Page:The naturalist on the River Amazons 1863 v1.djvu/203

 without motion, except when irritated, in which case it reared itself on its hind legs from the back of a chair to which it clung, and clawed out with its fore paws like a cat. Its manner of clinging with its claws, and the sluggishness of its motions, gave it a great resemblance to a sloth. It uttered no sound, and remained all night on the spot where I had placed it in the morning. The next day I put it on a tree in the open air, and at night it escaped. These small Tamanduás are nocturnal in their habits, and feed on those species of termites which construct earthy nests, that look like ugly excrescences on the trunks and branches of trees. The different kinds of ant-eaters are thus adapted to various modes of life, terrestrial and arboreal. Those which live on trees are again either diurnal or nocturnal, for Myrmecophaga tetradactyla is seen moving along the main branches in the daytime. The allied group of the Sloths, which are still more exclusively South American forms than ant-eaters are, at the present time furnish arboreal species only, but formerly terrestrial forms of sloths existed, as the Megatherium, whose mode of life was a puzzle, seeing that it was of too colossal a size to live on trees, until Owen showed how it might have obtained its food from the ground.

In January the orange-trees became covered with blossom—at least to a greater extent than usual, for they flower more or less in this country all the year round—and the flowers attracted a great number of humming-birds. Every day, in the cooler hours of the morning, and in the evening from four o'clock till six, they were to be seen whirring about the trees by scores. Their