Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 11, 2025
The bill can scarcely be said to be a very good contrivance for seizing and crushing small birds, or taking them from their nests in crevices of trees, habits which have been imputed to Toucans by some writers.
The only striking features of the animal world are the hornbills, which are very abundant and take the place of the toucans of Brazil, though I believe they have no real affinity with them; and the immense flights of fruit-eating bats which frequently pass over us. They extend as far as the eye can reach, and continue passing for hours.
Some of these birds, and especially the toucans, have bills beautifully adapted for picking up the ants before they reach the nest. Many of the smaller birds build on the branches of the bull's-horn thorn, which is always thickly covered with small stinging honey-eating ants, that would not allow the Ecitons to ascend these trees.
The birds and other inhabitants of the bamboos, were those of the more open jungle, flocks drifting through the clumps, monkeys occasionally swinging from one to another of the elastic tips, while toucans came and went. At evening, flocks of parrakeets and great black orioles came to roost, courting the safety which they had come to associate with the clearings of human pioneers in the jungle.
The birds seemed to be shouting out "To-o-cano, to-o-cano," and it is on this account that the Indians give them the name from which we derive that of toucans. One was perched above the rest, and he kept bending his neck downwards, and looking about in the most knowing way, as if to ascertain what sort of creatures we could be.
It is pleasant, when the sun is bright, and the trees are green, and when flowering shrubs and sweet-smelling tropical trees scent the balmy atmosphere at eventide, to lie extended at full length in a canoe, and drop easily, silently, yet quickly, down the current of a noble river, under the grateful shadow of overhanging foliage; and to look lazily up at the bright blue sky which appears in broken patches among the verdant leaves; or down at the river in which that bright sky and those green leaves are reflected; or aside at the mud-banks where greedy vultures are searching for prey, and lazy alligators are basking in the sun; and to listen, the while, to the innumerable cries and notes of monkeys, toucans, parrots, orioles, bemtevi or fly-catchers, white-winged and blue chatterers, and all the myriads of birds and beasts that cause the forests of Brazil, above all other forests in the world probably, to resound with the gleeful songs of animated nature!
They stretch their necks downwards to look beneath, and on espying the least movement among the foliage, fly off to the more inaccessible parts of the forest. Solitary Toucans are sometimes met with at the same season, hopping silently up and down the larger boughs, and peering into crevices of the tree-trunks. They moult in the months from March to June, some individuals earlier, others later.
They thus become an easy prey to hunters, and everyone at Ega who can get a gun of any sort and a few charges of powder and shot, or a blow-pipe, goes daily to the woods to kill a few brace for dinner; for, as already observed, the people of Ega live almost exclusively on stewed and roasted Toucans during the months of June and July, the birds being then very fat and the meat exceedingly sweet and tender.
Belt, Mr., on the nakedness of tropical mankind; on a spider-monkey and eagle; habits of ants; Lampridae distasteful to mammals; mimicry of Leptalides; colours of Nicaraguan frogs; display of humming-birds; on the toucans; protective colouring of skunk. Benevolence, manifested by birds. Bennett, A.W., attachment of mated birds; on the habits of Dromaeus irroratus.
They lay themselves out for dispersion by monkeys, toucans, and other relatively large and powerful fruit-eaters; and the rind is put there as a barrier against small thieves who would rob the sweet pulp, but be absolutely incapable of carrying away and dispersing the large and richly-stored seeds it covers.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking