the

forest, and it was impossible to go any distance without flushing some,

but it was only possible to get a very momentary glimpse of them

as their noisy flight was so sudden and unexpected. I had many young

ones brought in each year, and some lived for a long time but usually

escaped in the end as the enclosure I made for them always seemed to



