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One day as I was entomologising alone and unarmed, in a dry Ygapo, where the trees were rather wide apart and the ground coated to the depth of eight or ten inches with dead leaves, I was near coming into collision with a boa constrictor. I had just entered a little thicket to capture an insect, and while pinning it was rather startled by a rushing noise in the vicinity.
I once saw it in considerable numbers, when on an excursion with an Indian companion along the low Ygapo shores of the Teffe, about twenty miles above Ega.
Its back is of a brilliant metallic- green colour, and the breast steel blue. The natives call it the Suruqua do Ygapo, or Trogon of the flooded lands, in contradistinction to the red-breasted species, which are named Surtiquas da terra firma. I often saw small companies of half a dozen individuals quietly seated on the lower branches of trees.
It is not uncommon in the drier forests of the Amazons valley, but is not found, I believe, in the Ygapo, or flooded lands.
It is situated on a tract of high Ygapo land, which is raised, however, only a few inches above high-water mark. This skirts the northern shore for a long distance; the soil consisting of alluvium and rich vegetable mould, and exhibiting the most exuberant fertility.
It was really quite alarming to see men and women and children, in little leaky canoes laden to the water-level with bag and baggage, crossing broad reaches of river. Most of them have houses also on the terra firma, and reside in the cool palm swamps of the Ygapo islands, as they are called, only in the hot and dry season. Among the latter, the fruits of palm trees occupied the chief place.
They are merely an offshoot from them, a number of segregated hordes becoming degraded by a residence most likely of very many centuries in Ygapo lands, confined to a fish diet, and obliged to wander constantly in search of food.
When this description of land is not formed wholly of river deposit, as sometimes happens, or is raised above the level of the highest floods, it is called Ygapo alto, and is distinguished by the natives from the true islands of mid-river, as well as from the terra firma. We landed at one of the cacao plantations.
This season of enforced quiet being passed, they make their appearance suddenly in the dry forest, near Ega, in large flocks, probably assemblages of birds gathered together from the neighbouring Ygapo forests, which are then flooded and cold. The birds have now become exceedingly tame, and the troops travel with heavy laborious flight from bough to bough among the lower trees.
The rapidly moving and shining body looked like a stream of brown liquid flowing over the thick bed of fallen leaves, rather than a serpent with skin of varied colours. He descended towards the lower and moister parts of the Ygapo.
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