Beyond the town is a low, rambling shed used as a slaughter-house. When one tires of watching the blue tanagers, orioles, and yellow warblers quarrel in the cocoanut-palms near the hotel, he may tempt his æsthetic taste by walking to the pavilion of bovine death, and look upon the hundreds of black vultures sitting on the roof, strutting and hopping over the ground, or tearing at the hides that have been stretched out to dry. These birds are so typical a part of most towns and villages of tropical Colombia that one soon learns to accept them as a matter of course. They act as scavengers. Without them the settlements would reek with foulness. Puerto Berrio marks the beginning of a narrow-gauge railway, and each morning at six a passenger-train leaves the station for Cisneros, covering the first stage of the journey to Medellin. Almost immediately after leaving the port, the road plunges into the finest type of Magdalena Valley forest. We therefore debarked at the first settlement, called Malena, only fifteen minutes after leaving the starting-point. My assistant on this expedition was Mr. Howarth S. Boyle, of Elmhurst, Long Island. At Malena the tropical forest reaches the height of its development. There is a clearing large enough only to provide room for the village of some twenty houses, and the stately living wall of trees hems it in on all sides. The people are most obliging, and while there is no _posada_, or inn, of any kind, a Mestizo family volunteered to permit us the use of part of their dwelling. A short tour of inspection confirmed our first impression of the region; it was a naturalist’s paradise. One had only to go to the outskirts of the town to find birds in greatest abundance. A number of tall dead trees had been left standing in the clearing, probably because it was easier to merely girdle them and let them die than to cut them down, and many blue and yellow macaws and Amazon parrots were nesting in cavities high up in the trunks. They had young at the time of our visit (March), and screamed and fluttered about the nests all day long. No one thought of disturbing them. Rough-winged swallows and martens nested in the same stubs, and apparently lived in perfect harmony with their noisy neighbors. A shallow, narrow stream of clear water flows through the clearing, and a belt of woods and low sprouts mantles each bank with dusky green. This was the favorite resort of many small birds; oven-birds and ant-wrens ran about in the deep shade, while night-hawks, aroused from their slumbers, flapped noiselessly into the air and dropped again a few feet away. Scores of parrakeets chattered in the branches overhead, while flocks of large, spotted wrens (_Heleodytes_) added to the chorus with their incessant scolding.