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Updated: May 14, 2025
The river foamed between great rounded masses of rock, and at one point there was a sheer fall of six or eight feet. We found and ate wild pineapples. Wild beans were in flower. At dinner we had a toucan and a couple of parrots, which were very good.
Thus Rau, in The Archæological Collections of the United States National Museum, pp. 46-47, states that Further on he adds, "Leaving aside the more than doubtful toucan, the imitated animals belong, without exception, to the North American fauna."
Their continually-repeated answer was, that the sources of the Rio Negro and the Inirida were as near to each other as "two fingers of the hand." The toucan resembles the raven in manners and intelligence. It is a courageous animal, but easily tamed. Its long and stout beak serves to defend it at a distance.
Duppo and I stored our wallets with fresh farinha; and I hoped to kill a toucan, or a brace of parrots, on our way, which would afford us sufficient food. As no time was to be lost, we set off at once. Duppo showed some affection when parting from his mother. She was certainly less demonstrative, however, than a European would have been.
Wallis came in search of them when tea was ready, and found them absorbed in watching a toucan from America and a rhinoceros hornbill from Africa, which appeared to have struck up a friendship from the fact that they were both aliens. "Come to tea, boys; you can inspect those creatures later if you want to," said Mr. Wallis.
This day I saw one standing in the top of a tree with the big bill pointing straight into the air and the tail also cocked perpendicularly. The toucan is a born comedian. On the river and in the ponds we saw the finfoot, a bird with feet like a grebe and bill and tail like those of a darter, but, like so many South American birds, with no close affiliations among other species.
The early naturalists, having seen only the bill of a Toucan, which was esteemed as a marvellous production by the virtuosi of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concluded that the bird must have belonged to the aquatic and web-footed order, as this contains so many species of remarkable development of beak, adapted for seizing fish.
And so, leading our tired horses, we went cheerily down the mountain side in Indian file, hopping and slipping from ledge to mud and mud to ledge, and calling a halt every five minutes to look at some fresh curiosity: now a tree-fern, now a climbing fern; now some huge tree-trunk, whose name was only to be guessed at; now a fresh armadillo-burrow; now a parasol-ants' warren, which had to be avoided lest horse and man should sink in it knee-deep, and come out sorely bitten; now some glimpse of sea and forest far below; now we cut a water-vine, and had a long cool drink; now a great moth had to be hunted, if not caught; or a toucan or some other strange bird listened to; or an eagle watched as he soared high over the green gulf.
Every now and then, the maam or tinamou sends forth one long and plaintive whistle from the depths of the forest, and then stops; whilst the yelping of the toucan, and the shrill voice of the bird called pi-pi-yo, is heard during the interval.
The sound which the bouradi makes is like the clear yelping of a puppy-dog, and you fancy he says "pia-po-o-co," and thus the South-American Spaniards call him piapoco. All the toucanets feed on the same trees on which the toucan feeds, and every species of this family of enormous bill lays its eggs in the hollow trees. They are social, but not gregarious.
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