124 SNAKES IN NICARAGUA. Book I. 
the houses. As to poisonous reptiles I have never seen 
any in Nicaragua, with the exception of a beautiful speci- 
men of the coral-snake, which had been killed and was 
brought to me at Granada, and I could not learn one 
single case of a person having died from the bite of a 
serpent in the interior of the country. This was not the 
case at San Juan del Norte, where the son of one of the 
principal merchants had been killed in that manner and 
other similar instances were recorded. But still this 
cannot be compared with the danger from venomous 
reptiles in Texas, New Mexico, and other southern and 
western parts of the Union. In some tracts along the Rio 
Grande a rattlesnake may be seen every few hundred 
paces, and at San Antonio in Texas no summer passes 
without some persons of the lower classes, mostly Mexicans, 
dying from the bite of the mocassin. In Nicaragua too a 
species of rattlesnake — cascabela — is found, but it cannot be 
very abundant, as I never encountered it in my travels. 
Two kinds of snakes are said to be particularly dangerous 
in the coast region near San Juan del Norte and in the 
woods of the San Juan river, — one of them called the 
culebra tobova, the other the vibora de sangre^ and to these 
the fatal cases which I heard mentioned at San Juan 
were ascribed. 
A little basin of water, at the foot of the steep hill on 
which the town is situated, was a place of rendezvous for 
various kinds of large aquatic birds, which at certain hours 
I saw there assembled in flocks. Amongst them were two 
kinds of white herons ; a very large white bird with black 
wings, head and neck entirely naked, and the whole very 
much like the Jabiru or Mycteria Americana. There was 
also a rose-coloured spoonbill with a rhombic shape of its 
bill, the whole bird of the most delicate beauty, with dif~ 
