The entrance is rectangular, about three by six inches, and some five feet above the ground. Painfully I pick my way to the side of the stub, and bracing myself, focus on that spot of black on the trunk. Then Milady rustles the weeds in the rear of the stub. Again a rustling, and on the ground-glass of my Graflex flashes the green head. Snap! I have her! and with the slowest of motions I change plates. While she is engrossed with the disturber in the rear I advance a step and get another picture. Then screwing up my speed-button, I push slowly forward, and just as she is about to hurl herself from the stub I secure a third photograph. Off she goes to the nearest palms, shrieking at the top of her lungs, and is joined by her mate. We cut a hole in the trunk near the ground, and there find the nest of the parrot. Three white eggs, one of which is pipped, and a young bird just hatched reward us, all resting on a bed of chips. The diminutive polly is scantily clothed with white down, and while in the shade lies motionless. When a ray of warm sunlight strikes it the little fellow becomes uneasy and crawls and tumbles about until it escapes from the unwelcome heat. During its activity it keeps up a continuous, low, raucous cry like the mew of a catbird. Far out on the expanse of black pitch—six feet in the depth of this dark cavity!—this little squawking mite surely had a strange babyhood to fit it for its future life in the sunlight among the palms. It was the Yellow-fronted Amazon Parrot,[64] a common species with dealers everywhere, but we shall never see one in a cage, uttering inane requests for crackers, without thinking of the interesting family we discovered at the pitch lake. We found strange fish in the pools of water scattered over the lake. Some must have wriggled their way over dry land for some distance to get there. There were round, sunfish-like fellows (_Aequidens_) and others, long and slender, with wicked-looking teeth (_Hoplias malabaricus_). Most curious of all were the Loricates or armored catfish, with a double row of large overlapping scales enclosing their body from head to tail. Like the Hoatzins among the birds, these fish are strange relics of the past, preserved almost unchanged from the ancient fossil Devonian forms. [Illustration: FISH FROM THE POOLS IN PITCH LAKE. FIG. 38. _Aequidens_ Sp. FIG. 39. _Hoplias Malabaricus._] Days passed like hours in this wonderland, and the time for returning to civilization came all too soon. The strange living beings which filled jungle and air and water, made us long for the leisure of months instead of weeks, in which to study all the infinite variety of life which surrounded us.