Brazil -- Description and travel; Geology -- Amazon River Valley
root. It is about a foot in diameter, and stands edgewise upon a branch,
or in the crotch of a tree. Among the smaller birds I noticed bright
Tanagers, and also a species resembling the Canary. Besides these, there
were the wagtails; the black and white widow-finches; the hang-nests, or
Japi, as they are called here, with their pendent, bag-like dwellings,
and the familiar “Bem ti vi.” Humming-birds, which we are always apt to
associate with tropical vegetation, were very scarce. I saw but a few
specimens. Thrushes and doves were more frequent, and I noticed also
three or four kinds of woodpeckers, beside parrots and paroquets; of
these latter there were countless numbers along our canoe path, flying
overhead in dense crowds, and at times drowning every other sound in
their high, noisy chatter.
“Some of these birds made a deep impression upon me. Indeed, in all
regions, however far away from his own home, in the midst of a fauna and
flora entirely new to him, the traveller is startled occasionally by the
song of a bird or the sight of a flower so familiar that it transports
him at once to woods where every tree is like a friend to him. It seems
as if something akin to what in our own mental experience we call
reminiscence or association existed in the workings of Nature; for
though the organic combinations are so distinct in different climates
and countries, they never wholly exclude each other. Every zoölogical
and botanical province retains some link which binds it to all the
others, and makes it part of the general harmony. The Arctic lichen is
found growing under the shadow of the palm on the rocks of the tropical
serra; and the song of the thrush and the tap of the woodpecker mingle
with the sharp, discordant cries of the parrot and paroquet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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