Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/61

Rh "The voice of the Buceros bicornis" says Wallace, "can be plainly heard at a distance of a mile, so that the amazement of travelers visiting its haunts seems explicable enough. Its screams may be described as something between the bray of a jackass and the shriek of a locomotive, and are not surpassed in power by any sound that an animal is capable of making. They re-echo through the hills to such a degree that it is difficult to assign the noise to a bird, and are sometimes kept up so continuously as to become absolutely unbearable."

The condor and the harpy eagle have not found their way across the Caribbean Sea, but the West Indies boast three varieties of fish eagles, several species of mountain falcons, and a curious singing owl, the oriya, that chants its serenades in the plaintive strain of the whip-poor-will, and is dreaded by the Porto Rico darkeys as a bird of ill-omen:

 Grita l'oriya: Veuga amigo, Venga coumigo a mi patria, Venga te-digo!"

Small hooting owls abound, and there are four species of sparrow hawks, one of them not much larger than a finch.

It is probably the smallest bird of prey, and there is no doubt that one species of West Indian humming bird is the smallest bird on earth, the Vervain colibri, of Jamaica, that hides its nest under an orange leaf, and, though an insect-eater, could be easily overpowered by an able-bodied bumblebee. In beauty some of the south Cuban species rival those of the Amazon Valley, and frequent every flowering shrub from the jungles of the coast lands to the highland meadows of the Sierra Maestra. In Hayti there are parklike plateaus where they often appear in swarms at a time of the year when the forests of the foothills are drenched by the afternoon cloudbursts of the rainy season, and on some of the smaller Antilles they are seen only during the flowering period of special plants.

In the solitudes of the Morne Range (San Domingo) mountain ravens rear their brood in the crevices of steep rocks, and fiercely attack birds of prey, not excepting the black-crested eagle, that now and then visits the sierras in quest of conies. But the winged constables of the highlands rarely leave their mountain reservation. Of Abd-el-Wahab, the Arabian heretic, it used to be said that "Mohammedan zealots shrank in affright from his superior fanaticism," and on the midway terraces of the Dominican sierras the persecution mania of the giant crow yields to that of the great shrike, the Lanius rufus, that operates pairwise and assails all winged comers with absolutely reckless courage.

The raven of the Mornes seems to be identical with the cosmopolitan forager that is found in the uplands of the eastern continent