Swallows,[119] emerald and white, catch the flies which hover near us; a big yellow-breasted Flycatcher alights for a moment on the bow of our boat—and a tropical day is fairly begun. These and a hundred other creatures about us bathe, sing, and seek their food during the fresh hours of early morning. Then, as the sun rises higher and its heat draws a hush over all, the notes of the birds die away, leaving the insect vocalists supreme. Butterflies click here and there, a loud humming tells of huge wasps winging their way on murderous missions, but above all rises the chant of the cicadas. The commonest of these grinds out harsh, reverberating tones—whir-r-r-r-r-r! wh-r-r! wh-r-r! wh-r-r! wh-r-r! rolling the r’s in the first utterance for a minute or more, then ending in a series of short, abrupt whirs. Then another cicada, a giant species, sends his call through the jungle; he has two strings to his bow, one a half-note higher than the other, and on these he plays for five minutes at a time. It is Chinese music to the very tone. Sometimes his tune ends in a rising shriek, and we know that one of the big blue wasps has descended on him and stabbed him in the midst of his love-song. [Illustration: FIG. 11. SUN-BITTERN.] The day wears on, and even the cicadas become quiet. The sun is overhead and the air full of tropical heat. In the shade it is always comfortable, and in the full glare of the sun one perspires so freely that the heat is hardly felt. As we paddle lazily along, a great Tegu Lizard (_Teius nigropunctatas_) scrambles slowly along the bank; now crawling over a muddy expanse, now taking to the water to avoid a bushy tangle, folding back his legs and swimming with long graceful sweeps of his tail. As we watch him he leaps at several little crabs and catches them before they can escape into their holes. We eat our luncheon in the shade of a clay bank, the first hint of dry land we have seen along the caño, and here we watch the little crocodiles basking in the sun and the crabs scuttling over the mud. A bird of iridescent green and orange swoops down to our very faces, and hangs swinging in a loop of a tiny liana on the face of the bank. The next instant it vanishes into the earth, darting into a hole hardly larger than the crab-holes around it. We have found the home of a Jacamar.[86] At the end of the short tunnel are four round white eggs laid on the bare clay.