The Animal World, A Book of Natural History: Young Folks' Treasury (Volume V) — John Shaqi
The Animal World, A Book of Natural History: Young Folks' Treasury (Volume V)Wood, Theodore
General
The Animal World, A Book of Natural History: Young Folks' Treasury (Volume V)
Wood, Theodore
Animals -- Juvenile literature
Very much like the spider-monkeys are the howlers, which are very common
in the great forests of Central America. They owe their name to
the horrible cries which they utter as they move about in the trees by
night. You remember how the gibbons hold a kind of concert in the
tree-tops every morning and every evening, as though to salute the
rising and the setting sun. Well, the howlers behave in just the same
way, except that their concert begins soon after dark and goes on all
through the night. They have very powerful voices, and travelers who are
not used to their noise say that it is quite impossible to sleep in the
forest if there is a troop of howlers anywhere within two miles. And it
is hard to believe that the outcry comes from the throats of monkeys at
all. "You would suppose," says a famous traveler, "that half the wild
beasts of the forest were collecting for the work of carnage. Now it is
the tremendous roar of the jaguar, as he springs upon his prey; now it
changes to his terrible and deep-toned growlings, as he is pressed on
all sides by superior force; and now you hear his last dying groan
beneath a mortal wound. One of them alone is capable of producing all
these sounds; and if you advance cautiously, and get under the high and
tufted trees where he is sitting, you may have a capital opportunity of
witnessing his wonderful powders of producing these dreadful and
discordant sounds."
If one monkey alone is capable of roaring as loudly as a jaguar, think
what the noise must be when fifty or sixty howlers are all howling at
the same time. No wonder travelers find it difficult to sleep in the
forest.
Perhaps the best known of these monkeys is the red howler. Its color is
reddish brown, with a broad band of golden yellow running along the
spine, while its face is surrounded by bushy whiskers and beard.
THE OUAKARI
Another very curious American monkey is the red-faced ouakari. If you
were to see it from a little distance you would most likely think that
it was suffering from a bad attack of scarlet fever; for the face and
upper part of the neck are bright red in color, as though they had been
smeared with vermilion paint. And as its whiskers and beard are
sandy yellow, it is a very odd-looking animal.
If a ouakari is unwell, strange to say, the bright color of its face
begins to fade at once, and very soon after death it disappears
altogether.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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