We expected to meet the launch from the Hoorie Mine, but as it had not yet arrived, we boarded the steamer again and went on with it to the end of its route at Mount Everard. We left Morawhanna at half-past ten in the morning and reached our destination five hours later. Although all this country is low and marshy, yet the White Mangrove and the Courida, or Red Mangrove, here give place to a variegated forest growth, and we soon saw our first Mora trees,—huge we thought them, but to be dwarfed by the inland giants of our succeeding expeditions. The walls of vegetation were seventy or eighty feet in height, draped by vines, while dead branches protruded here and there from the water near shore. Many Snake-birds[48] were perched on these snags, from which they dropped silently into the water at our approach and swam off with body immersed. [Illustration: FIG. 68. TYPICAL INDIAN HOUSE AT MORAWHANNA.] Blue-and-Yellow Macaws[61] were common—always as usual in multiples of two. We observed them a half dozen times in different reaches of the river, four in the first group, then eight, two, six, four and two. A trio of American Egrets[32] kept flying ahead of us for several miles, hemmed in by the lofty walls of foliage, alighting now and then and waiting for the steamer. At last when only ten yards distant they rose and floated over our heads. Once a splendid Guiana Crested Eagle[57] flew past and alighted on a dead tree, and twice we saw small colonies of Yellow[151] and Red-backed[152] Cassiques nesting in isolated Mora trees _out in the water_; a new method of protection on the part of these intelligent birds. At occasional intervals a nesting pair of White-throated Kingbirds[106] was seen, but no other of the Tyrants which are so common about houses in this region. The event of the day came when we caught a flash of white from a Buzzard floating high overhead and our stereos showed a King Vulture[50] circling slowly around, craning his wattled head down at us as he drifted past. We had never expected to see this bird near the coast and indeed we saw no others during our entire stay in Guiana. As we steamed past a wind-break we caught a momentary glimpse of two wee naked Indian children paddling away in a wood-skin while behind them their bronze-skinned parents watched us silently.