Page:The naturalist on the River Amazons 1863 v2.djvu/358

 forest, near Ega, in large flocks, probably, assemblages of birds gathered together from the neighbouring Ygapó forests, which are then flooded and cold. The birds have now become exceedingly tame, and the troops travel with heavy laborious flight from bough to bough amongst the lower trees. They thus become an easy prey to hunters, and every one at Ega, who can get a gun of any sort and a few charges of powder and shot, or a blow-pipe, goes daily to the woods to kill a few brace for dinner; for, as already observed, the people of Ega live almost exclusively on stewed and roasted Toucans during the months of June and July. The birds are then very fat, and the meat exceedingly sweet and tender. I did not meet with Cuvier's Toucan on the Lower Amazons; in that region, the sulphur and white-breasted Toucan (Ramphastos Vitellinus) seems to take its place, this latter species, on the other hand, being quite unknown on the Upper Amazons. It is probable they are local modifications of one and the same stock.

No one, on seeing a Toucan, can help asking what is the use of the enormous bill, which, in some species, attains a length of seven inches, and a width of more than two inches. A few remarks on this subject may be here introduced. The early naturalists, having seen only the bill of a Toucan, which was esteemed as a marvellous production by the virtuosi of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concluded that the bird must have belonged to the aquatic and web-footed order, as this contains so many species of remarkable development of beak, adapted for seizing fish. Some travellers also related fabulous stories of Toucans resorting to