Life-History of the Black-Chinned Jacamar

Abstract

AT Birichiche beside the Ulua River in Honduras was a grove of stately cohune palms, with tall, massive, columnar trunks and spreading crowns of gigantic pinnate fronds. Tall as they stood, they were overshadowed by some noble silk-cotton trees and a few other giants of the forest. Scattered among the palms grew many wild fig trees, most of which had probably started life on the trunks of palms long since vanished. Here was a numerous troupe of Black Howling Monkeys, which enjoyed the protection of the owner of the banana plantation in which the grove stood. Their voices reverberated through the still air at dawn, and answered the echoes raised by the passing trains. Their grove stood between the railroad and the river, with extensive plantations of bananas on the other two sides; they never descended to the ground, and so had remained here and multiplied since the retreat of their ancestors had been cut off by the felling of the forest more than twenty-five years before, isolated as effectively as though they were on an island in the sea. Here, among the many interesting birds which frequented the grove, I saw one cloudy afternoon a slender, graceful creature, scarcely larger than a Starling, with a long and very sharp black bill which it held with a saucy upward tilt. I watched it make long, graceful evolutions in the air, tracing beautiful loops and figures-of-eight, as it snatched up insects on the wing, usually returning to the same perch after each sally, to sit there quietly and await its next catch. Since the bird was of a kind entirely new to me, I took out my notebook and tried to write a description as it perched there, to look up its name later when I returned to my books. But I had undertaken a task more difficult than I at first supposed. The dark, metallic plumage was so wonderfully variable, in the dim light which filtered through the clouds and the palm fronds, that I could not decide what color it was. I wrote 'green' as the color of the bird's crown, but in a moment it turned its head and I was obliged to substitute 'blue'; and after I had described the broad band across the breast as blue, the bird shifted its position and the band appeared green. The wing feathers I first described as dusky, but when next I glimpsed them in a more favorable light, they also appeared green. Finally I gave up in despair and wrote: Plumage wonderfully iridescent. When next I encountered a Black-chinned Jacamar (Galbula melanogenia), three months later, it was on the open, bushyflood-plain of the Tela River. The light was good, and there could be no doubt that the bird's principal