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Photograph by Luts

The inlet from the island shore

JUNGLE ISLAND

By
WARDER C. ALLEE

Associate Professor of Zoology, University of Chicago

and
MARTORIE HILL ALLEE

RAND MCNALLY & COMPANY
CHICAGO NEW YORK

Copyright, 1925. t>y

Rand M9Nally & Company

AH rights reserved

Made in U. S. A.

A-25

To

TOarri:er ^Wtty

A good field companion,
1913-1923

THE CONTENTS

PAGE

The Preface ix

Old Roads to a New Island i

From Ancon to the Island ...... 20

My Tree 38

The Clever Family of Ants 54

Termites, the Destroyers 68

Spiders and Their Relatives 89

Peripatus, the Most Interesting Animal . . 103

Snakes and Crocodiles 107

The Ancient Family of Lizards 123

Strange Birds i37

Furry Animals i59

The Conquest of the Mosquitoes . . •. . 179

More Books i95

Glossary ^97

Suggestions to Teachers 205

The Index 211

. (^ ^^

^

Vll

A LIST OF MAPS

Early trade routes to South America . . . .
The Canal Zone

The Panama Canal: Pacific entrance and profile view .

A LIST OF FULL-PAGE HALF-TONE
ILLUSTRATIONS

4
11
15

The inlet from the island shore .

A ship passing through Gatun Lake .

The island from the inlet .

Spanish bayonet palm with termite nest

The spike ladder .

A stilt palm with termite nest

Termite runways on tree trunk

Anteater feeding on termites

Termite mound nest

The home of the crocodile .

Where the long-toed jacana walks on the lily pads

The machete-cut trail

Where soldiers and mosquitoes lived together in old
San Lorenzo

Clean paved street in Panama ....

Drain-making by the American Sanitary Service

Frontispiece

18

35

36

41

69

72

82

84

119

140

151

Fort

180
187
189

vni

THE PREFACE

.Most of the books written for children about the
tropics are purely romantic, and that has seemed a
great pity to the writers of this little book. Every
year, as disease is pushed back and as men understand
better the conditions under which they can safely
work near the equator, more and more rich territory
is open to the overcrowded colder regions. Transpor-
tation and communication have at the same time
become rapidly easier and cheaper. Many of the chil-
dren who read this book will come to know the tropics
from their own experience, and they will be happier if
they have not too many ignorant prejudices or roman-
tic dreams to set aside.

Further, even to the stay-at-home, there is great
interest in the lives of plants and animals that have
the whole year round in which to develop; in the sub-
stitution of a dry season for a northern winter; and in
a country whose forests, streams, and hills are as yet
largely unchanged by civilization.

And let us admit gladly that from the most scientific
point of view there is still the glamor of romance in
the tropics. The beauty of the golden-flowering
tecoma tree, the absurdity of the great bill of the
toucan, the drama of the long struggle between white
men and yellow fever — these are as keenly fascinating
when seen with wide-open critical eyes as ever they
were in any legendary tale.

Our own experiences were made possible by grants
from the University of Chicago and the Bache Fund

ix

X THE PREFACE

of the National Academy of Science. The account
set down here has been checked and often supple-
mented from the observations of more specialized
writers, to all of whom we are most grateful.

We are indebted to Mr. Kenji Toda for making the
drawings; to Mr. James Zetek, United States ento-
mologist in the Canal Zone, Dr. F. E. Lutz of the
American Museum of Natural History, Dr. Curt P.
Richter of Johns Hopkins University, the United States
Army Air Service, and the Field Museum for permis-
sion to use photographs taken by them. The manu-
script was read and helpfully criticized by Miss Bertha
Morris Parker, of the University of Chicago Elemen-
tary School.

Several authors and publishers have kindly allowed
us to copy drawings from their books. We are indebted
to the following: Cambridge Natural History, Organic
Evolution by R. vS. Lull, Vertebrate Zoology by H. H.
Newman, Medical Zoology by W. B. Herms, all pub-
lished by the Macmillan Company; Ants by William
M. Wheeler, published by the Columbia University
Press, and Social Life among the Insects, also by
Dr. Wheeler, and published by Harcourt, Brace &
Company.

JUNGLE ISLAND

OLD ROADS TO A NEW ISLAND

A narrow mountainous strip of land running
nearly east and west joins North America to
South America. It is called the Isthmus of
Panama. Almost ever since the time when
Columbus landed there, it has. been one of the
great highways of the world.

Balboa, who struggled across the Isthmus
through mountains, swamps, and jungles, not
only found the Pacific Ocean. He brought back
pearls and gold, and every vSpanish explorer
returned with news of the golden ornaments the
Indians wore. The Spaniards wanted the gold for
themselves. They took it away from the Indians,
who could not protect themselves against the
Spanish guns, and made the Indians bring more
gold from the mines and treasure houses. Peru,
on the western coast of South America, furnished
most of the gold, but there were also pearls from
the little islands off the coast, and furs from the
animals that ranged the great forests.

But not even the most determined gold hunter
could live on the yellow metal. It had to be
sent back to Spain regularly to pay for the cargoes

2 JUNGLE ISLAND

of European food and cloth, wine and weapons
brought to Panama by the Spanish fleet. Roads
must be made and guarded so that both gold and
supplies would travel safely. The shortest way
from Spanish ports to the west coast of South
America lay, as you see on the map (page 4), over
the Atlantic Ocean, across the narrow Isthmus of
Panama, and south again by ship.

One road was a land- and water-way. Ships
sailed up the Chagres River as far as they could
go from the Atlantic side, and then loaded their
cargo on pack trains to be driven by trail to the
city of Panama on the Pacific Ocean. The
Chagres River has been a most important river
of travel for the last four hundred years, but prob-
ably it looked much the same to the Spaniards as
the photograph (Fig. i) shows it today. The thick
rain forest on its banks has been little disturbed.

Another road went all the way overland from
one ocean coast to the other. The Spanish-built
trails were called the "king's highways." They
were about four feet wide and paved with stones
picked up by the way, and they rambled in and
out among the hills and streams wherever the
going seemed easiest. Today parts of them still
may be seen, but great trees have grown up
through the rough pavement since the time when
they were in constant use.

It was hard work to keep them clear even when
they were being used all the time. The Isthmus

OLD ROADS TO A NEW ISLAND 3

is close to the equator, and in that part of the
world, which is shown as the rainy tropics on the
map, it is always warm and usually moist. Day
after day the vines and bushes of the jungle
stretched their fast-growing branches across the

Photograph by Zetek

Fig. I. Bank of the Chagres River

trail, and some one was continually busy cutting
the tangle back so that the loaded pack trains

could pass.

When the narrow trails were kept open, still
the men and mules suffered. Runaway negroes,
brought over from Africa to take the place of the
unwilling Indian slaves, hid in the thick bush
and robbed the pack trains. . And the Spaniards
were afraid of the few Indians left in the forest,
as they had reason to be. To this day the Indians
of the Isthmus distrust white men so. heartily

Fig. 2. Early trade routes to South America

OLD ROADS TO A NEW ISLAND 5

that they will hardly let one stay in their villages
overnight.

Even on the most peaceful trips the men were
terribly bitten by small jungle pests. Little
brown ticks waited on every leaf for a chance to
fasten themselves on man or beast and suck his
blood. Clouds of hungry mosquitoes rose from
the wayside pools. The men sickened and died
of malaria and yellow fever. Yellow fever was
a disease no European had ever heard of before
America was discovered.

Big boa constrictors rustled through the leaves,
and painted, poisonous little coral snakes lay
under rotten logs. The natives frightened the
Spaniards with stories of other jungle animals
which were seldom seen. Sometimes, however,
they did catch sight of the green eyes of a "tiger
cat" shining in the camp-fire light, or heard in the
distance the deep howling of an animal the
natives said was a monkey, but which sounded
more like the roaring of a great bull.

It is no wonder that the Spaniards, even while
they were building their first roads four hundred
years ago, tried to work out some easier and
safer method of travel. They puzzled over some
way of making a canal that would join a river
on the Atlantic side to a river that ran into the
Pacific Ocean, but their plans were too expensive
to carry out. They were obliged to stick to the
king's highways and' the Chagres River. Away

6 JUNGLE ISLAND

from these they were afraid to venture, and tales
of the remarkable plants and animals to be found
in the depths of the jungle grew bigger every
year.

Their cities were built along the coast, and
many of them were very rich. At Porto Bello,
a beautiful harbor on the Atlantic side, there was
a fair like a great market twice a year. The streets
of the town were piled with wedges of silver
waiting for the vSpanish fleets to come with goods
for exchange. Merchants came to this fair
across the sea from the Philippines and up and
down the Pacific coast of the Americas. They
exchanged their precious wares and hurried away
as fast as they could, for the air of lovely Porto
Bello was said to be unhealthful, and many
caught malaria and yellow fever there.

This was in the days when Spain had at sea
in her fleet many high galleons bearing her flag,
her gold, and her goods. But England was
growing strong at sea, too, and trying her strength
against Spain. She built up her navy and she
encouraged English pirates so long as they brought
home Spanish treasure.

Stories of Porto Bello in fair time were enough
to make the mouth of an English pirate water.
One successful raid on a city like that and he
and his crew would be rich for life. Henry
Morgan left his ships and struck out across land
to old Panama, an even richer prize than the

OLD ROADS TO A NEW ISLAND 7

cities on the Atlantic side and not so well guarded.
His men nearly starved to death on the way,
although there were animals on every side that
would have made good eating, had the Englishmen
known it. But they did reach Panama, took the
city, and carried off much gold. For this and
other raids Henry Morgan was made an English
knight.

Other pirates were encouraged by Morgan's
success. They attacked at sea, so that Spanish
ships never sailed alone. They made the Chagres
River unsafe for valuable goods, and the king's
road from Panama to Porto Bello was finally
ordered to be used only at fair times, when the
merchants and mule trains traveled with an
escort of Spanish soldiers.

When after two hundred years peace came
between the two countries, Spanish trade and
Spanish power were broken. At that time the
Isthmus was no longer important to Spain or
to any other country. All the stored-up gold
of the Indians had been seized and sent back to
Europe. The gold left in the old mines and the
sand of the stream beds was so thinly scattered
that white men would not bother with it. No
one on the Isthmus was rich enough to buy cloth
and wine from Spain. English traders and
American whalers bound for the Pacific sailed
south around Cape Horn by the route shown on
the map (page 4). The long trip by sea was

2

8 JUNGLE ISLAND

easier and cost less than packing shiploads across
the Panama hills. Except where the natives kept
a path worn, the king's highways went back to
jungle.

It was gold that opened the roads again. In
1849, another hundred years later, gold was dis-
covered in California, and eastern Americans who
heard the news were in wild haste to reach it.
They might go in three ways: in saiHng ships
around the Horn as the whalers had done, or
across the untraveled plains and mountains of
western United States, or by the Forty-niners'
route shown on the map, south to Panama, across
by river and boat, and up the Pacific coast by
ship to California. This last way usually took
less time for passengers than either of the others,
and it became once more the road of the gold
hunters.

Just as in the time of the first Spaniards, men
began to plan for a canal that would make an
easy water highway across the Isthmus. Many
attempts were made up and down the coast in
different places, but all failed. The plan that
seemed for a time most likely to succeed was
that of a French company which began digging
in 1 88 1. They decided to cut through the hills
from Colon to Panama along the hne where the
Canal goes today, and work has never stopped
entirely from that day to this, though the French
themselves were not able to finish it.

OLD ROADS TO A NEW ISLAND 9

It was not only that they had too Httle money
for such a tremendous task. Their trouble was
worse than that. They could not keep men well
enough to do the work. The workmen whom
they brought over from France and Spain and
down from the United States fell sick and died
from malaria and yellow fever just as newcomers
had alwavs done on the Isthmus. No one had
learned what caused these diseases or how to
prevent them.

In 1904 the United States bought the rights
and the supplies of the French company, and ten
years later the old dream of an ocean-to-ocean
waterway had come true. The canal that * 'divided
the land, united the world," was finished.

The Americans were good engineers, and they
were fortunate enough to know how to treat
malaria and yellow fever. For two or three years
some American physicians had known that both
diseases are carried by certain kinds of mos-
quitoes. Working as quickly as they could, the
Americans killed off the mosquitoes near the
Canal, destroyed the places where they could
lay their eggs, and screened the houses where the
workmen slept at night. Within a few months
the Canal Zone, once called the unhealthiest spot
in America, became known as the healthiest
place in the world.

The French had at first intended to make a
sea-level canal. They expected to cut down

lo JUNGLE ISLAND

through the hills until the salt water of the two
oceans met in a deep channel through which
ocean ships could sail without stopping. This
plan took so much expensive digging that they
decided instead to build a canal with locks to
lift ships up to a higher channel. This is the
plan now used by the Americans in the Canal.

From Colon on the Atlantic side a sea-level
canal was shoveled out through the low country
seven miles to Gatun Locks. You can see this
on the map of the Canal Zone, as well as another
seven-mile sea-level canal on the Pacific side below
Miraflores Locks. Joining the two is a great
man-made fresh-water lake, whose surface is
about eighty-five feet above sea level.

Part of the bed of this lake is the valley of the
Chagres River. Where the river turns sharply
away into the hills at Gamboa, as the map (page 1 1)
shows, so that its valley can no longer be used, the
engineers have cut straight through to Miraflores
Locks a long, narrow passageway.

Along this nine-mile stretch the engineers had
much trouble. The rock and clay of the hillsides
were soft, and when they were disturbed by digging
they had an unexpected way of slipping down
overnight into the cuts that were being made,
burying the tools and leaving all the digging to
be done over again.

The hills were covered, not only with a tangle
of plants, but also with many feet of fine red

Fig. 3. Canal Zone

12 JUNGLE ISLAND

earth that hid the rocks underneath, so that it
was impossible to tell how long to expect them to
keep sliding down into the Canal. The engineers
sent for a geologist, a man who had studied rocks
and knew their history, to come down from the
United States and help them decide which were
solid enough to make safe canal banks and which
could not be trusted.

The geologist studied the cut hillsides and bored
down to rock in other parts of the Isthmus. He
was able to give advice to the canal builders, so
that the Canal could be safely made. He found,
too, stories of the Isthmus long before the
Spaniards or the Indians came.

The rocks showed that some of them had first
been poured out from volcanoes, red-hot and soft
as molasses. After they had cooled, the wind
and rain had weathered them into smaller pieces,
the sea water had poured over them and left the
skeletons of little sea animals strewn among
them, and the rivers had washed valleys through
them again and again.

The rocks showed plainly that the Isthmus
has not always been solid land as it is today.
Often it has sunk under the sea until its mountain
tops were only a chain of islands between North
and South America.

This is one reason why the South American
animals are so different from those in North
America. For many thousands of years at a

OLD ROADS TO A NEW ISLAND 13

time they could not cross from one land to another,
and in those years when they could not mix
together they grew to be less and less alike. In
North America the old camel family died out,
while in South America the same family grew
into the llama and the guanaco. In South
America the rodent family flourished in many
sizes and shapes. In North America we think
of a rat as a large rodent, but on the other side
of Panama some rodents grew four and five feet
long. There came to be very few kinds of deer
in South America. The catfishes are much more
important among the water animals than they
are farther north. Running birds, somewhat like
ostriches, live wild in South America, and opossum-
like animals, that carry their young in pouches,
are more common there than with us.

It seems quite certain from the story of the
rocks that the Isthmus of Panama was under
water the last time many thousands of years ago.
If Columbus had lived so long ago he might have
found his waterway to India then; but, so far as
we know, there were at that time no men on the
earth yet. The land has not stayed at the same
height since the last ocean connection was broken.
Sometimes it rises, sometimes it sinks, and again
it stands quiet long enough for the ocean to build
up great beaches. Judging from these old beaches,
the land has been slowly rising for the last
thousand vears at the rate of three feet in a

14

JUNGLE ISLAND

century. No one can guess how long it will keep
on rising. It is just as likely that some day it
will begin to sink once more.

Fig. 4. The spillway of the Gatun Dam

The engineers who had made the Canal worked
much faster than the earth forces which had for
millions of years lifted and lowered the land in
their own way. The men had dams and a swift

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tropical river to help them flood the Chagres
valley and make Gatun Lake. At Gatun they
built a wide, gently rolling hill that is so broad
and grassy that it does not look like a dam at all.
This stands.straight across the path of the Chagres
River. When it was finished, it caught and held
back the river waters. The water rose higher
and higher as the heavy summer rains fell, until
it reached at last the top of the locks and the
spillway (Fig. 4) . When it stood eighty -five feet
above sea level, the extra water was allowed to
run over the spillway and off down the old river
bed to the Atlantic.

While the waters of the new lake were rising,
there was a long time of moving among the
mysterious animals that lived in the great forests
of the drowned Chagres valley. The people of
the few native villages the lake would cover had
been warned in plenty of time and given new land
high and dry. Nobody warned the animals.
Every day as the water rose they moved back a
little higher, and often in the morning they found
they had been cut off in the night from old hunt-
ing grounds and play places. Most animals can
swim, but not many of them like to, especially
when there are crocodiles in the water. They
preferred to go higher in the hills. Even the
sloth, which hates to move at all, had to sling
himself from one branch to another as the water
rose.

OLD ROADS TO A NEW ISLAND

17

When the lake was full, many animals found
themselves stranded on hilltops that now were
islands in the lake, and there they were obliged
to stay, as securely penned in as the bears in
zoological gardens.

The largest of these islands (Fig. 6) that once
was a hill is almost in the middle of Gatun Lake,

Courtesy of U. S. Air Service

Fig. 6. Barro Colorado Island from an airplane

easily seen on the map of the Canal and passed by
every ship that steams through (Fig. 7) . There are
about six square miles of it, covered with heavy
forest and as well stocked with animals fleeing
from the water as a tropical Noah's Ark.

In 1923 the governor of the Canal Zone decided
that this island should be set aside for a forest
preserve. It is known as Barro Colorado, which

2

OLD ROADS TO A NEW ISLAND 19

means in English ''red clay," from the color of
the soil. We have called it Jungle Island. No
animals are to be hunted there, nor any trees cut,
and people are invited to come and find how ani-
mals really grow and behave in a tropical forest.

The Indians who mined the gold, the Spanish
explorers who came hunting it, and the English
pirates who followed them, the Forty-niners who
opened the old roads again, the French who tried
to build the Canal, and the Americans who
succeeded — these were the people who had made
the paths that led me to Barro Colorado in the
winter of 1924.

This little book tells about Jungle Island and
some of the animals I found there. The brave old
explorers would be surprised and amused at such
a strange winter's work; but then they never
knew how interesting tropical animals can be.

FROM ANCON TO THE ISLAND

B-r-r-r! B-r-r-r! The alarm clock was saying
over and over that it was half -past five of a cool,
dark January morning in Panama. Although it
is only a few hundred miles north of the equator,
we never found a night when we were not grate-
ful for our blankets. Ancon, built high on the
shoulder of a hill overlooking the city of Panama,
sometimes has a temperature of sixty-five degrees
at night, and that, in the tropics, makes one
shiver. Ancon, with its screened houses (Fig. 8),
' its American supplies, and its American hospital,
was my headquarters. Already, in the few days I
had spent on the Isthmus, I had worked out a
schedule that took me from Ancon to Barro
Colorado in the shortest time.

First came a cold shower bath in the big bath-
room that the United States government provides
in all the airy houses where Canal Zone workers
live. My toes touched something round and
smooth on the floor, and I found a crocodile egg
lying on the grating of the shower-bath drain.
Santiago had given me that egg the day before,
and at night when I turned out the electric light
it was lying on the table by my bed. Some
animal, perhaps a rat, but more likely a harmless
snake, had tried to carry it off down the drain in

20

FROM ANCON TO THE ISLAND

21

the night, and found it too large to pull through
the iron grating.

I carried the egg back to my room and hurriedly
dressed in the same heavy cotton clothes I wear
comfortably while tramping through the Indiana

Fig. 8. Bachelors' quarters in Ancon

dunes in the springtime. With my khaki trousers
I put on leather puttees and heayy boots, which
help to keep off ticks, and might have saved me a
snake bite in case I met a poisonous snake. I may
add that I never did meet a poisonous snake in
the jungle. I put on a tie and a coat because
white men are expected to wear them in that
part of the world, and when I was thus dressed
up I completed my costume with a limp cloth

22

JUNGLE ISLAND

hat much more useful than beautiful. I found no
need of the cork helmets often thought necessary.
Across the Bay of Panama the east was growing
faintly lighter. It was always a temptation to
stand and watch the spectacle of the sun rising
over the Pacific Ocean, which gives one a very
odd feeling unless he studies carefully the map
of the Isthmus. But there was not much time
for that. I slung over my shoulder the knapsack
holding my collecting outfit and my lunch, and

Fig. 9. Royal palms overlooking the plaijis of Panama

was away down Ancon Hill to the restaurant,
under an avenue of rubber trees and palms, past
two solidly built blocks of hospital.

FROM ANCON TO THE ISLAND

23

The American restaurant (Fig. 10) is big and
clean, and little breezes blow through it pleasantly,
sending the white paper napkins scurrying across

Fig. 10. The American restaurant in Ancan

the cement floor. The breakfast is much the same
that any American cafeteria would serve in mid-
summer. The oranges are peeled like apples,
with only a button of rind left at one end to hold
while the rest is eaten. The melon that looks
and tastes much like a cantelope is really a
papaya, which grows on a tree instead of a vine.
In the photograph (Fig. 11, page 24) the porcu-
pine is posing on the crown of one of these papaya
trees.

24

JUNGLE ISLAND

At the restaurant I found Molino, a tall, hand-
some Panamanian who was assisting the Canal
Zone entomologist in his study of insects. Molino

Photograph by Zetek

Fig. II. Porcupine in a papaya tree

FROM ANCON TO THE ISLAND 25

did not worry about the dignity of his clothes on
these trips. He went hatless and coatless and
carried his lunch in a brightly colored twine bag
over his shoulder, in the comfortable fashion of
the humblest workers. He was educated at the
University of Panama to be a lawyer, but he knew
a great deal about plants and animals, too, and
I was always glad to have his company.

After breakfast we made our way in the full
light of a new day past the cool and beautiful
American school building, and along a little walk
that runs up steps and down between houses to
the more thickly built-up streets of Panama and
the modern railway station. The morning Star
and Herald, printed both in Spanish and in
English, cost us a nickel from a little brown news-
boy. We showed our passes to the friendly
conductor, who already knew my face, and
climbed aboard the waiting train.

The Panama railway is short but important
since it is the only road open all the way across
the Isthmus. The Canal does very well for ocean
liners and battleships, but it is far too slow and
expensive for commuters. All kinds of people
take this early morning train. Chattering tour-
ists run over for a day's sight-seeing in Colon.
Plantation owners go out to oversee work in the
bananas. Sometimes there are sleepy actors
from the vaudeville theaters. Children ride to
school. The quietest passengers are the Canal

26 JUNGLE ISLAND

Zone workers. Negroes usually take another
car on which they do not pay so much for their
tickets.

We pulled out of the station promptly on time,
swinging round a half-circle that brings the train
to the Balboa station near the Pacific end of the
Canal. After that the railway line keeps fairly
close to the Canal as it runs north to the Atlantic
Ocean. Already the ships were moving through
Miraflores Locks. Beyond the locks we looked
anxiously down at Miraflores Lake to see if the
wind was up yet. If the wind were blowing
strongly, we knew we should get well drenched
going across the much bigger Gatun Lake to our
island.

vSoon came Pedro Miguel Locks — Americans
call them Peter M 'Gill — then Culebra Cut, which
still shows the red and yellow clay and the rocks
that told their stories to the geologist. Empire
was next. Once it was the Canal headquarters
and the busiest town on the Canal Zone, but now
that the Canal is finished and the engineers have
moved away it is sleepy and weatherbeaten.
Farther along at Gamboa we crossed the pretty
Chagres River where it joins the lake it helped
make. In the dry season it is a quiet-looking
stream, but at its times of high flood it brings
down whole tree trunks, which must not be
allowed to drift out into the Canal in the way of
the big ships.

FROM ANCON TO THE ISLAND 27

Nearly all the way from Panama we had come
through high hills. Along the railroad they have
been cleared of the heavy jungle bush, and herds
of cattle graze over them just as they do in the
dairy country of the United States. Corozo
palms and the great leaves of banana plants have
sometimes reminded me that I was still in the
tropics.

Halfway across the Zone you will find, if you
have been following us on the map, our station,
Frijoles, which we reached after an hour's travel.
Frijoles, if you are interested, means just "beans."
But it is not beans for which the tiny negro
village is noted, but its bananas, which are the
finest in the country. The gold of bananas is
now the gold of Panama, for which fortune
hunters toil.

A huge dugout canoe, piled high with green
bunches of bananas, now lay at the . rickety
wharf, waiting to be unloaded into one of the
empty freight cars standing on the railway siding.
We looked at the load with interest, knowing from
past experience that if a bunch among them had
begun to turn yellow we might have it for the
asking. Bananas ripen so fast that only the
green ones will not spoil in the ten days between
Frijoles and New York.

On the cinder platform waited John English
(Fig. 12), the friendly and intelHgent negro who
helped me to find workmen when he was not busy

28

JUNGLE ISLAND

overseeing his cattle, his alligator-pear orchard, or
some other venture. He spoke very good English,
Spanish, and a little ''African," whatever that

Fig. 12. John English

may be. With him were Santiago, the workman
I had had the day before, who spoke English,
Spanish, and a French patois, and Necto, who
spoke only Spanish, but who was extremely polite
and pleasant in that language. Before he took
my pack he was always particular to shake my
hand and ask after my health.

Santiago was clever in many ways, and I found
him especially useful because he was a good
camp-fire cook, and could be trusted to boil the

FROM ANCON TO THE ISLAND

29

drinking water. The clear water of the little
brooks looks good enough to the ordinary negro
to drink as it is. It is hard to make him realize
that unboiled drinking water is one of the greatest
dangers of the tropics to a white man, now that
yellow fever has gone. The tiny, invisible animals
with which it may swarm can cause the most
difficult and wearing diseases.

Our own small dugout canoe, called a ''cayuca"
(Fig. 13) and chopped out by a Frijoles negro, was
brought along the wharf and we loaded carefully,
for it never balanced quite so well as less home-

FiG. 13. The big cayuca

made boats do. Across the Frijoles inlet two negro
girls swung out from the shore standing in another
cayuca; but we sat down cautiously and were

30 JUNGLE ISLAND

content to keep still while Necto at bow and
Santiago at stern paddled us out between the
stumps of dead trees.

All this was once a valley forest drowned when
Gatun Lake rose. Some of the trees are very-
hard and solid and will stay in the water a long
time unless they are dynamited to pieces. Through
the dry season the water of the lake creeps a
little lower every time the locks are emptied to
let a ship out to sea. The dead snags of trees
that were well under water in the rainy summer
are close enough to the lowered surface to scrape
the bottom of a cayuca whose boatsmen are not
watching with sharp eyes.

The few houses of Frijoles village are built of
lumber and screened. Farther out the roofs are
of thatch, made of palm leaves, with walls of
sheet iron or odd bits of board. Presently the
walls disappear completely. The picture (Fig. 14)
shows one of these, which Molino explained was a
real palace, a casa grande. A whole negro family
lived there, and they had room besides to take
our Necto as a boarder.

I asked Santiago once how long it took to build
such a house.

"Not too long," said Santiago. "Maybe three
weeks if the moon is right."

Perhaps I should explain that he did not mean
that the builder worked by moonhght, but that
he thought the palm leaves would not dry into

FROM ANCON TO THE ISLAND

31

proper thatch if they were not cut at the right
time of the moon.

Out past the point where the casa grande stood,
we came into one of the wide bays of Gatun

Fig, 14. The "casa grande" — a native hut

Lake, where we could sight across the Canal to
Barro Colorado, whose nearest point was a mile
away. But the wind was upland we knew that
we might have to paddle over a three-mile route
to reach a landing place, for the cayuca may
capsize if the waves strike flat against its side or

32

JUNGLE ISLAND

Splash into it too heavily. Coming back from the
island is easier, even though it is rougher. The
wind increases through the day, but it is at our

Fig. 15. The palm sail

backs, and the men make a sail of broad palm
leaves tied together with tough jungle vine and
run before the wind (Fig. 15).

We always looked up and down the channel of
the Canal, marked through the lake by red and
black buoys, but ocean freighters seldom get so
far from the locks this early in the morning, and
we found it safe to cross. If we had heard the
warning whistle of an approaching ship, we
should have hurried out of its way, watching for

FROM ANCON TO THE ISLAND

33

the waves that spread on either side as it steams
slowly down the channel.

At this distance the island looked like a mass
of closely fitting green plants. Here and there
were blocks of color like big bouquets. The red
was of new leaves. Many vSmaller trees and
spreading vines bloomed in pink and lavender.
In February huge solitary trees blossomed in
brilliant yellow. We looked at them from the
water as long as we could, knowing that once we

Fig. 1 6. The ' 'flowerpot

were under the forest roof the blossoms would be
so high above our heads that we could not see
them.

34 JUNGLE ISLAND

Halfway across we were above the old village of
Frijoles, for ten years now under the lake. San-
tiago liked to tell of living there when he was a
boy. It was his joke that he was born under
water. If he felt talkative he pointed out the old
valley of the Chagres River below us and the
place where the Frijolita River used to join it,
''right there, Boss Doctor." But all that we
could see was the dead tops of trees that used to
grow on the banks of the rivers.

From the south came cayucas bound for Fri-
joles Landing, with bananas, oranges, hand-
groimd corn for tamales, live chickens, or even
pigs with their tied legs sticking stiffly into the
air. The Canal is a highway, not only for ocean
freighters and passenger ships, but for the negroes
living in the small jungle clearings along the shore
of the lake and the streams that empty into it.

On the far side of the Canal channel we entered
Barro Colorado Inlet and made for the landing
at the very end of it. The paddlers guided them-
selves by keeping a water-killed tree shaped like
a harp in line with a tall tree on the shore (Fig. 1 7).
This channel was not cleared, and we had to be even
more careful not to run the cayuca on any of the
dead trees hidden under water. Most of the
trees were gray and bare, but here and there an
orchid clung to the side of one, and closer toward
shore in the shade the lower stumps were topped
with a heavy growth of ferns and flowers (Fig. 16).

Photograph by Lutz

Fig. 17. The island from the inlet

Photograph by Lutz

Pig. 1 8. Spanish bayonet palm with termite nest

FROM ANCON TO THE ISLAND 37

Plant growth on the shore runs thick and green
even out into the water. It is so dense that a
startled animal that has come down for a drink
can plunge back through the brush with nothing
but the noise of his passing to tell what it was.

Where a little stream joins the inlet a long dark
log lazily moved off and disappeared in the
shadowy water. This was a crocodile. It was
on his account that we did not swim in the inlet.

Up the hillside in front of us the island brush
had been cut away to make a red clay trail. We
alighted at the foot of it and tied the cayuca to
a Spanish-bayonet palm (Fig. 18). When I first
came over to the island its thorns were as cruel
as the weapon they were named after, but they
were trimmed away without hurting the tree.

Fifty feet up the shppery hillside I liked to
pause and turn to look back over Gatun Lake.
Down the inlet was a lovely view (see frontis-
piece) which would have been hidden from this
spot if it were not for the trail clearing. It was
the only place on this part of the island where
the green jungle roof did not shut away the lake.

An hour by train and an hour by boat it has
taken to make the trip from American Ancon to
our jungle island.

MY TREE

I wanted very much to climb a big tree in the
jungle. Most of the trees on Barro Colorado grow
about ninety feet high and spread out into a thick
green roof, but every so often there is a much
larger tree that reaches above the smaller ones,
twice as high. I wanted to climb up one of these
tall trees above the jungle roof and see what was
happening there, what plants and animals lived
so high, and what they did.

Naturally there was no hundred-foot ladder
lying around waiting for me on the island. If I
got up a tree, I had to make some kind of ladder
for myself. My first idea was to get some extra
long railroad spikes to drive into a tree trunk for
steps, but there were no railroad spikes to be had.

The manager of the Canal scrap department
helped me out. He looked over his great piles
of rusty machinery and found some bolts from
the old machines that the French had used in
digging at the Canal, and from these he had
some stout spikes made for me. They were
fourteen inches long, not quite an inch thick, and
sharpened like a wedge at one end to make them
easy to drive.

I took these over to the island one Wednesday
morning, with Linder, a tall, lazy negro from the

38

MY TREE 39

British West Indies, to help me. There was a
funny little shack on the island, a good deal like
the playhouse a boy might build for himself, and
there I meant to stay of nights until my ladder
was finished. We had rice and canned meat,
fruit and crackers and tea enough to feed us for
a few days.

It was not so easy to find the right tree as you
might think. We climbed to the top of the slope
and looked around. One tree was a good height
and standing in a convenient place, but when I
drove a spike into it the spike went in about an
inch and shot out again. The wood was too
hard and close-grained to make room for the
spike.

I knew better than to try that kind of tree
again. We walked farther and found a big thorny
tree, called a sand-box tree. It stood well up on
a ridge and towered over the jungle roof. The
trunk was about five feet through at the ground.
From the top of the tree hung large vines, called
lianas, an inch to three inches thick. Most jungle
trees are hung with these vines, which grow from
the ground up and from the branches down.
These lianas were as useful to me as ropes would
have been.

The first thing we had to do^was to shave the
thorns off one side of the tree with our long
knives, called "machetes." The native uses his
machete for everything from a weapon to a hoe,

40 JUNGLE ISLAND

and nothing could have been better for removing
these woody thorns. It did not take long to
clear them off as high as we could reach, although
they had a milky juice that spattered unpleasantly
into our faces as we worked.

We started driving the spikes early the next
morning. Linder could drive the first one stand-
ing on the ground, and he easily sunk it half its
length into the soft wood, leaving a good seven-
inch step. Then his troubles began. He did not
want to climb, he did not want to work. He
wanted a ladder to stand on, or an auger to bore
holes for the spikes, or anything he could think
of that we didn't have. The job "humbugged"
him, he said, and I knew what he meant, even if I
had never heard the word used that way before.
Finally he decided that he could go on if he had
a long pole for a sort of ladder.

While he was away looking for his pole, I drove
the next spike two feet above the first. Then I
tied myself to the second spike and stood on the
lower one while I drove the third, two feet higher.

Linder's pole turned out to be convenient to
use for one foot while the other was on a spike.
We went on up the tree, driving spikes turn and
turn about until we had reached the top of the
pole. The work went slowly. My muscles were
soft, and Linder was badly frightened when he
was off the ground. It was still harder when we
had to stand with both feet on one spike. We

Fig. 19. The spike ladder

42 JUNGLE ISLAND

tied ourselves to the tree again and used the
hanging lianas to lean back against while we
worked. Figure 19 shows the base of the spike
ladder.

It was now Saturday morning, and Linder
decided that he wanted to get away from the
island, that the work was too hard, and that his
shoulder hurt him very badly, and so we went
back to Frijoles.

I never knew from one day to the next which
of the Frijoles men would help me on the island.
Sometimes those who had come with me most
regularly would go off for a few days' work in
the bananas, leaving a new man for me. Some-
times I found only one man waiting for me on
the station platform and sometimes there were
half a dozen to choose from. When I reached
the island again late Monday morning, I found
that Linder had brought over Santiago, and
Santiago had already run the spike ladder twice
as high as I had left it on Saturday.

Santiago had done much tree chmbing in the
days when he collected rubber. He climbed in
bare feet, with a rope over his shoulder tied to
the highest spike. When he reached the branches,
he could stand on them or pass his rope around
the body of the tree where it became smaller.
By night he had driven spikes to the second big
limb. This made a convenient saddle ninety feet
above ground.

MY TREE

43

The branches were fifteen inches thick and very
strong. We could sit comfortably on them and
look about us and down on the plants below. Not
many white people get to see the jungle from
above (Fig. 20).

I myself had seen it before only from a narrow
trail, or working my way through the vines, ferns.

Fig. 20. Looking down on the jungle roof

and palms, where, if I was content to travel
slowly, I seldom needed to use my machete to
cut a path, though sometimes i was obliged to
get down on my hands and knees to crawl under
a tangle of bamboo vines or look for the next
clear spot. A well-sharpened knife made a path

44 JUNGLE ISLAND

faster, but I found only one place on the island
where I had to use it all the time. This was in
a patch of wild pineapple, higher than a man's
head, where it took four or five strokes of the
machete to cut one step through the stiff
leaves.

My tree stood in a part of the jungle that was
like most of the rest of the island. The plants did
not grow so thickly as they did down at the shore,
because the big trees shut off most of the sunlight.
The red clay forest floor was loosely covered with
dead leaves, and over it flecks of sunlight moved
through the middle of the day, seldom staying in
one spot more than a few minutes, but touching
everything below at some time. All the low-
growing bushes and ferns had a short time of sun
for their broad green leaves, but not so much as
to dry them out. A few flowers grew among the
ferns in January. I saw a familiar milkweed
whose flower makes a good insect trap, and the
brilliant red blossom of the passion vine, which
grows also in the southern United States. There
were ferns like those we grow in our houses, as
well as fern bushes six feet high and graceful
fern vines (Fig. 21).

The greatest difference between this jungle
wood and the forest of a cooler country was the
great number of palms. Some were only shrubs
that could be cut as easily as a cornstalk. Some
grew sixty feet tall, as straight as a rod, and were

MY TREE

45

so hard that they turned the cutting blade of an
axe. Near my spiked tree was a stilt palm (Fig.
30, page 69), so called from its manner of bracing

'

1

"J

II

i

'V-

ci.-^^" ,'..

* t

J

R-/^"**^

■-"■-it"^-/'

.. *

1\V

■ 1. ,' ' ".

IP

V

*
/

-

r

^~

? -v]

•'^

\:l

^'

■■■ 1

v^X

^\^

M

■^

^^B ^

"it

\ ¥^

m

1

:A ..^l

^^^

/■ MM

1

^^Hr^^>

m

-%j^3HBI

,:*■':

. 1

Fig. 21. A fern vine

its trunk with roots branching out five feet above
the ground. You probably do not remember as
well as I do the thorny Spanish-bayonet palm
to which we tied our cayuca at the landing.

46

JUNGLE ISLAND

When I had climbed only ten feet up the tree,
I could look out over the tops of the lower shrubs.
Another ten feet brought me above the smaller
trees.

Fig. 22. A young strangler fig

MY TREE

47

Now I began to notice especially the lianas.
Some of these were the spongy roots of plants
perched high on the big trees. Others are like
our wild grapevine. They climb to the jungle
roof and leaf out there, tying the branches to-
gether and helping to make the dense jungle
shade.

One of the most interesting vines is the wild
fig, which starts from a tiny seed dropped by some

Fig. 23. Wild fig fallen after its inner support has rotted away

bird in the branches of a j tingle tree. This
sprouts into a Httle plant which drops a root as
fine as thread down to the ground. The rootlet
thickens into a trunk that sends out from its

48 JUNGLE ISLAND

sides dozens of other rootlets to hug the tree on
which it grows until it is quite surrounded and
smothered to death. Sometimes the wild fig
stands like a real tree after the first one has
rotted away inside it, leaving a hollow down the
center. It is helped to stand erect by having
its upper branches woven into the vine tangle of
the forest roof, but if a heavy windstorm comes
along it falls more easily than a real tree. Near
my spiked tree I could see several wild figs at
different ages. The pictures (Figs. 22, 23) show
a young fig just beginning to take possession of a
tree, and an older one which has lost its support-
ing tree and fallen.

Another liana that is most pleasing to find on
a hot day is the water vine. One day, coming
home from a long tramp across the island, our
guide fairly jumped forward, as suddenly as if
he had seen a snake. With his machete he
attacked a large liana, looking like an immense
twisted grapevine, and cut from it a piece nearly
a yard long. The sloping ends were three inches
across. Necto Hfted one end over his mouth
and water ran from it so fast that he could not
swallow it all. He cut pieces for the rest of us,
and we found the water cool and of a very good
flavor.

Higher on the sand-box tree grew many plants
that are never found except in such airy places
as tree trunks and branches. Many of these are

MY TREE

49

the plants whose roots make Hanas. At a height
of ninety feet I could look down on one like a
great rosette three feet across, whose glossy leaves

Fig. 24. Aeroid plants that grow as large rosettes near

the jungle roof sending down spongy roots which

absorb moisture from the air

50 JUNGLE ISLAND

made a good photograph (Fig. 24). Perched
among the branches are plants that look like the
stiff tuft of leaves growing out of a pineapple.
Their cupped leaves catch and hold water that
helps them through the dry season. Flies, ants,
and other insects drown in the water and are
absorbed by the plant for food.

Perhaps the most beautiful of the tree plants
are the orchids, which send up from their leaf
rosettes a slender stalk, crowned with yellow or
lavender flowers. If you cut out a large chip of
the wood to which they are fastened, so that the
plant itself is not disturbed, you can carry it away
without harming it. Many verandas in Ancon
have these lasting bouquets hung against their
walls. In this moist climate they bloom on
without attention.

At the top of my spike ladder I could again get
a glimpse of Gatun Lake. The rest of the view
was jungle roof, much as it appeared from the
Canal. Here and there were other trees as high
as mine, and in February some of them were
gorgeous masses of yellow blossom. These were
the guayacan (wy-a-con) trees, very hard-wooded.
The wood is so hard that cart wheels are made of
it simply by means of cutting off a round of the
tree trunk, trimming it, and boring an axle hole
through the center. Santiago told me about it.
"Can't drive nail in it. Boss Doctor. Must use
screw. Oh, hard, hard, hard!"

MY TREE 51

Such hard wood is valuable, of course, but often
it does not pay to try to get it out of the forest.
From my tree I could see that the yellow-flowering
trees did not grow close together. They were a
quarter of a mile or farther apart. In the north
we are used to woods that have nothing but oak
or maple or pine trees for miles, but here in the
tropics big trees of the same kind do not grow
together.

The distances between trees make it impossible
to use the machinery with which we haul the big
trees of the northern woods. Usually only those
trees are cut which stand on hillsides close to
water, where the logs can be rolled downhill and
floated away. Even this method has its diffi-
culties. The thick undergrowth down to the
waterside must be cut away before the log can be
sent down the hill. When it reaches the water
the log is often so heavy that it sinks like iron.
Then some one must dive under it with ropes to
lift it and tie it to a raft of lighter wood that will
float and support it.

Mahogany trees grow in Panama, but the
natives do not think its wood is nearly so good
or beautiful as that from some other trees. They
make rough furniture from it to sell to Americans,
and sometimes a few logs ard shipped to the
United States.

Some of the less valuable wood is very light
indeed. The ''sentinel tree" (Fig. 62), one of the

52 JUNGLE ISLAND

few that sheds all its leaves at once in the dry
season, is nearly as light as cork. A log of it can
be used as a canoe without hollowing out.

Down at the foot of my tree hardly a breath of
air stirred all day long. For a whole week a
thermometer hung there showed that the tem-
perature did not rise or fall more than three
degrees. Almost no water evaporated there.

This was true even when the wind was roaring
past me at the top of my spike ladder. Up above
the jungle roof the thermometer rose and fell
twenty -five degrees in a day, and water evaporated
three times as fast as it did below.

Above the jungle roof the wind and the sunlight
were more free, since there were not so many
branches to catch them and hold them back.
On the ground I could not take snapshots even
with a fast lens and special films, but up above
I could take the pictures of the jungle roof shown
here with an ordinary kodak.

Living at the foot of the tree was much like
staying in a well-regulated greenhouse, with the
same damp warmth day in and day out; but
plants and animals up in the tree tops had a
much more adventurous and changing life. Some-
times they might be warm and sometimes cold.
The sun and wind would dry them out, or a
sudden rain drench them. It is almost Hke living
in another country for them. The Hght was over
four hundred times brighter than on the ground.

MY TREE S3

Some of them seem to thrive on changes, and
are never found except high in the trees. Even
these do not have to endure the changes in light
and heat and moisture that the plants and
animals of northern woods meet in the summer,
which is our mildest season.

THE CLEVER FAMILY OF ANTS

Ants are everywhere in the jungle and many
are very big. They explore a new building quickly
and use such parts as suit them quite as if it were
their own property. Ants with long, powerful
jaws like scythes run over the window screens and
catch flies. Tiny ones climb on the table in
search of crumbs and sugar. When I picked up
an old tent cover or a coat thrown down and left
in one corner of the shack for a few days, I was
not at all surprised to find half -inch ants carry-
ing away their white, grublike babies into dark
crevices.

The life of any ant colony is wonderful to
watch, whether it is in your own back yard or
on Barro Colorado Island, but many of the most
interesting and easily seen activities of the ants
never happen outside the warm tropical countries.
Ants, like men, are to be found all over the world,
but warm climates suit the ants best, though men
thrive better in cooler countries. One reason why
ants are more active in warm countries is that
their bodies are always the same temperature as
the place in which they live. In the north they
run around easily in the summer, but in the
winter they must stay in their nests, cold as the
ground itself and so stiff that they cannot move.

54

THE CLEVER FAMILY OF ANTS 55

In the tropics they can work in the warmth all
the year round.

There have been ants on the earth very much
longer than men have been here. Our best guess
is that men have lived here half a million years,
but we have good reason to think that ants have
lived not less than twelve million years. The
two families, men and ants, are the most intelli-
gent of all the animals, and it would be conceited
of us to say that men were always cleverer than
ants, and not true, besides. We can learn more
quickly than they can, but we cannot do nearly
so many important things as the ants can without
having to learn how to do them first. Through
the long, long time ants have been on the earth
they have come to live together in large colonies,
where each one does his share of the work without
having to be told what it is by any other ant.

Their accomplishments are more remarkable
because most of them are blind. They use their
sense of touch, especially in the long antennae
or "feelers " at the front of their heads, to examine
new things. Their sense of smell is very keen and
helps them to keep to their usual trails outside
their nests.

When I first walked through the jungle forest, I
saw several paths about four inches across, hol-
lowed down with much use until the center was
an inch below the level of the forest floor. The
leaves had all been removed from them, and the

56 JUNGLE ISLAND

bare red clay showed signs of much traveling.
Some of these paths were deserted, but along
others marched files of leaf-cutting ants, called
Attas. They came in a steady stream, about one
to every six inches. Each carried in his jaws a
rounded bit of leaf half an inch wide and three-
fourths of an inch long, held up and down like
a sail. If the wind blows too strongly the ants
are sometimes capsized.

Follow those that are going back for a fresh
load and you reach a hillside where plants and
bushes are being stripped of their leaves to a
height of two feet. The Atta prefers green leaves,
but I have seen in the same procession ants
carrying bits of green leaves, of brown dead leaves,
and of the pink blossoms which were falling from
a large tree high above the jungle roof.

Attas are reddish brown and less than half an
inch long. I wanted a photograph of them on the
trail, and cut away an overhanging branch to let
in all the sunlight I could get for a picture of such
small creatures. The ants were bothered. They
gathered at the edge of the sunlit space, and it
was some little time before they ran across again.
Neither do they seem to like to get wet. After
an early morning rain the runways are littered
with untidy leaf fragments which they have
dropped to hurry home and which they clear
away later when the rain has stopped. In very
dry weather they stop work through noontime.

THE CLEVER FAMILY OF ANTS

S7

It is easy enough to decide that they carry
leaves home to eat, but it might be well to look
in the nest and see. I found the entrance to
one nest at the end of an ant trail that led half
a mile from the hillside where the ants were
cutting leaves. The entrance was a hole four
inches across, level with the bare ground, at the
top of a ridge. In spite of the fact that it was

After Belt and Wheeler

Fig. 25. The Attas* gardens

the dry season and the forest floor was covered
with dead leaves, all the leaves had been cleared
away for a rod or more around the opening of
the nest.

The four-inch hole is the opening of a corridor
leading to a large underground room, and from
this room tunnels run to other rooms, in the kind
of network shown in Figure 25. The ants have
cleared the earth from these until each is about
as large as your head. That is a large room for
ants to make, but their work has only begun when
the room is made. Ventilating shafts run up

58 JUNGLE ISLAND

from each room to the fresh air. Often from the
deeper rooms shafts run down into the ground,
perhaps to carry off water in case of a heavy rain.
The underground nest must be well drained.

In the nest the Atta returning with his leaf sail
finds two other kinds of Attas. The larger one,
much bigger than the leaf carrier, is a soldier with
a well-helmeted head. His long jaws are strong
enough to bring blood from one's finger. He never
goes outside the nest unless it is attacked. It is
his job to stay at home and protect it.

The other Atta is much smaller. Sometimes
he may come out of the nest, and if you look
carefully you may see him riding home again on
a leaf sail carried by a larger worker.
■ When the leaf carrier has brought his load
safely down into one of the big rooms, he sets
to work cutting it into smaller pieces, often helped
by the workers that live in the nest. With their
jaws and feet they make the leaf into a soft little
ball, which is stacked away at one side with
other leaf balls. The rooms are nearly full of
these piles. Very few ants are so careless as to
drop their leaves around unchewed.
. Perhaps you think the ants are making hay to
be eaten after it ripens. People used to think so,
but they had not looked closely enough. These
chewed-up masses of leaves are really garden beds
on which the ants plant the kind of mushroom on
which they live.

THE CLEVER FAMILY OF ANTS 59

So far as we know, these ants were the very
first gardeners in the world, and very good
gardeners they are. They are very particular
in the care of their mushrooms. They plant the
slips just the right distance apart to give each
room to grow. They never let the parasol grow

After Wheeler

Fig. 26. Food mushrooms from the A tta gardens

out at the top of the mushroom stalk. The stalk
is kept cut back nearly to the roots. When it is
trimmed like this the mushroom forms little white
balls. These little ''cabbage-heads" are what the
Attas want (Fig. 26). The workers eat them and
feed them to their babies.

The special job of the smallest Atta workers
is to keep the mushroom garden weeded. If

6o JUNGLE ISLAND

Other plants or different kinds of mushrooms start
to grow in the warm, rich leaf mold, it is the
job of the tiny Atta to kill them at once.

Leaves too wet or too dry would spoil the
mushroom bed. This is probably the reason why
Attas do not bring in leaves when it rains nor in
the dry noontimes.

When a queen ant leaves the home nest to
start a colony of her own, she carries with her,
tucked away in her cheek, a small pill of the food
plant which she tends as carefully in her new nest
as she tends her eggs. She will even chew up the
eggs to fertiHze the plant's roots. As soon as
the first young ants are large enough they take
charge of the garden and begin carrying in leaves
to make the garden beds.

All her life the queen ant continues to lay eggs.
They hatch out into tiny, white wormlike grubs.
These are usually placed near the top of the
nursery, and there the smallest workers take care
of them when they are not tending garden. They
sort the grubs according to size and feed them
differently. Watching very closely through a
magnifying glass, you may see that when the
tiniest grubs are hungry they pout out their lips.
Then the first nurse passing by stops and feeds
the hungry baby by brushing a bit of the mush-
room food across its lips. Nurses are always
passing about with food held in their jaws so
that a grub does not have to wait very long.

THE CLEVER FAMILY OF ANTS 6i

By the time the baby has grown large enough so
that he can be watched without a magnifying
glass, he is fed a whole ball of mushroom at one
time, and he may have to beg from two or three
nurses before he is satisfied. After he is fed, the
nurses pay no more attention to him until he
pouts again.

It may be from two to four months before the
ant baby has changed into a full-grown ant with
a dark, hard, leggy body in place of the soft
white one he started out with. All this time the
workers take care of him. They feed and clean
him, carry off food he has not eaten, cocoons he
has climbed out of, and all the odds and ends
that might make the nest unpleasant to live in.

When he is grown he seems to know without
being told that he must get to work helping with
the food and the babies, or bringing in leaves, or
defending the nest from enemies, according to
whether he is a big or Httle worker or a soldier.

The Attas are one kind of ants, but there are
as many kinds as there are nations and tribes of
people. When I made the spike ladder up the
sand-box tree I remembered that there were ants
that bit and stung. One of my friends who
climbed a tree in the South American forest met
a colony of stinging ants seventy feet up the
tree and was glad to get down from his ladder
as fast as he could, and not attempt to climb
back again.

62

JUNGLE ISLAND

I myself met the big black ants Figure 2 7 shows,
called by the natives **Congos," living at the root
of a tree in a well-cleared forest trail. If some

Fig. 27. Big "Congo' ants

one knocked on the tree, the ants rushed up from
the ground in fighting humor, and the sting of
one of these inch-long warriors was as lasting as
a hornet's. They came into my shack searching
for food. At night they could be seen hunting
up and down their tree trunk, always on the same

THE CLEVER FAMILY OF ANTS

63

side of the tree, seeming, like most ants, to follow
a trail they could smell. I knew that a nest of
these in my tree could make a great deal of
trouble.

Up about fifty feet we met a colony of small
ants coming and going, but they did nothing more

1

■mHHH^^BHHI

L

m^^

Fig. 28. -42/eca aw/ nest. Plants grow on
the nests and tree trunks

than tickle and annoy us. At eighty feet we
found their nest, hung from a branch like a
huge, blunt gray-paper icicle (Fig. 28). These
ants are paper makers and we have given them
the name Azteca because they live in the land
of the old Aztec Indians.

They make their paper out of the tiniest > bits
of wood or plants, chewed well and glued together

64 JUNGLE ISLAND

by sticky juices from their mouths. The paper
of the nest in my tree was quite thin, and tough
enough to bend without breaking. In a country
where there was less rain the paper would be more
brittle.

We never saw these ants near the ground, but
when we climbed the tree we always found them
traveling about high up in sunny, wind-swept
spots very different from the ground trails of the
Attas. They followed the same paths, which
looked no different to me from any other part of
the bark of the tree, and which they must have
followed by smell. Each time we climbed the
tree we had to kill several of them so that they
would not crawl over us while we worked astride
their pathway.

Down in the Brazilian forest of South America
lives a relative of some Barro Colorado ants that
makes its nest in a still odder way. The nest is
made of leaves fastened together with silk. The
grown ants cannot spin silk. The baby ants can
spin silk, but they cannot weave it. This is
what happens:

The big ants take the grubs in their forelegs
and hold them against the leaf they want to use,
until the silk thread dries on the leaf edge. When
the end of the thread is glued tightly the little
grub is carried across to another leaf edge, spin-
ning the thread as it goes, while other ants hold
the leaf in place (Fig. 29). Back and forth.

THE CLEVER FAMILY OF ANTS

6S

crisscross, the baby ant is carried until the leaves
are firmly woven together and the little living
spinning machine is allowed to rest.

Often I found on Barro Colorado a black ant
about half an inch long with great sickle-like

After Wheeler

Fig. 29. Ant weavers

jaws. These jaws were usually carried wide
apart, but they could be brought together with a
snap that I could hear several feet away. These
were the army ants, the Ecitons, and one of my
reasons for going into the jungle was the hope that
I might find their nest, the most wonderful of all
the ant nests.

66 JUNGLE ISLAND

The army ants are not plant eaters, like the
Attas. They are meat eaters, like the big four-
legged woods animals. They eat insects, the
baby ants of other ant families, and any small
animal that is unfortunate enough to get in their
way. Since they are so nearly blind they hunt
together, a great many of them in an army, each
following the other by the sense of smell, and in
these great numbers they can overpower the
largest animal in their path.

It does not take them long to clean up all the
small creatures in one place, and then they must
move on to find food in new country. Probably
they cannot stay more than four or five days in
one place. Then they move off again in a long
line, thousands and millions of them. The work-
ers carry the little white baby grubs in their
jaws. The soldiers move up and down the line,
directing it.

They do not have time to dig the big under-
ground rooms that the Attas live in, nor to make
paper for nests like the Aztecas, but they do make
nests even when they settle down for only half
a week. It would be no use to ask any one to
guess what they use for building their portable
houses, and yet it is the easiest material they
could find and can be put up quickest. They
build with live ants!

Each ant fits into place into the walls as if
he were a brick. With his long legs he holds

THE CLEVER FAMILY OF ANTS 67

on to the ants about him. When the nest is
finished it may measure as much as a yard in
every direction. It is usually built under a log
or something solid that serves as a roof and
reaches down to the ground. From a doorway
tunnels lead back into the nest, and there are
rooms at the end of these for the baby ants.
Everything — floors, ceiling, walls, and all — is
built of live ants holding firmly to one another.
Down the living halls the hunters run in and
out, carrying the food they have found to the
workers and baby ants inside.

No one knows how these ants make their nests
so cleverly and well without any one to superin-
tend the whole task. It is one of the things that
ants have been doing so long that they do not
need to be taught how to do it, any more than a
baby needs to be taught how to cry.

I never found any great number of the army
ants on the island. Perhaps when the waters of
the lake rose round the hill, the big armies were
off hunting in some other place. Perhaps they
prefer a climate that is still more rainy. I was
sorry not to see their wonderful nests, but the
little animals of Barro Colorado are safer than
they would be if they were penned up on the
island with armies of hungry Ecitons that had
to stay there, too.

TERMITES, THE DESTROYERS

Whether I tramped along a partly cleared
jungle trail or scrambled up a rocky, nearly dry
watercourse, I was continually catching sight of
rough blackish-brown balls fastened to the trees.
Some were only four or five feet above ground.
Others were eighty feet high (Fig .62). Some were
the size of footballs; some were three feet through.
In one mile I counted fifteen. They were the most
noticeable animal buildings in the jungle.

One of these is seen in the picture of the stilt
palm near my spiked tree mentioned earlier, and
shown here (Fig. 30). Molino had struck off the
stony outer shell with his machete blade to show
me what was inside. The shell fell away and
showed hundreds of tiny runways within, with
small, white antlike animals hurrying about.
These were termites, often called * 'white ants,"
but not ants at all. They are cousins to the
cockroaches, and are no more closely related
to ants than kangaroos are to men.
. Like the ants, the termites are a very old
family, and in the many years they have beert
on earth they have built up a way of living
together that is very like that of the ants. Some
of them live in the cool countries. I have found
them in Massachusetts and the Indiana sand

68

Fig. 30. A stilt palm with termite nest

70

JUNGLE ISLAND

dunes, but they are much commoner and more
important in the warm countries.

The termite tree nests are made of paper mixed
with clay and cemented in place with juice from
their mouths while it is still moist. Like the
tree ants, they make the paper by chewing up

Courtesy of U. S. Department of Agriculture

Fig. 31. Termite runways built into space

wood. Some of the nests are so hard and flinty
that they dull the edge of a machete. They are
very much more solid than the nests of the paper-
making ants. No opening can be seen. The
termites come and go through covered tunnels.
Wherever the termites go they build these tiny
runways to travel through (Fig. 31). If they go
down tree trunks or over the ground, they make

TERMITES, THE DESTROYERS 71

arched tunnels. If there is nothing soHd on which
their pathway can rest, they build a round tube.
The same clay-and-paper mixture is used here
as in the nest.

The workers venture out from the open end
of the runway less than half an inch, carrying
their tiny speck of material to extend the tunnel.
On the roadway marked out by the first workers
the others pat in place their little balls before the
mixture hardens. A little more than an inch of
tunnel can be made in an hour.

These covered roads, branching frequently, lead
off from the big nests down the trunks of the
trees. One tree of which I took a picture had a
network of tunnels over its bark like the veins
under the thin skin of a race horse (Fig. 32).
Some of the runways end at the ground where the
termites get water and dig clay mines and con-
struct underground nests. Others are built as far
as three hundred feet from the main nest and
end in smaller tree nests. Often these smaller
nests are on dead timber. Where the jungle has
been cleared away and people are trying to farm,
their fence posts are often capped with the
smaller nests.

The termites are very enterprising in their road
building. I found they had invaded the bed of
a stream that three months before in the wet
season had been a raging torrent, though now
it was only a little brook. Their arched runway
led from a moist and decaying palm, across a

Fig. 32. Termite runways on tree trunk

TERMITES, THE DESTROYERS 73

broad flat stone to sand and gravel on the other
side.

When roads or nests are broken open, you
may see many small termites with brown heads.
From the middle of their foreheads sticks out a
single hollow horn that makes a most excellent
squirt gun (Fig. 33). I took some termites in
my hand, and soon the whole hand was covered
with a clear, sticky liquid like cedar oil, which I
found hard to wash off. These are the termite
soldiers, whose duty it is to protect the colony,
and their sticky weapons are very useful against
most of their enemies. Other termite soldiers
are armed like the ant soldiers with large biting
jaws.

The termite workers are a little larger than the
soldiers. They do not have squirt guns, and their
jaws, though very strong, are not overlarge. It
is their business to build nests and runways and
bring in food.

Deep in the center of the nest are rooms called
''queen chambers," and in each of them live from
one to ten queens. The queens are much larger
than the tiny workers and soldiers. Their bodies
are often more than an inch long, six times the
length of a worker. The queens' chief occupa-
tion is to lay the eggs that will hatch out into new
termites to carry on the business of the nest.

"Kings" are usually found in the queens'
chambers, too. They are larger than the workers,

Soldier with
jaws

"Squirt-gun'
soldier

Winged adult

Wingless queen

No. 6 original. Rest after Grassi

Fig. 33. Termites

TERMITES, THE DESTROYERS 75

but smaller than the queens. Sometimes there
are three different kinds of kings and queens
living in the same nest.

Altogether there may be five kinds of termites
in the same colony: the soldiers to protect the
nest, the workers to build, to hunt food, and to
care for the young, and the kings and queens to
produce eggs.

Most of the year there are only a few kings
and queens in each colony, but in the spring,
about the time the rains begin again after the dry
season, a great many princes and princesses are
hatched out. None of the other termites in their
family has any wings, but each of these has two
pairs.

You will remember that the hard shell of the
termite nest completely covers it. There is no
opening for termites to get out or anything else
to get in. But when the rains come and all the
princes and princesses are hatched out, the workers
make holes in the nest walls while the soldiers
mount guard to kill ants or other interfering
enemies.

When all is ready, usually at the end of a warm
rain, the royal children climb out and fly away
into a world that they have never known before.
They are heavy -bodied like their parents, and fly
slowly. Birds eat a great many of them, but
there are still enough left to trouble the natives
who do not have screened porches. Swarms of

76

JUNGLE ISLAND

termites fly into their faces and hair and fall into
their food. If the Panamanians have been spend-
ing the dry season in the country, they know it

After Leidy

Fig. 34. The termites' wood-digesters

is time to move to town where they will not be
bothered so much.

After a flight of a few hours the termites bite
off their own wings and are then ready to settle
down. Two of them mate, build a nest, and
start a new colony with themselves as king and
queen.

The building habits of termites are interesting,
but what they eat is much more important to
us. These tiny animals live on wood, which the

TERMITES, THE DESTROYERS

77

workers gnaw away in tiny bits with their strong
jaws. Wood is not easy to digest, even for a
termite, and these workers make use of a strange
way to get it done. Inside their bodies, in their
intestines, are thousands of very small one-celled
animals called Protozoa, which look, as Figure 34
shows, more like a decorative design than a wood
factory, but they are able to digest the wood
swallowed by the workers so that the termites
can use it for food. Some of the soldiers and the
royal family cannot even chew wood. For these
the workers produce a liquid like milk which

Courtesy of U. S. Department of Agriculture

Fig. 35. A book damaged by termites on shelf in room.
The damage was done in one^week's time

gathers in drops around their mouths. The others
feed on this milk, and the workers may feed
each other or even swallow their own liquid.

78

JUNGLE ISLAND

Sometimes the termites eat into living trees
and kill them. Coconut palms and even sugar
cane are damaged by them, but more often they
feed on dead timber. This is the reason why
they are so frequently found in fence posts and
buildings. They are eating up the wood, leaving
nothing but a shell. Nothing escapes their attack.

Courtesy of U. S. Department of Agriculture

Fig. 36. Hard beech wood from drawer of a desk damaged
by termites in a building in Ancon

They eat telegraph poles, houses, railroad ties,
bridges, furniture, ships, books (Fig. 35).

They destroy wood and timber worth millions
of dollars every year (Fig. 36). Only recently the
government of the United States spent ten thou-
sand dollars repairing the damage that termites
had done to one building, the Hotel Tivoli, in
Ancon, which is owned and managed by the
government.

TERMITES, THE DESTROYERS 79

Their most remarkable and unexpected feat
was to bore through the lead sheathing of tele-
phone and telegraph cables laid underground and
even through the sheathing of cables carrying a
strong electric current through the locks of the
Canal. In one place alone fifty feet of cable had
to be replaced.

One company has laid a cable across the
Isthmus about a foot underground. They find
that where the line runs close to timber the
termites are likely to make their way over to it.
The little destroyers eat through the outer water-
proof coverings of rubber and lead, half a dozen
holes to the foot. They eat out the sheathing
of the bundle of wires that make up the
cable, and if they find "dead wires" without
an electric current, they follow these along,
stripping the separate wires of their wrapping
as they go. This performance seems to be pure
mischief, since, so far as we know, they cannot
digest metal or rubber. Possibly they use bits
of it for nest or road building, for it is not much
harder than some of the clay that they mine.
It seems to me more likely that they have the
habit of chewing anything they find and, like
some children, do not use judgment in what they
eat so long as it is conveniently in reach.

Soft wood — for example, pine brought in from
the north for building — is quickly eaten and
ruined, unless it is soaked first in creosote poison,

8o JUNGLE ISLAND

and even then it is not altogether safe. The
termites prefer other wood to creosoted wood, or
to the very hard and heavy native woods, Hke
the timber of the guayacan tree, but if the near-by
timber becomes scarce they will work even on
these. Some of the wooden forms into which the
cement was poured to make the walls of the great
Canal locks were of both hard and creosoted
woods, but they have been attacked by termites
where they were left in place around the cement.
Probably this was because the country around
the locks is well cleared of wood and even small
bushes, and the termites there were hard driven
to find food.

When we were building a wooden laboratory on
Barro Colorado we placed the timbers on cement
foundations so that no wood could come in con-
tact with the ground and attract a venturing ter-
mite scout. The laboratory was set on the top
of a high hill sloping down to Gatun Lake. The
red clay hillside was slippery enough in dry
weather, but after a rain it was impossible to
reach the top without hobnails in one's shoes and
a firm grasp on the strong lianas that the men
had tied to trees along the path. A long flight
of steps had to be built to the laboratory from
the boat landing by the Spanish-bayonet palm.
These rested on the ground. They were made
out of seasoned native timber, so hard that nails
could not be driven in it unless nail holes were

TERMITES, THE DESTROYERS 8 1

drilled first. Where softer wood had to be used
because it was less expensive and easier to work
with, it was treated with creosote poison. It is
my guess that even with these precautions the
busy termites will not let the stairs stand many
years without needing repairs.

As the Americans cut down and burn the
tropical jungle and build wooden houses and
fences and railway bridges, they are taking away
one food of the termites, but giving them another
which suits them just as well, unless it is better
protected from them than it has been up to
this time.

New ways to discourage the termites are tried
every year. I saw a little experiment made last
winter that tickled my imagination. In the jungle
live three different kinds and sizes of animals
called anteaters, for the very good reason that ants
are their chief food. They break open ant nests
and run their slender, sticky, wormlike tongues
down the tunnels, drawing them back covered
with ants. One of these anteaters is just as fond
of termites. He is shown in Figure 37 making
a good meal from a termite nest. On his strong
front legs are long claws that break through the
flinty shell of the nest. I wondered whether the
Canal Zone might not start raising herds of these
convenient anteaters to keep the termites down!

Not all of the termites' work is harmful. Their
mining stirs and softens the ground just as the

6

TERMITES, THE DESTROYERS

83

burrowing of the earthworms does; and their
very habit of wood eating, which is so destructive
in the wrong place, is often useful in the jungle,
where it turns dead wood quickly back to fertile
soil which supplies food for other plants.

^'

";r

^*.'«ii

Zf^*''^****^*^ .^ A^>>

Photograph by SSetek

Fig. 38. Cross-section of termite mound nest

Thirty-six kinds of termites are known to live
in Panama, and new varieties are still being dis-
covered. Not all of these make the tree nest
I have told about. Some live only in the ground.
Others have nests in the wood on which they
feed. And still others build tentlike mounds

Photograph by Zetek

Fig. 39. Termite mound nest

TERMITES, THE DESTROYERS 85

(Figs. 38, 39) of clay out on the plains, until the
plain looks like an Indian encampment. These
last may stand as high as a man's head.

All of them avoid light, moist air, and wind.
They have lived under shelter for so long that
their skins are thin and sensitive like a child's
that has been too long indoors, and they are
nearly or quite blind. The soldiers would not
be able to protect their colonies without the help
of the strong nests. We have already seen that
birds and anteaters feed on them. Ants are an
even more terrible enemy. ,^

Sometimes ants come into the termite nest and
live there. The termites let the ants have the
center of the nest and they themselves go off to
the outer rooms. Sometimes they may live in
the same nest without disturbing each other, but
if they come in each other's way there is a
vigorous battle.

I broke into a half -rotted log one day and found
part of the tunnels through it taken by ants and
part by termites. They might have been living
peacefully before, but both were excited by having
their runways broken open and the ants began
to stalk the termites. They ran up close to the
termites and made a dive at them with their
long jaws, which I could distinctly hear cHck as
they closed. Usually the first attempt was made
from too great a distance. Then the ant would
stop, take another start, and grab again. On

86 JUNGLE ISLAND

the second trial the termite was often caught and
probably eaten.

When I looked at the log again two days later,
all was quiet again. The termites were estab-
lished in one small part of the log, leaving most
of the galleries to the ants. When a few ants
were picked up and dropped among the termites,
they immediately made their escape. I took two
soldier termites with squirt guns on their foreheads
and dropped them into ant country. They moved
slowly while ants came rushing up, darting forward
and backing off, clashing their huge jaws.

Seven or eight ants, each one five times as large
as the termites, came within an inch or two of
the termite soldiers, who had cHmbed on slightly
raised places in the rotten wood and stood there
about two inches apart, facing the enemy first
in one direction and then in another. The ant
confronted at the time would usually drop back,
and, though I could not see the termite squirt
guns working, I could tell that the ant had been
hit by something, for he backed off wiping his
feelers.

After much running in and backing out, one
ant finally dashed at the side of a termite, bit,
and ran. Another ant repeated the same tactics,
and the termite rolled off his Httle hill and lay
still. The second termite soldier was killed by
the same side attacks. After the two Httle
invaders were safely dead the ants passing them

TERMITES, THE DESTROYERS 87

would touch them with their feelers, but soon
they paid no more attention to the battle ground.
The whole affair lasted no more than five minutes.
I think it ended only after the termite soldiers
had no more sticky liquid left to shoot from their
forehead squirt guns.

While this fight was going on I saw other ants
hunting the worker termites and carrying them
off in their jaws. The termites had a runway
near one edge of the rotten log, and though it
was no longer covered they were still using it.
For some distance the runway followed the side
of a tiny ridge. The ants climbed this ridge to
a position where they could reach over and touch
the passing termites with their feelers. When
it had found a termite victim, I saw one ant run
out behind it and bite it about mid-body. After
two bites here the ant ran around and bit its
head close to its jaws. Perhaps this crushed the
termite's jaws so that it could no longer hurt the
ant. At any rate, the ant was now ready to pick
it up and run off with it.

One of the stalking ants touched a termite
soldier going by, seized him from the side, and,
quicker than my eye could follow, dragged him
from his place on the trail, over the httle ridge,
and threw him down on the other side. The ant
turned back to attack the trail again, but this
time he met a termite soldier head on and backed
quickly away. I watched the robber ants for

88 JUNGLE ISLAND

half an hour, but I saw no more soldiers taken
from the trail, though many passed.

The termites must have been moving out, for
as time went on fewer and fewer workers came
along the trail, and at last only soldier termites
were left. When this came about the ants went
away, leaving the field in the possession of the
squirt-gun w^arriors.

Another day I found a tree termite nest which
had also some ant lodgers. The ants had taken
the upper and inner parts, where they kept their
eggs and babies. When this nest was broken
open, some of the ants were accidentally shaken
down among the termites. This time the soldier
termites went after the ants. When one attacked
an ant by himself, he might shoot at its legs, but
he preferred to climb on its back and squirt down
on it. When several joined in attacking one ant,
they gummed him up well with the clear, sticky
liquid from their guns. They often overloaded
an ant so heavily that he became quite helpless
and tumbled to the ground, termites and all.

These battles, you will remember, were between
blind ants and blind termites. They were fought
by the sense of smell and the sense of touch.
Perhaps when the ants and termites live peace-
ably in the same nest it is because they do not
smell each other any more. We say, ''Out of
sight is out of mind." Their motto may be,
"Out of smell is out of mind."

SPIDERS AND THEIR RELATIVES

Cholo, a fat little negro who liked to believe
and tell wonderful stories, was afraid of forest
ghosts and bullfrog hoodoos, but most of all he
was afraid of a certain pink scorpion he told me
about. These pink scorpions were found on
Barro Colorado, Cholo said, but he did not know
anybody who had ever seen one. The reason
was very simple. The pink scorpion was so
deadly that no one had ever seen him and lived
to tell the tale. Cholo could not ever tell me why
he knew they were pink, but he was as sure of
the color as he was of the scorpion.

Of course we never saw this gaily colored and
frightful animal, but the story reminded me of
other tales I had heard when I was a boy. The
grown-up people I knew then were all afraid of
spiders, which were the nearest relatives to scor-
pions that Indiana could boast. They believed
that the bite of any spider was poisonous, and
they thought, too, that spiders would go out of
their way to bite people. This was an entirely
wrong idea that took me many years to correct
for myself. When we read lett-ers from friends in
Mexico who told of finding scorpions in their shoes
of mornings, we were sure that they had been in
great danger.

89

go JUNGLE ISLAND

All these boyhood memories came back to me
on one of my first days in the jungle when Blanco
found a number of half-grown scorpions in a log
he was chopping for firewood. He supposed I
knew nothing about them and explained kindly
and carefully, ''Malo, malo — muchomalo," which
I guessed to mean, "Bad, bad — very bad."
Then, for fear I still did not understand, he
pinched one finger between his teeth, then held
the bitten finger with his other hand while his
face took on a look of great pain and he said in
his difficult Enghsh, ' ' Bite-a-you-bad ! ' ' Such an
elaborate warning must have seemed to him quite
enough for any sensible person, and he was much
concerned for me when I ran over to examine the
inch-long black animals and picked up with my
long forceps as many as I could find to put away
in glass jars for study.

The scorpions are relatives of spiders, but they
do not look much like them. The scorpion has
a long, jointed "tail" armed at the end with a
sting (Fig. 40). The sting is made of two parts —
a sharp spine at the tip of the tail for piercing its
victim and just under this an opening from which
poison flows into the wound made by the spine.
Its front pair of legs has grown into great
pinching claws like those a crayfish uses so well.

In the daytime scorpions rest in dark places
like the log where Blanco found them. At night
they go out to hunt their prey. Their long

SPIDERS AND THEIR RELATIVES

91

pincher claws are covered with sensitive hairs.
When a beetle or other unfortunate insect touches
these hairs, he is caught by the strong claws and
held. The scorpion lifts his flexible abdomen
and tail rapidly up and forward over his head

Modified from Riversid» Natural History

Fig. 40. Scorpion

and pierces the body of the insect with the sharp
spine. The poison under the spine oozes into the
wound and kills the insect. His own poison does
not hurt the scorpion's digestion. As bOon as the

92 JUNGLE ISLAND

insect is helpless he tears it into pieces with his
claws and eats the softer parts, poison and all.

The quantity of poison depends on the size of
the scorpion. The larger scorpions, which may-
grow to have a length of eight inches, can kill
mice. As far as human beings are concerned, I
knew that to a man in good health a scorpion
sting is painful, but not dangerous. It aches
severely, swells, and throbs as it becomes feverish,
but it is not fatal. I did not want a scorpion
sting any more than I wanted a wasp sting, but
I found the scorpions much easier to handle with
forceps at a safe distance than an active wasp
would have been. To a person weakened with
malaria or some other wasting disease a scorpion
sting would be more serious.

Blanco was plainly much worried at my interest
in these scorpions, but I had no trouble with them,
nor later with others. They do not sting unless
they are hunting for food or are attacked, and I
was careful not to provoke them. I did not put
my bare hand into dark holes, nor under logs.
I rolled the logs over to see what was under them
and fished in dark corners with my good steel
forceps.

Another spider relative found in the jungle and
often much feared is the large hairy tarantula,
which is also called the bird-eating spider. The
plump bodies of tarantulas may grow to be two
inches long, and their hairy legs have a spread of

SPIDERS AND THEIR RELATIVES 93

seven inches. They Hve in natural holes in trees
and in the ground, and these nests they line with
a web as many spiders do. Sometimes they ride
north on the ships in bunches of bananas, where
they are neither happy nor welcome.

One day I had climbed my spiked tree and was
working there when Santiago called to me from
the ground to come down in a hurry. It was not
very easy to get up speed when I was so well
loaded with expensive apparatus, but I let myself
down as fast as possible. There I found Santiago
excitedly holding down a big wasp while a tired-
looking tarantula lay near by. Santiago had been
hunting around at random for animals when he
spied this tarantula climbing up on a slanting
stick until it reached the tip a foot or so above the
ground. There it settled down quietly, probably
waiting for some animal which it could catch and
eat to come along. It gets its name of bird-
eating spider from its ability to catch and kill
small birds once in a while.

While it waited, another hunter came along.
This was a large wasp, a really monster wasp an
inch and a quarter long. The wasp swooped on
the tarantula, seized it, and stung it and was
dragging it off when Santiago interfered.

The wasp, commonly called tarantula hawk,
was dead and there was nothing to do but pickle
it. The tarantula was still alive, but paralyzed
from the wasp's sting until it could not move.

94

JUNGLE ISLAND

I put it away in an unventilated can to see how
long it would live. The photograph given (Fig. 41)
was posed four weeks later. The dead wasp has
been propped up on her stiff legs as well as

Fig. 41. Tarantula and tarantula hawk

possible, but the tarantula, which is still alive,
can be much better posed because his legs, though
almost helpless, are still flexible. In fact, he
could still move them slightly.

The tarantula lived thirty-five days in his can.
If he had been taken away by the wasp he would
have lived as long, unless he had first been eaten.
The wasp had near by a hole which she had
carefully prepared for a nest. There she meant
to drag the tarantula and lay her eggs on it.

SPIDERS AND THEIR RELATIVES 95

When the eggs hatched, the wasp babies would
feed on the still living tarantula until they had
grown large enough to spin cocoons for them-
selves. The wasp mother had no refrigerator,
and this was the way she arranged for her children
to have all the fresh meat they needed.

I wish that Santiago had let the tarantula
hawk live. I should have been interested in
seeing her drag the heavy tarantula to her nest
and pack it away there as preserved meat. I have
seen wasps farther north do the same thing with
spiders and caterpillars, but never any so large or
so easily studied.

People have puzzled a great deal over the
instinct that leads young wasps, freshly hatched
from their cocoons, to hunt always for the same
kind of animal on which to stow away their
eggs. They never see their own mother to learn
from her, nor do they have any older wasp to
watch, but the young tarantula hawk never
makes a mistake. She always selects a tarantula
on which to lay her eggs, just as the northern
wasp will always find the same kind of spider or
caterpillar on which she has grown up, for her
own children to eat.

The answer is probably this: The tarantula
hawk has been brought up on- tarantula. As a
youngster she never ate any other food, so that the
smell of nothing else attracts her. Flying through
the jungle, she sniffs tarantula odor and she

96 JUNGLE ISLAND

straightway goes to it. It is the most homeHke
smell in all the jungle to her. When she finds
the tarantula and has it safe, she is ready to
lay her eggs near by.

Tarantulas can inflict a very painful wound
which might be fatal to a person not in good
health, but I did not hear of any one being bitten
by them in the tropics, and no one mentioned
being afraid of them.

As for the spiders themselves, they were
abundant, prowling about among the stones and
leaves and spinning their webs in the shade, but
they were dull colored and, curiously enough, I
could find them most easily at night. When I put
a headhght on my hatband and walked slowly
along the trail, little sparks of greenish-blue Hght
gleamed back at me wherever the light struck
the ground. These puzzled me at first. I thought
they must be dewdrops, but each one that I
stalked and caught I found to be a spider, whose
eyes reflected the light like diamonds. They were
as abundant as fireflies on a summer evening.

These spiders never attack people, and I doubt
if their bite would be felt more than a pin prick.
I was grateful to them for their constant kilhng
of troublesome insects. There are so many of
them that they must dispose of a great many
mosquitoes and other nuisances.

One of the oddest spider relatives that I saw
was the harvestman (Fig. 42), which we call

SPIDERS AND THEIR RELATIVES

97

granddaddy-long-legs. This is a ridiculous look-
ing animal with a tiny round body like a small
dark seed, balanced on eight long, hairlike legs.
His legs are very useful to him, carrying him
along on great strides, although he cannot scurry

Fig. 42. The harvestman

SO fast as a spider. I found one afternoon that
he had another use for them as well.

We were working down my shady little brook,
turning over stones and dipping into the pools
to see what we could find, when I saw under the
overhanging bank a large dark speck, dancing up
and down like a giant dust mote in a sunbeam.
As I waited, it waved to and fro more slowly

7

I

98 JUNGLE ISLAND

and came to rest. Then I could see that it was
the body of a harvestman, which had been spring-
ing up and down so fast that its legs were invisible,
like the spokes in a rapidly moving wheel.

I came closer to see more clearly in the half-
light of the shaded ravine, and suddenly a whole
group of the dark bodies began dancing. Their
feet did not move from the spot. They swayed
up and down hke a child bouncing on bed springs.
When their bodies were moving they looked to
be free in the air, but when they became quiet
I could see that each was supported by its long
legs and that the legs of each harvestman touched
the legs of its neighbor. When one was dis-
turbed, the movement of his legs sent the news
along the legs of all the rest and they danced
together. The whole colony spends sociable days
in this cool, quiet retreat, and with their scheme
for making themselves invisible they are fairly
safe, even though there are so many of them.

The long legs serve well at another time. When
the army ants set out hunting, all animals that
can move come flying, crawHng, and leaping out
of their hiding places. But if they escape the
ants they are in as great danger from the birds
that follow the ant column to pick up the left-
overs. In the midst of the confusion the harvest-
man stands still. He lifts first one foot and then
another as an ant scout comes too near that
particular leg. His Httle roimd body is swung

SPIDERS AND THEIR RELATIVES 99

well above the ants. His legs are so slender that
the ant does not easily blunder against them, and,
if necessary, he can lift five of his eight legs at
once and balance on the other three. It is seldom
that he cannot find clear space for three legs
while the others are held up out of harm's way.
At the same time the harvestman is safe from the
birds that follow the ants, since the birds are
careful not to come too close to army ants.

The spider relatives in the jungle that everyone
talked about and detested were neither scorpions
nor tarantulas. They were the tiny red bugs
that are relatives of our northern chiggers, and
the somewhat larger ticks, which are like the
wood ticks we find in our own woods.

It is hard to say which of the two pests is the
more troublesome. The red bugs, which are so
tiny that they can barely be seen without a
microscope, could be somewhat discouraged if one
sprinkled one's skin with yellow, sneeze-producing
"flowers of sulphur" while dressing in the morn-
ing. When they did succeed in burrowing under
one's skin in spite of the powder, they produced
an itching spot that demanded to be scratched
whether scratching was convenient or not.

I did not find any sure way of keeping off the
flat brown ticks. In January when I first reached
the jungle I found a crop of small newly hatched
ticks over all the plants. They waited hopefully
on nearly every leaf, stretching out their forelegs

lOO JUNGLE ISLAND

to catch on any moving thing that brushed by.
These were called seed ticks. They are tiny things
that can get through anything short of leather.
I have found as many as fifty on one forearm.
Fortunately they have the habit of wandering
about over the skin for some time before settling
down to bury their heads and suck blood, and
it is at this time that they can be most easily
removed. If they are allowed to settle down and
stay, their bodies swell surprisingly with blood.
I have seen them a half -inch and even more

across.

The sure and slow way is to pick them off by
hand one at a time. The wholesale treatment is
to rub down one's body with kerosene, follow this
with a heavy lather of soap and water, and poHsh
off with alcohol. Even after this program I have
found the larger ones hanging on, and then the
only thing to do was to ask some one to take
them off in return for a similar favor.

The best practice I found was to go ahead as
if there were no ticks around as long as possible
and then pick them off and go ahead again. The
negroes took their spare time for looking over
themselves and one another quite as a matter of
course. But I never quite reached the place
where I was not somewhat embarrassed to sit
in the first-class coaches of the Panama railway
of an evening, picking off ticks that rambled
across the back of my neck toward my hair.

SPIDERS AND THEIR RELATIVES

lOI

The red bugs and the ticks are real nuisances.
If one were out in the jungle for a long time with
no good way of getting rid of them at least once

Photograph by Field Museum

Fig. 43. Ticks feeding through turtle shell

a day, he might be driven nearly distracted. Both
trouble other animals beside man. The large
tapirs are said to be covered with them. One of
the turtles I found had not only ticks attached
to its leathery legs, but others as well fed that
had gone to the work of boring through its hard

102 JUNGLE ISLAND

shell. Figure 43 shows them on the shell about
their real size. These are the same kind that
attacked me. A soft-skinned person must be a
very juicy morsel to animals that can success-
fully feed through a turtle's shell.

The ticks are a great hindrance to cattle
growers. Fresh milk on the Canal Zone costs
thirty cents a quart, so that most people use
dried or condensed milk instead. This is because
the orood milk cows we have in the north cannot
live in the pastures of Panama on account of the
ticks. The ticks not only weaken the cattle by
sucking their blood, but they carry a disease that
kills many of them. The cattle grown on the
ranches owned by the government on the Zone
are of the small native breeds that do not suffer
from disease as the better northern cattle do.

PERIPATUS, THE MOST INTERESTING

ANIMAL

Pe-rip-a-tus vSOunds like the answer to a charade
or a puzzle, and you may think that it really is
a puzzle when I tell you that of all the animals
on Barro Colorado Island my naturalist friends
ask first about it. * ' Did you really see PeripatUs ? ' '
they ask. * * Is it found on the island ? If I went
there do you think I could find it?"

I wonder if you ever heard of it before. Perip-
atus is not found in great numbers like the ants,
nor is it clever about its work, as they are. It
is not poisonous. It does not destroy property,
like the termites. It is not beautiful. It has no
market value, except as a pickled specimen on a
museum shelf. And yet to many people it is the
most interesting animal on the island. '

This is the reason : Peripatus is neither a worm
nor an insect, but a little of both. It is a sort of
connecting link between the two great groups of
animals. The centaur that the old Greeks
imagined, with the head of a man and the body
of a horse, was not nearly so queer a combination
as Peripatus.

It is a very old family. Millions of years ago
the still older family of worms were changing the
style of their bodies a little. From the outside

8 ^^3

I04 JUNGLE ISLAND

they looked much the same, but on the inside of
their bodies they tried new ways of breathing air
and pumping blood. They were no longer real
worms, but neither had they changed enough to
be called insects. They were Peripatus. In rocks
that geologists think were laid down about eight
hundred million years ago we find today the print
of Peripatus bodies very much like those that live
on Barro Colorado Island now.

In those ancient days, when all the earth was
warmer and moister, Peripatus could probably be
found over a great deal of- the world. Now the
family lives only in the belt around the middle
of the earth, in South and Central America, the
West Indies, Africa, the Malay Peninsula, the
East Indies, and Australia.

On Barro Colorado, Peripatus is hard to find
in the dry season. Whenever I had the time to
spare I dug for the animals in likely places, but I
never brought any up to the light. I was for-
tunate enough to see one that had been found by
a man digging out termite burrows.

This Peripatus had a wormlike body, about an
inch and a half long, with rows of fat legs ranged
in pairs along its sides, like the legs of an ordinary
caterpillar. Its light-brown velvety skin had a
darker stripe down the back. The eyes on the
sides of its head were small and bright. Above
its eyes it carried a pair of antennae, or feelers,
nearly as long as the Peripatus itself, and these

PERIPATUS 105

antennae it could push farther out or shorten
when it pleased.

Since Peripatus like neither the light nor dry
air, they burrow deep in the loose moist ground
under old logs when the dry season comes on. In
the rainy season they come out at night and may
be seen by a flashlight as they move over their
logs. Like earthworms, they are able to crawl
backward as well as forward. When disturbed,
their smooth muscular bodies contract suddenly
and they squirt out small drops of sticky slime
which clings to almost everything it touches
except their own velvety skin. Perhaps this bom-
bardment frightens enemies away, and perhaps,
like the sticky stuff in the termite's squirt gun, it
helps to gum up the legs and wings of the animals
they hunt, so that they cannot easily escape.

When they are taken into the laboratory for
study they can be fed on liver or flies. It is well
to remember to put only a few of the same size
in a cage, for they will also eat each other. I heard
the sad story of a man who managed to collect
fourteen grown Peripatus and twenty young.
Before he realized what was happening only three
were left. Those three had eaten all the others.

The eggs are very fragile and the mother carries
them inside her own body until they are hatched
out. When the little Peripatus are born they are
like their mother in every way except that they
are smaller and not so dark. She does not take

io6 JUNGLE ISLAND

any further care of them. They crawl away and
find their own food.

From Figure 44 you can see the long, wormlike
body, but you cannot see that the legs are hollow
as they always are in legged worms. The hidden
arrangement of muscles under the skin fits the
needs of a soft-legged worm, but would never
do for a hard-shelled insect.

After Sedgwick

Fig. 44. Peripatus

The jaws grow like those of an insect, but
Peripatus has only one pair of jaws and most
insects have more, Peripatus has a real heart,
which the worms have never had. The heart
is built like that of an insect, and so are the air
tubes with which it breathes. Worms breathe
through their soft skin or by tiny gills on their
legs or heads.

This insect-worm combination seems to be an
experiment that Nature tried once and found
neither poor enough to throw away entirely nor
successful enough to become important and wide-
spread. From other experiments came the true
insects, and many failures must have died off.
Our great reason for being interested in Peripatus
is that it lives today and shows us what that old
experiment was like.

SNAKES AND CROCODILES

Everyone asks me about the snakes of the
jungle, and I must admit that they were the
animals I most feared in going into the tropics.
On the big boat that took me from New Orleans
to the Canal Zone I heard some hair-raising snake
stories, but it was encouraging to find that the
tales of men killed by snake bite while digging
the Canal grew less terrifying the nearer we came
to the Isthmus. At New Orleans I had been told
that hundreds died. At Colon they said that
there had been a few snake-bitten men. But I
found only one person who actually knew of such
a case, and he assured me that the man recovered
from the effects of the poison.

My reading and my common sense had told
me all this before I left the north, and I had
planned to wear rubber-soled tennis shoes and
canvas leggings in the jungle, as being noiseless
and light. However, a friend who studies snakes
and who had spent some time in Central America
advised heavy shoes and leather puttees. He said
quite frankly that he had spent nearly half a year
looking for poisonous snakes in the Central
American jungle, and that he had not found half
a dozen in all that time. But he told me also
that if I should happen to run across a poisonous

107

io8 JUNGLE ISLAND

one it was likely to be very poisonous, and, what
was more serious, it would not give warning of
attack, as our rattlesnakes do.

My first snake experience on the Canal Zone
came on my first day there. I had gone to the
office of a physician in the Ancon hospital to ask
when I should begin to take quinine to prevent
malaria. He took me into a large adjoining
closet to show me some jaguar skulls and bird-
skins and I bent over to look. Presently he
called my attention to a shelf close to my forehead,
and there in the half-darkness lay a live boa
constrictor, so large that it was hard for me in
my excitement to tell how big it was. Whatever
its actual length, it was large enough to swallow
full-grown chickens for a meal, though the phy-
sician was complaining that he could not get it
to eat at all and he was afraid that it would
starve. Boa constrictors are, of course, not
poisonous and they are seldom dangerous to
people or large animals, but the experience left
me a little nervous.

A few days later a physician on the Atlantic
side sent me by messenger a can containing, so the
label said, two live tree vipers. These are really
poisonous snakes, whose lives are spent in trees.
They use their slender tails in climbing, as a
monkey uses his, clinging to limbs. Sometimes
they are found in bunches of bananas which give
them an excellent hiding place.

After photograph by Ditmars

Fig. 45. Horned palm viper

no JUNGLE ISLAND

When the vipers were transferred carefully to a
wire cage they were seen to be nearly half grown.
The grown snake reaches a length of three feet. A
glass dish for water had been placed in one corner
of the cage where' it could be filled without
opening the cage. We gave them grasshoppers,
various bugs, and bits of meat, but, like many
snakes in captivity, they refused to eat. They
usually stayed coiled, with their flat, arrow-
shaped heads, all too heavy for their slender bodies,
poised and alert to strike.

These vipers are relatives of the dreaded
fer-de-lance and bushmaster, much larger poison-
ous snakes found more commonly on toward
South America. I was told of an airplane relief
party recently sent from Ancon to the interior
of Panama with antitoxin to treat a man bitten
by a bushmaster.

These snakes and snake stories did not make
my dreams the most pleasant the night before
I first went to Barro Colorado. I carried in my
knapsack, as a matter of course, a bottle of
potassium permanganate and a sharp razor blade,
and I knew that in case of a bite I must make a
crisscross cut at the bitten place, after having
first bandaged tightly above it, then suck out the
poison and rub in the potassium permanganate,
all of which sounds simple enough.

As a matter of fact, I did not see any snake
that first day, nor yet the second. It was not

SNAKES AND CROCODILES

III

until noon of my third day that I stumbled across
one. With Molino I was picking my way up the
dry bed of a rocky run, machete in one hand,
camera and notebook in the other. I chanced

Fig. 46. Tht ^.<

to slash away a great hanging leaf, and there I
saw a fairly large snake, six feet or more long, in
the shade.

Instinctively I drew back long enough to see
that he was not poisonous. A bushmaster would
have shown briUiant black blotches on a reddish
yellow background. This snake had a plain dark
skin with a bluish sheen. Molino pushed forward
and struck him a smart blow^on the head with
his machete, but the snake was not even stunned.
He crawled slowly but surely out of sight under
an overhanging rock.

112 JUNGLE ISLAND

More enthusiastic snake collectors would have
taken energetic measures to catch him, but I was
content to watch him ripple away. Later I shot

After photograph by Ditmars

Fig. 47. Coral snake

one just like him behind the little camp shack,
and found him to be a relative of our northern
black snake and no more dangerous. His picture
(Fig. 46) was taken on so big a log that he does
not look as large as he was.

This was the dry season and snakes were scarce.
Santiago brought me two coral snakes (Fig. 47)
which he had found under dry logs near Frijoles.
These are the commonest poison snakes of the
Canal. They are beautifully marked with red,
black, and yellow bands running entirely around
the body. The colors are much the same that
the Indians use in cloth and pottery.

Coral snakes are not much feared by the
natives, for they will not strike at a passing
object, and are roused only when touched or
stepped on. Even then the hollow fangs through
which their poison flows are so short that canvas

SNAKES AND CROCODILES 113

leggings over ordinary clothing will give complete
protection. My native helpers went about bare-
footed or wearing rope or leather sandals as they
pleased. Their ankles were always bare, but they
were not afraid of these snakes.

One day while I was working up in my spike-
ladder tree, I had my men collecting ants and
whatever animals they could find near the tree
trunk. Cholo, an excitable little negro, who was
exploring in the center of wild pineapple plants
near by, ran over to the tree and called me to
come down and see the snake he had found. All
coiled up in the protected bud-center of the plant,
sheltered by the larger leaves, was a mildly
poisonous snake called the blunt-headed snake
(Fig. 48). I could see its body, glistening with

After photograph by Ditmars

Fig. 48. Blunl-headed snake

moisture, but the broad head was hidden under
the body coils and the slender neck looked much
like the equally slender tail.

8

114

JUNGLE ISLAND

As it persisted in keeping its head out of sight
so that I could not pick it up properly by the
neck, I finally shook it out of its resting place
two feet above the ground into a bag held ready.

After photograph by Ditmars

Fig. 49. The long-headed tree snake

Then I caught its neck with my forceps and put
the head into a bottle of formalin. The long
slender neck, the heavier body, and the deHcate
tail followed, and when the bottle was corked, I
had caught my first jungle snake.

SNAKES AND CROCODILES 115

We caught only one other snake that was even
mildly poisonous. This was a long-headed tree
snake (Fig. 49). During my entire stay in the
jungle I met no really poisonous snakes.

We usually think of a poisonous snake as being
short and stout-bodied with a broad head. Both
the blunt-headed snake and the long-headed
snake had long, whiplike bodies, and only one
had a broad head. As a matter of fact, not
nearly all broad-headed snakes are poisonous, nor
are all poisonous snakes broad-headed.

The truly poisonous snakes have fangs like
hollow needles through which the poison runs
into the wound they make. The mildly poison-
ous snakes have poison grooves on short teeth so
far back in their mouths that they cannot strike
with them. A small lizard which can be crammed
well back into their mouths can be quickly poi-
soned when it is bitten, more quickly often than
by the other snakes which men fear more.

The snakes go into hiding in the dry season,
but they appear again, oddly enough, before the
wet season has begun, just as the trees that shed
their leaves begin to leaf out before the rains
come. In March I saw four or five snakes in
one day. These were small and harmless, like
our garter snakes in size and behavior.

The tropical snakes that I handled did not
have the cold, clammy feeling that makes our
snakes disagreeable to the touch. They were

Ii6 JUNGLE ISLAND

nearly as warm as I was. The reason is simple.
Their temperature is the same as the air around
them, or the ground over which they crawl. A
snake lying out in the heat of the tropical sun
may have a temperature of a hundred degrees.
He will be just as warm as the sunshine is. This
is one reason w^hy snakes, as well as ants and
termites, thrive better in the tropics, where they
are not obliged to lie stiff and still through the
winter.

Even in this warm snake paradise, everything
is not pleasant for them. They are commonly
attacked by the army ants, by birds, and by
other snakes. I even heard of a snake whose
tail was so covered with blood-sucking ticks that
he was mistaken for a rattler.

Snakes make their home in the thick layer of
palm leaves that thatches the native huts, and
live there on the other little animals, the lizards,
rats, and mice that find the thatch a convenient
hiding place. John English likes to tell of the
time when he fumigated a hut like this where he
was living. There were too many bugs and
larger animals for his comfort, and he decided to
usie sulphur fumes to drive them out. This hut
was a grand one, with walls. After it had been
closed all day he aired it out thoroughly, and
when the sulphur smoke was gone the family
went to bed. In the night he was wakened by a
thud on the floor and there he found a big boa

SNAKES AND CROCODILES 117

constrictor that had fallen out of the palm
thatch, still stupefied by the sulphur.

I should not feel as untroubled as John English
did about sharing my roof with a snake. But
I must confess that when I made up my mind
that it must be a snake that was carrying off
crocodile eggs night after night from the table
beside my bed, instead of the rat that I first
believed it to be, the idea did not disturb me
any more than if it had really been a rat.

I do not think that one needs to fear the snakes
on our jungle island. Probably coral snakes and
even bushmasters are there, but in two months I
found none, although my men and I turned over
logs, as well as every loose stone in the stream
bed near by. I crawled through underbrush on
hands and knees, lay flat on the ground watching
animals, cHmbed my tree regularly, and tramped
about as freely as I have ever done in my native
Indiana woods. In all that exploring I managed
to see twelve living snakes in the jungle. The
two that were slightly poisonous were not half so
dangerous as the copperheads I found and killed
when a boy.

Personally, I was much more bothered by the
crocodiles in Gatun Lake than by any snake.
The island inlet was a pleasant shady stretch of
clean water (Fig. 50). No spot could have been
more inviting for a swim and a bath in the late
afternoon of a hot jungle day, except for one

ii8 JUNGLE ISLAND

important item. I knew that a big ten-foot
crocodile liked that inlet, too. Sometimes I saw
him, floating like a log at the edge of the water.
Sometimes he moved on up the little creek as
our boat landed. But even when he was out of
sight he made swimming a little too exciting to
be worth trying, particularly when I knew that
the marines stationed on the mainland near by
were under orders not to swim in the lake. It
should be added that there are tropical workers
much more experienced than I, and no hotter or
more anxious for a bath, who take a daily swim
regardless of crocodiles.

A number of these crocodiles, which the natives
called alligators, were to be seen in the quiet
bays along the margin of the lake. One of them
I saw day after day from the train window as
I commuted from the jungle back to civilization
in Ancon. My men brought me big, blunt-ended
crocodile eggs (Fig. 51) which they found near
the lake shore in February.

It is not likely that there were many crocodiles
in this stretch of country before the lake was
made. They are known to live in the deeper
holes of rivers, but they prefer to live in lakes.
Along rivers they are usually solitary and scat-
tered, but in lakes their numbers increase rapidly.
In Gatun Lake they have increased so fast that
they have driven their smaller relatives, the
caimans, back up into the pools of the little

H^

^;«'.- J.

. .^;

.*»^*i#

-«•■ v.*

-■■♦^.^

'•'S^N.iiP*'

■•^

Photograph by Zetek

Fig. 50, The home of the crocodile

I20

JUNGLE ISLAND

creeks. The caimans are used to stream life as
they once found it along the Chagres, and it is
likely that there are fewer of them here now than

Fig. 51. Crocodile eggs

in the old days before the river bed became a
lake. The large crocodiles eat the caimans that
do not get out of their way, and they also eat the
smaller crocodiles.

Blanco, Necto, and I were tramping across the
island one day looking for large animals. We
came to a shady pool in the bed of a stream that
was otherwise nearly dry. This was about a

SNAKES AND CROCODILES 121

quarter of a mile up from the lake. The pool
was about a rod long and in the widest place four
feet across. In the deepest spot there might have
been two feet of water. There, lying with his
head at the surface well out in the open, we saw
a five-foot caiman.

I made ready to shoot him with my light rifle,
since I wanted very much to take back his head
to a museum, but both the men whispered, ' ' No !
No!" so I watched to see what they would do.
Both took off their sandals and tightened hold
on their machetes. Blanco stole softly around
until he was behind and just over the unsuspect-
ing reptile. With one blow he cut into its brain,
and then Necto waded in and brought it out to
dry land. I tried several photographs with my

Fig. 52. The caiman

big camera, moving the caiman into the brightest
sunflecks to be found under the dusky jungle
roof, but I only proved again that there is seldom

122 JUNGLE ISLAND

light enough on the forest floor for a good picture.
The photograph given (Fig. 52) is the best of a
poor lot.

In the pool were several fish, eight inches long
or less, on which I suspect he depended for food.

The caimans are related to our Florida alli-
gators. Like the alligators, they lay their eggs
in heaps of rotting leaves and twigs, which serve
to keep the eggs moist and at about the same
temperature. Crocodiles bury their eggs in the
ground. Caimans are found as far north as
southern Mexico, and they spread far into South
America, where they live in great numbers along
warm, quiet rivers and swamps of the rainy
tropics.

THE ANCIENT FAMILY OF LIZARDS

The lizards more than made up for the scarcity
of snakes. They were abundant and of many
different kinds. None of them was poisonous.
It seemed to me, as I watched them climb bushes
and trees, hop along the ground, or skip over the
surface of the lake, that I might be living in the
Age of Reptiles, when they were lords of the world
and there was neither man nor any of the hairy,
four-footed animals to be found. But I had to
remember that in those old days some of them
were so huge that I should have scuttled away
from them as swiftly as their small very-great-
grandchildren slipped away from me now.

The ancestors of these very lizards were living
back in the years when the great coalbeds were
being laid down in hot forest swamps, and many
geologists think this happened more than five
hundred milHon years ago (Fig. 53). Coal
miners dig up their bones now with the coal, and
in the earth layer just above the coal they find
the bones and footprints of huge lizard-like
animals, a hundred feet long and weighing several
tons. Sometimes they were large and sometimes
they were small, but always there were lizards
to be found in this warm region. When the
land sank and the sea came in they moved back.

123

124 JUNGLE ISLAND

When the land rose above sea level they spread
out over it again.

The lizard family is so old that it makes even
the ants seem rather new. From it have come
not only the tremendous old dinosaurs, but also
the snakes, turtles, alligators, and crocodiles.

I hope that as you read you will not only see
these lizards as they look today, but that you

After Lull

Fig. 53. Ancient lizard

will imagine some of their interesting habits being
learned gradually in this long, long stretch of time.
In less than a week from the time I saw my
first tropical jungle I was living alone on Barro
Colorado with no one nearer than an hour's
paddle across the lake and no boat to take me
there if I had wished to go. When I had come to
the island before, some one was always with me
and we were always in a hurry to get back into
the jungle to see some special thing. Now that
my boatman had gone back to Frijoles and I
was alone and quiet, the smaller animals began

THE ANCIENT FAMILY OF LIZARDS

125

to go about their business again, and I had
nothing to do but sit in the door of my shack
(Fig. 54) and see what I could see.

Photograph by Lutz

Fig. 54. The shack

126 JUNGLE ISLAND

The crazy little board shack was set about
fifty feet up the hillside, by the cleared trail, on
a shelf not so steep as the rest of the hill. There
was a little footpath running to a near-by brook
where I got my drinking water. The rest of the
hillside was a tangle of green trees, shrubs, and
vines. Among these I knew the palms and the
broad-leaved heUconias, but the other plants had
never got into any greenhouse I knew, nor been
named in any picture book of my acquaintance,
though I grew to know many of them later.
They made a strange green frame for the long
inlet, and it only made me feel even farther away
from home to catch once in a while a gUmpse of
a great ocean freighter sHding quietly past far
out in the lake.

The first moving thing to catch my attention
in this imfamihar picture was a Httle AnoHs
Hzard, hopping across the open space like Old
Man Kangaroo, thirty inches to one hop. He
started to cHmb a near-by tree and I made after
him with a net in one hand. I peeped around the
tree, holding the net on the other side of the tree
in case he ran. He did not run. He kept his
small bright eyes on me and dodged the clumsy
efforts that I made to catch him with the net
around the tree.

In California I had caught rock Hzards in my
hands, and I tried that plan on AnoHs now. My
open hand struck the tree where he had been

THE ANCIENT FAMILY OF LIZARDS 127

without touching him, but to my surprise he fell
to the ground as if he had been stunned and lay-
there perfectly stiff. When I picked him up he
was still stiff, but I noticed that he had fallen as
if by accident under a leaf to which one claw
still clung carelessly. With my free hand I
fumbled for a bottle and found the cork hard
to pull out. All this time Anolis showed no sign
of hfe. When I thrust him head first into the
bottle his hind toes caught on the top, again as
if only by accident.

Nothing else had showed me that he was still
alive, but these two accidents would have been
enough to make me suspicious, even if I had not
known all the time that he was a very much
alive lizard playing dead in the hope that I would
let him go.

Once he was safely bottled I had plenty of time
to examine him. Of AnoHs' five-inch length,
about two-thirds was tail. Since his head and
mouth look something like an alligator's, one of
his names is alligator lizard. Like the kangaroo,
his jumping hind legs were long and his front legs
short. All his twenty long toes were fitted with
vacuum pads that help him climb.

There w^ere many other Anolis around. Their
favorite position seemed to be on a tree trunk,
head downward and well out in a graceful line
(Fig. 55). I caught two more and tethered them
to my window screen by a bit of dental floss tied

128 JUNGLE ISLAND

loosely around the body just in front of the hind
legs.

My first Anolis had a dull brown back, faintly
patterned, but I found that they were not always
the same color. Sometimes they might be brown,
or a dull gray, or a light green, and often they
would mix colors, with a brown stripe down the
spine while the rest of the body was green.

Many people believe that these lizards which
change color are always the color of whatever
they are standing on. This is not true. One of
my lizards was a Hght gra^dsh green when I
decided to place him on a little plant of the same
color. He immediately turned to a rich brown,
but even then I must give him credit for not
being easily seen as he stood, "frozen," head
downward. A brown lizard that I found curled
around a white nut was well hidden, too. It was
much easier to see the nut than the lizard.

AnoHs' color seems to be controlled partly by
light, partly by heat, and partly by excitement.
Whenever he is excited he puffs out bright yellow
skin under his throat.

Mr. Ditmars, the "snake man" of the New
York Zoological Gardens, tells of watching two
dull brown male Anolis lizards as they met each
other. Both extended their yellow throat fans
and approached each other with dancing steps,
nodding their heads. As they came closer both
changed to an ashen gray. Then they charged

Fig. 55. Anolis, the hopping lizard

After Stejneger

I30

JUNGLE ISLAND

and fought. The lizard that lost the battle
scampered off turning to a dull yellow, while the
victor strutted away bright green. When the
excitement was over and he had settled down to

Fig. 56. The brown ground lizard

catch flies once more, he turned to his everyday
dull brown.

There is another lizard trick as good or better
for protection than the Anolis' changing color or
playing dead. I tried to catch a lizard, but my
hand closed only on its tail. For an instant the
whole lizard was there. Then a squirm and a
twist and the lizard ran away, leaving his tail in

THE ANCIENT FAMILY OF LIZARDS 131

my hand. It is easy for any lizard to break off
his tail and then grow a new one and it is one of
his best ways of escaping from enemies.

One day I set fat Httle Cholo to catching any
lizards he could find on the island. He came
back in half an hour with two lizard tails.

"Why, Cholo," I said, "those are only tails."

"Yes, Boss Doctor, this one, she's a tail, but
this one, he's a Hzard. I saw him jump!"

I knew what had happened. Cholo had struck
the lizard, and the lizard had immediately made
off, dropping its tail, which wriggled like a snake.
While Cholo was gathering up the lively tail its
owner had got safely away.

When the tail is brightly colored the trick is still
better. One of the common island lizards had a
brown back striped with rich yellow (Fig. 56), but
it boasted a tail of robin's-egg blue. The body
of the lizard was much the color of the dead
leaves over which he scampered, so that an
inexperienced person or a young animal would
notice much sooner the gay active tail left behind
than the dark animal slipping away.

Another's white-tipped tail trailed after a
brown head and a bluish-coated body. When he
snapped off his conspicuous tail^ my hand reached
for it before I thought and I nearly lost the
lizard.

Some lizards run away from danger with the
tail held high, offering what seems to be a very

132

JUNGLE ISLAND

convenient handle to pick up the whole animal.
If the tail is touched, the lizard, of course, snaps
it off and leaves it wriggling on the ground. I
wonder how man}^ snakes and birds have had
only lizard tails for their dinners when they had
thought they were about to have whole lizards !

Down close to the w^ater's edge lived some
larger lizards with long hind legs and tail. When
disturbed they went running out over the surface
of the water in the most startling manner. They
ran with bodies erect, on their hind legs, spreading
the long toes of their hind ^et to support them
on the water and balancing easily with their long
tails. I suppose they could swim if they should
chance to fall under the water, but all those that
I saw skipped as easily over the surface of the
inlet as if it were dry shore. They lived on land
too, but always near water.

They look, as they run around, very much as
did their relatives, the old dinosaurs (Fig. 57), in

After Lull

Fig. 57. Dinosaur

the great days of the reptiles, except that one
must remember that not even a baby dinosaur
would be so small.

THE ANCIENT FAMILY OF LIZARDS I33

These lizards, called basilisks, grow sometimes
to be three feet long. The largest ones that I saw
were only two feet long, and most of them were

Fig. 58. The basilisk

not half so big (Fig. 58). I suspect that a beauti-
ful white-and-black hawk that perched near by
ate many of them. Like many dinosaurs, the
basilisks wear on their heads a handsome crest.
The older male lizards add to this a crest running
down the spine and another on the tail. A lizard
that has parted with his crested tail does not get
a ruff on his new tail when it grows.

Unlike Anolis, the basilisk will bite viciously,
but vsince I let them bite a stick or the heavy

134

JUNGLE ISLAND

sole of my shoe in place of the finger that the}^
might have preferred, I cannot tell just hovr
painful their bite is.

One late afternoon I was attracted to the door
of the shack by the creaking of branches in a
near-by tree. Forty feet above the ground,
crawling out over the slender branches, was the
big lizard called iguana. This iguana was ' a
heavy-bodied fellow, five feet long. He cHmbed
awkwardly and the branches swayed alarmingly
under his weight. While he was moving about
he could very easily be seen, but as soon as he
had settled himself along a limb not as thick as
his own body he was very hard to see, although

Fig. 59. Iguana

I knew perfectly well where he was and there were
not many leaves in the way.

His upper parts were a dark greenish hue, and
his flanks were yellow. Both colors fitted well
enough the color scheme of the tree, and the
pinkish ruff of spines running down the middle of
his back looked like the irregular knotty bark

THE ANCIENT FAMILY OF LIZARDS 13 5

(Fig. 59). He seemed no more suited to tree
life than an alligator would have been, but he
was probably as safe there as such a juicy morsel
would have been anywhere.

Not only the large forest animals, but the
Panama natives prize the iguanas highly for food.
Two that John English shot furnished meat for
Frijoles over Sunday. My men were willing to
bring me plenty of iguana heads for my collection,
but they asked permission to keep the bodies to
eat. I was warned not to eat chop suey in the
Panamanian cafes, because it was sure to be made
of iguana meat instead of chicken. Personally I
could see no objection to eating meat that looks
and tastes like chicken, simply because it came
from a lizard instead of a bird. The iguanas'
taste in food is quite as clean as a chicken's.
They eat leaves and fruit, and probably add to
this eggs, young birds, and other small animals
as they can catch them.

I saw several iguanas in the branches of shade
trees in Ancon, and even a young one, two feet
long, running across the asphalt-paved street
dodging automobiles. One of my Ancon neigh-
bors complained of an iguana that landed with a
thud on his roof every night just as everything
was quiet and restful within. They may be seen
alive, with their feet tied together, waiting a
purchaser in the markets, and they are sometimes
shipped to New York alive.

10

136 JUNGLE ISLAND

These are only a few of the many kinds of Hzards
I saw running about. If I hved in the tropics, I
think I should find them as varied and as interest-
ing as the birds we study in the north. Those
like Anolis are much pleasanter to handle than
frogs or toads, because their skin is dry and warm.

Our southern chameleon, with which you may
have played, is a relative of Anolis, and so are
the lizards of the southwestern United States.
Next time you see one of these remind yourself
that millions of years ago, when the coal you
burn in your furnace w^as being made, lizards like
these slid through the jungle forests just as they
do today.

STRANGE BIRDS

I believe more Americans are interested in
birds than in any other wild creatures. On the
boat that took us down from New Orleans to
Panama, people asked me where they could find
a guide to tropical birds, hke the little handbooks
we tuck away in our pockets when we go out to
look for birds here. I was sorry to have to tell
them that there were no convenient little books
with colored pictures to take out birding in the
jungle. I should have liked such a guide myself.

Some of the men I knew at Ancon had studied
birds, but they always wanted to see a specimen
before they were sure of its name. This meant
that I should usually have to kill a jungle bird to
learn its name, and it is no fun for me to kill a
bird. I shot only two birds while I was on
Barro Colorado. One was a motmot, which trims
his tail feathers in an odd way, and the other was
a tiny black-and-red man akin, over which my
little daughter grieved so sincerely that I
regretted my curiosity about it.

The negroes who were with me on the island
were not much help with the birds. They always
had names for any that they saw, but I soon
found out that the same name might be given to
entirely different birds, or that one bird might

J37

138 JUNGLE ISLAND

have as many different names as the Prince of
Wales.

But there were birds ever>^where, and after a
while, with many questions, I found out the names
of those I saw oftenest. Nearly all of them were
strange to me. I was on the Isthmus at the
time when summer birds have left the northern
United States, but while some of these migrate
even farther into South America, I myself saw
few that could have come to Panama from the
United States. Most Panama birds seemed to
be stay-at-homes instead of tourists.

The largest birds and those we saw oftenest were
the great black vultures, with featherless, skinny
heads, which floated and swung all day long over
the city of Panama. When we were in Ancon
we lived high on Ancon Hill, with a wide view
over the plain where Morgan the pirate fought to
take the city many years before. Now a great
stretch of the plain is kept cleared for an aviation
field, and from above we could watch the air-
planes landing or taking off for a flight. The
airplanes roared away below us, almost as far as
we could see them, but the vultures were on our
own level or above us, floating silently on wide
quiet wings.

When we went down to the water front of the
city, we saw them at closer range (Fig. 60).
When the tide went out and left acres of mud
uncovered in the harbor, the big birds came down

STRANGE BIRDS

139

on the shore and the mud flats and fought over
decayed food stranded there, thrown out from
the seaside market and from the boats that
brought in fruit to the market.

Fig. 60. Vulture hanging over the waterfront

Down in the bay, well out from shore, were
brown pelicans, with queer leathery pouches under
their bills to make room for a large catch of fish.
These might be seen flying ^ overhead in the
V-shaped formation that wild geese use. They
dived from the air after fish, beak and breast
together, with an awkward, resounding splash
that reminded us comically of a small boy learning

STRANGE BIRDS 141

to swim. These pelicans are the same kind that
are found along the California coast.

Long-tailed grackles flew about in flocks or
singly, much as our blackbirds do in the United
States. They seemed to thrive on city life and
they were as impertinent as English sparrows.
I remember one sleek black fellow that sauntered
up and down the platform of the Balboa station
as if he were himself a passenger for the early
morning train, and squawked grackle talk to the
small crowd waiting there. From the train
windows we saw them along the cleared and
fenced pasture lands. They ranged themselves
on bushes and sat there to watch the train go
by, looking like shiny ornaments on some new
kind of Christmas tree.

We kept a lookout from the train over the
lily pads that grow in the quiet bays of Gatun
Lake (Fig. 61), and usually we were rewarded by
a sight of jacanas. Jacanas are long- toed water
birds which run daintily around over the lily
pads, scarcely wetting their feet at all. The bird
itself is heavier than a robin, but its long legs end
in slender-toed feet with a vSpread of six inches.
The lily pads are small, but the wide feet spread
the jacana's weight as a snowshoe does a man's
on soft snow.

The jacanas were more interesting than the
hawks flying over the Canal or back up in the
valleys. The hawks looked much like our own

142 JUNGLE ISLAND

marsh hawks, and were recognized by a telltale
white spot on the rump.

When we were out on Gatun Lake in our cayu-
cas we often saw long low lines of cormorants
flying heavily a few feet above the water. The
natives call them *'fish ducks." If we were
fortunate we might sight out in the deeper part
of the lake a floating field of black specks, cover-
ing thickly a space half as large as a city block.
As we came closer we could see that each black
object was the head of a cormorant, whose entire
body floated well below the surface of the water.
As our boat came near, the cormorants began to
struggle heavily from under the water, like tired
swimmers. They took to the air until we were
past and then as quickly as possible they sank
into the lake again, with only their watchful
black heads turning above water in our direction.

Sometimes a red-bellied woodpecker flew out
from one of the dead snags as we neared shore,
and we were likely to see kingfishers of all sizes.
Some were about as big as a chipping sparrow
and others were larger than I have ever seen in
the north. A white hawk, black-barred on wings
and tail, spent a great deal of time perched in a
water-killed tree close to shore where he could
swoop down for the basilisk lizards that ran out
over the surface of the water.

We seldom saw vultures over Gatun Lake or
Barro Colorado, although they lived in such

STRANGE BIRDS I43

numbers only twenty-five miles away. Their
absence shows how very clean the lake is kept.
When the dynamiting crew of the Canal came
out to the island inlet and blew up old trees and
stumps so as to make a safe passageway for
motor boats, many fish were killed. Presently
the dead fish rose and floated on the surface of
the water and the vultures gathered in at once to
feed on them. How they knew that any dead
animal was there is a mystery to me. I could
not yet tell that the fish had begun to smell bad,
and the vulture's sense of smell is poorer than a
man's.

In most Central American cities, where the
streets are not kept as clean as in Panama,
the vultures are very useful birds and are held
in great respect for their services in cleaning up
garbage that would decay, bring flies, and thus
cause illness.

If we came down the inlet quietly we som.etimes
saw a little blue heron standing in the shallow
water. The young birds were white. Once we
saw three white ones, nearly as large as their
blue mother, standing together. These tall pale
birds were a sharp contrast to the dark green of
the jungle shore. • ^

I have seen a little green heron, the Louisiana
heron, and the great blue heron along the shore.
Perhaps these had migrated from the north, but
it may be that they only looked and behaved like

144 JUNGLE ISLAND

northern birds of the same sort. The great blue
heron, standing patiently on his stiltlike wading
legs, his stout, stabbing beak poised four feet
above his wide toes, is a sight to remember
whether he is seen beside the Panama Canal or
on the weedy edge of the Wabash River.

When we went up the hill back of the camp
I sometimes caught a feeHng of being at home as
a long **whir-r" announced the rising of a par-
tridge-like bird from the forest floor at my feet.
This was the tinamou, called by the natives
''paradise bird," for what reason I do not know.
It is not the brilHant bird of paradise whose
feathers women used to wear on their hats, but
a dull-colored bird, whose plumage conceals it
well among the dead leaves where it lives and
whose flesh is very good to eat.

Of evenings I was pleased to have my camp
visited by a relative of the whippoorwill. Some-
times he is called a goat sucker on account of his
large mouth, though there is no reason whatever
to think that any goat ever attracted his attention.
The wide mouth strains insects from the air like
a net as the bird flies along. Sometimes he is
named poor-me-one because of his mournful wail.

He used to come out hunting insects just as
I was arranging my headHght to see what I could
see in the darkening forest. This headlight was
a hot and heavy but useful acetylene lamp that
I wore on the front of my hatband. It gave a

STRANGE BIRDS 145

brilliant light that not only helped me to find
my way up and down hills, over rocks and roots,
and along trails, but also picked up unexpected
sights around me. It was when I wore this that
the ground was jeweled with reflections of the
light from many spiders' eyes.

The poor-me-one flew noiselessly into the clear-
ing and set himself down very low and fiat on
the ground. In the fast-falling tropical twilight
I seldom saw him until one of his eyes caught
and reflected the light from my lamp. The
spiders' eyes were like diamonds, but the eye of
the poor-me-one shone red like the most brilliant
ruby. As I moved toward him, he would fly
a few feet and come to earth again. Once he
flew directly toward me with both large eyes
aflame.

Orioles are found on the Isthmus, but they
have a much more common relative, called the
hangbird, which seems to prefer to build his nest
in company with other hangbirds. On Barro
Colorado I found a cluster of nests in the lower
branches of a high tree (Fig. 62). These were
neatly woven of grass, and they hung two or
three feet below the branches to which they were
fastened. In this tree there were half a dozen
nests, but I have heard of trees from which hung
fifty nests. The hangbird 's body is black and
brown and his tail a bright yellow, so that he
reminds one of the oriole.

10

g^..

^^

After photograph by Corntbwaite

Fig. 62. Hangbird colony and termite nest
on a sentinel tree

STRANGE BIRDS

147

The gaudy macaw (Fig. 63) and the brilliant
green parrots are like nothing that lives in
northern forests. I seldom saw the parrots that
I heard shrieking overhead. Their green feathers

Fig. 63. A gaudy macaw

are too much like the leaves among which they
perch. Thomas Belt, who studied animals in the
rainy tropics a good many years ago, tells of seeing
a single green parrot sitting in a tuft of green
leaves. When he ,shot at the parrot the whole

148 JUNGLE ISLAND

tuft fell, and he found to his great astonishment
that the leaves were green parrots, too. He had
been able to recognize one of them because it
happened to move.

The natives capture half -grown birds to sell.
Even so young they are good fighters. John
English made a parting gift to my small daughter
of a newly captured young parrot. We are all
very fond of Lorita, but we take pains not to
come too close to her stout beak. The sailor
who tried to make friends with her on the N^w
York boat, the janitor who "wanted to see if
she would peck" — and found out — not to men-
tion numerous hungry neighbor cats, have learned
to respect her ability to defend herself. In her
native jungle she could probably use her beak
to even better advantage.

Lorita (Fig. 64) wears a dash of red on her
forehead and shows bands of red on her wings and
tail when she spreads them, but when she is
sitting on her perch her color is the soft green of
young leaves. She prefers to eat seeds, just as
she did in the jungle. She does not care for
fruits as she used to, and she has developed a
fondness for cheese.

She knows a very few words and several
whistled tunes and some of the calls the children
make. Her voice is loud even when vshe makes
herself ridiculous trying to imitate a canary. Once
in a long while, when she is wakened early in the

STRANGE BIRDS

149

morning, she lifts up her voice in the harsh morn-
ing call that the flocks shriek together as they
fly off overhead, and for an instant we vsee palms
and lianas about us and smell the smoke of
the breakfast camp fire.

Morning and evening the parrakeets chattered
to one another as they left their high roosts or

Fig. 64. Loriia

came home again. I never minded their noise,
though I have heard it much complained about
in other parts of the rainy tropics. They did not
disturb me half so much as the lowing of hungry
cows of a morning on the farm. I used to watch
the parrakeets coming in of an evening to a large
sentinel tree near camp. They always flew two
by two in small groups.

I50 JUNGLE ISLAND

The island had the reputation of being a good
hunting ground. My black helpers would fre-
quently pause and stand listening in rapt atten-
tion and then motion for me to bring my gun
and follow them to find ''torkevs." I was told
that there were two kinds of **torkeys" in the
forest, a ''big, big, big red kind" and a "black,
black" one. These are not real turkeys, though
they do look like them. Their proper name is
curassow. Later I found that the red curas-
sows are hens. The gobblers, which are black
and usually found on the ground, are as large
as small turkey gobblers. Both the gobblers
and the hens have beautiful curled crests on
their heads.

Usually our ''torkey" -stalking expeditions were
failures. The birds were shy and easily fright-
ened by the rustling of dry leaves under our
feet. Three of the *'big red kind" flew over my
clearing one quiet day and stopped near by so
that I saw their red feet and their dark brown
feathers that turn dusky in the shadows.

There is a smaller black relative of the curas-
sows that is not so shy and is also good to eat.
This is the ''black, black kind" of the natives.

My experience in trying to stalk "torkeys" and
attempts to see other animals convinced me that
I must have a real trail through the forest. What
we had called trails were only blazed paths where
almost no clearing had been done. What I

Fig. 65. The machete-cut trail

11

152 JUNGLE ISLAND

needed was a wide passage cleared of underbrush,
with all the dry leaves removed. Fortunately
Necto liked this kind of work. It seemed to him
much less silly than running around looking for
useless animals. Under his direction and mainly
by his work, a fine trail twelve feet wide, three
times as broad as the old Spanish paved roads,
was hacked out for half a mile, across two ravines
and over the slopes between.

The work was done with only two tools. One
was the long machete, which I think he must
have picked up as soon as he put on his scanty
clothes in the morning, so constantly did he
carry it. With this knife he cut down bushes
and hacked away roots. The other tool was a
forked stick he cut with the machete, to help
rake awav leaves.

Down this cleared passageway through the
forest I could walk quietly without watching my
step, with eyes intent on animal life (Fig. 65).
Even at night I could follow the trail noiselessly.
The trail had another advantage. It was not
wide enough to open the jungle floor to the sun,
but it did present a cleared space that animals
were some time in crossing. For at least a
moment I could see them in the open, and some-
times they followed the trail a little way as if it
were their road, too. Lizards hopped along it,
and sometimes I saw a great blue butterfly float-
ing up over the slope. If I were going again into

STRANGE BIRDS

153

an uncut tropical forest, my first care would be to
have miles of such trails cut.

Here along this new trail I found the motmot
(Fig. 66), a green-and-brown bird about the size

Fig. 66. Motmot

of a blue jay. It had flown silently across the
cleared space and was sitting in a jungle bush
twenty feet above my head, its green back fad-
ing away into the green of the leaves. Suddenly
it jerked its tail sideways and the movement
attracted my eye. Soon it repeated the gesture
as if to call attention to its remarkable tail. The

154 JUNGLE ISLAND

two central tail feathers were trimmed part way
along the shafts, leaving only a tennis-racket-Hke
end about an inch long on a bare handle the
same length. These two feathers grow out three
inches longer than the rest of the tail, which, as
the picture shows, is otherwise an ordinary tail.

After every molt the motmot carefully trims
off the shaft of the new long feathers. It does
this even if it is taken from the nest when young
and is never allowed to see other birds trimming
their tails. The part that is trimmed off is
weaker than the rest of the feather. Why do
they do it? No one knows. Perhaps for the
same reason that makes men shave their beards
and girls bob their hair.

Here, too, I found the red-headed and the
yellow-headed manakins. These are tiny black-
bodied birds whose color pattern is so broken
that they look like patches of sunhght in the
bushes and are not so easily seen as one would
imagine from their gay heads. A yellow-headed
manakin had built a nest on the fern-topped
stump in Gatun Lake pictured in the second
chapter (page 33). She shared the pretty spot
with a swarm of stingless bees.

Along the trail I caught my only glimpse of
the snow-hooded bell bird, whose isong, like the
dropping of water on tin, I had heard when I
first came to the island. His dull-colored mate
and young were more often seen.

STRANGE BIRDS 15$

The tropical humming birds made themselves
at home along the trail as they did everywhere
in the forest. At home I had known the little
ruby-throated humming bird that haunts honey-
suckle vines. Here they w^ere almost as large as
sparrows and nearly as inquisitive.

One evening near sunset, while I was sitting by
the little creek, a large green-throated humming
bird came up, apparently attracted by my new
tan cloth hat. He came gradually closer, pausing
at different levels and holding his place in the air
by moving his wings so fast they could not be
seen. If startled he darted several feet straight
up into the air and held himself poised there. At
last he came within easy arm's reach, with his
long sharp bill pointed directly toward my eyes,
so that I guessed it must be the gleam of my
eyeglasses that fascinated him. After a careful
examination he flew off, having decided, no doubt,
that there was no food around me.

Again, one of these graceful, rapidly moving
little fellows flew under my arm as I was writing
in my notebook in the forest. They seem to be
quite fearless, perhaps because they can dart
away so rapidly from the attacks of bigger
creatures.

Mr. Beebe, who has written about the birds
and animals of the South American rainy tropics,
tells of finding the humming birds sleeping on bare
vines or shrubs with their heads tucked under

156 JUNGLE ISLAND

their small wings just as bigger birds hold
theirs.

Part of their food is probably honey from
flowers, as w^e have always been taught, but when
we look at their tongues we find them forked at

After Belt

Fig. 67. Hummingbird' s pincer tongue

the end so as to make a very good pair of pincers
(Fig. 67) for picking up the smallest bugs. Thomas
Belt, the English naturalist, who first found
out about their tongues, thought that when they
visit flowers they are picking off little insects.
They carry pollen from one flower to another,
just as our bumblebees do in clover, and so help
seeds to form.

The most distinctly tropical birds were the
huge-billed toucans, which the natives call by a
Spanish name that means ''beak of iron." The
commonest toucan was a black bird about eight-
een inches long from tip of tail to tip of beak.
About one-fourth of his length was his round
olive-green bill, which was painted lengthwise with
wavy red and yellow lines. Under his chin he
wore a circular, bright yellow bib. Seen either
in a picture or in the forest, he looks as if he had
tied on a false beak to go to a masquerade (Fig. 68).

I saw these birds flying past my spiked tree
with somewhat labored flight, head held down as
if by weight of the bill. Considering its size, the

STRANGE BIRDS 157

bill is lightly constructed, although it is strong.
Its hollow shell holds, with much room to spare,
a long slender tongue.

There is a great difference of opinion as to the
usefulness of his tremendous bill to the* toucan.
It can drive a slashing blow and perhaps it is a
good weapon to defend the toucan's nest in a
hole in a tree from monkeys and iguanas looking
for young birds and bird eggs. Such a bill could
also cut out huge bites from the tropical fruits
on which the toucan chiefly feeds, and it is said
to be used to excellent advantage for reaching
into cracks and corners after bugs when the bird
has a taste for animal food. Perhaps it is safest

After photograph by Beebe

Fig. 68. Toucan

to say that the toucan's beak, like some people's
noses, just grew that way, and both have nothing
to do but make the best of it.

158 JUNGLE ISLAND

At night the toucan becomes an even more
comical sight. He sleeps outside his nest on a
limb, folding himself up like a jackknife. First
he twists his neck till the great beak Hes down
his back like the ridgepole of a roof. Then he
humps up his wings to make supporting side walls
along the beak. And last, his spread tail is bent
forward roof-like over wings and beak.

FURRY ANIMALS

Barro Colorado Island is a wonderfully fine
zoological garden. Safely penned in by Gatun
Lake, it keeps examples of most of the animals to
be found anywhere on the Isthmus of Panama,
all going about their business without the trouble
of any keepers to feed and care for them. It
must be said, however, that many of the animals,
although they are none the less interesting, are
so small that no zoo would bother to keep them.
In a big museum you might find a stuffed lizard
or perhaps a model of an ant 's nest, but when you
go to the zoo to see live animals you expect to
see for the most part some of the big furry animals
that we call mammals.

For myself, I like best to study the insects, but
when I went to the jtmgle I wanted to see all the
other animals in the Barro Colorado zoo as well.
As it turned out, I saw and heard fewer mammals
than any other kind of animals, but my luck was
as good as most people's, and it began almost as
soon as I came to the island.

On our first day we were so npisy as we cleared
a partly overgrown trail and pushed into the
underbrush after strange plants that we must
have scared away any big animal that might
have been close. The next day I started exploring

159

i6o JUNGLE ISLAND

with two soft-footed negro guides, and I did my
best to follow them noiselessly up the rocks of a
dry creek bed.

Suddenly Blanco, who was leading, motioned
for me to come up with him very quietly. The
banks of the creek were nearly as high as our
chins. Feeding on the leaves at the level of our
eyes, I saw a great many animals that I thought
at first to be small brown, doglike monkeys with
long tails. When one looked in my direction his
long pointed nose and the gray markings about
his eyes told me that he was either a raccoon or
a relative of the family. Blanco called them
gotosolas. The usual name is coati (Fig. 69).

When a white-and-black hawk flew into a near-
by tree, the coatis all scattered. Blanco told me
that the reason they were on the ground was
because the hawk was hunting them.

The coatis themselves are hunters. Belt tells
of seeing packs of them hunting iguanas. Some
would climb the tree and chase the heavy iguana
so far out on a slender limb that he would fall
and be caught by the pack beneath. When
one coati went hunting by himself, he had a
much poorer chance of iguana for his dinner,
since the iguana could drop and climb another
tree before the coati could reach the ground
and be after him again. But even when he
lost one iguana after another, the coati would
keep patiently on his search, hoping, perhaps,

FURRY ANIMALS

i6i

to find a fat iguana so very sound asleep that
he would not wake up until he had been caught.
If he became too hungry from the chase, the
coati could always stop and fill his stomach with
leaves and fruit.

The coatis are sociable animals. Sometimes I
saw them singly, lying on branches looking down
at me, but oftener they were feeding in groups.
Some of the small groups might have been families,

Photograph by Richter

Fig. 69. Coati

but others were much too large to be only one
family. They visited my camp at night, wakening
and startling me as they scratched among the
camp-fire sticks. They fight savagely dogs that
hunt them, but when tamed they make clever pets.

11

i62 JUNGLE ISLAND

As we went on up the ravine we were much
excited to find tapir tracks. Tapirs are big, shy
animals, not often seen, though their tracks are
fairly common. We saw nothing but the tracks.

Ahead of us came the scolding of a white-faced
monkey. We went quietly forward until we saw
the trees overhead shaking suspiciously and,
looking up through my excellent bird glasses, I
found a darlc, doglike back and a long tail. Then
the animal turned and I found myself apparently
looking into the face of a wrinkled old woman
with white forehead and black-penciled eyes. She
moved and stood up, evidently as much interested
in me as I was in her, and I saw her yellowish- white
shoulders. Another larger white-faced monkey
that might have been her mate came up and
jumped deftly in front of her as if he wanted the
best view himself. She looked over his shoulder,
while he cocked his head first on one side and
then on the other. Soon he jumped hghtly and
gracefully over her so that they were sitting side
by side, inspecting me from their balcony. Then
they silently disappeared among the branches,
leaving me with a strong feeling that I had seen
something very human.

These monkeys, called white-throated capuchin
monkeys after the hooded Capuchin friars, are
the most common of the monkeys about Gatun
Lake. They eat more animal than plant food.
They are always on the watch for insects, and will

FURRY ANIMALS

163

munch a large bug with as great relish as a boy
eating a piece of candy.

Next after parrots, they are the commonest
pets sold in the shops of the Canal Zone. It was

Fig. 70. The common white-faced monkey

at Colon that we took the picture given here
(Fig. 70), which would have been very hard to
get in the jungle.

Belt tells of one that he kept- as a pet. It was
fastened to a light chain to keep it out of mischief,
but the chain did not prevent it from catching
the young ducks it wanted to eat. It would hold
a piece of bread in one hand until the little ducks

i64 JUNGLE ISLAND

were close to it, and then it would seize a duck
and kill it with one bite. This is an appetite it
learns in the forest, where it eats little birds and
nestlings whenever it can take them.

Captain Marty, the Swiss who ran a govern-
ment launch on Gatun Lake, told me, ''I like
monkeys better out of doors. ^ When my Teddy
was a baby, I had a monkey. One day I came
in and found that the monkey had taken
Teddy's bottle away from him and given him
a kitchen knife instead. Teddy had the knife
in his mouth and the monkey was drinking
Teddy's milk."

Farther up the ravine we found more three-
toed tapir tracks. These were fully six inches
across. Then we saw large cat tracks which
Blanco said were "tigre" tracks and I knew must
be those of either jaguar or ocelot. There was
a muddy pig wallow by the stream and tracks
of the wild pig leading away. They looked like
those any barnyard hog might have made. As
we turned back to camp, the ear-filling bellow
of a black howling monkey came across the
gathering jungle twilight, but it was too late to
look for him.

Under a root we caught a glimpse of an arma-
dillo resting in his coat of mail. When disturbed
he came straight toward us and disappeared down
his hillside hole. The natives called the arma-
dillo a ''ground hog."

FURRY ANIMALS

i6s

On other days, of late afternoons, I saw arma-
dillos again, rooting about in the leaves of the
dark forest floor. Their food is mainly insects,
and most of these are ants. They do not seem
to see or hear very well and have been known

After Newman

Fig. 71. Armadillo

to run headlong into tree trunks when disturbed.
Probably they rely on their sense of smell for
warning of danger.

With their powerful forepaws they dig very
rapidly. They usually have holes near their
feeding grounds into which they can dodge if
frightened, as well as permanent holes, six or
seven feet deep, with a den two feet in diameter
at the bottom.

The most noticeable thing about the armadillos
is their curious bony armor (Fig. 71). This
undoubtedly helps to protect them when a tiger

i66 JUNGLE ISLAND

cat gets after them, but a stronger animal, like
an ocelot, can bite through the armor. When
attacked the armadillos turn over on their backs
and strike out powerfully with their claws.

When I was on the island by myself the next
week, playing Robinson Crusoe without any Man
Friday, I climbed on the second day to a palm
thicket at the top of the ridge above my shack,
where I had a view down into a ravine on either
side. From daybreak on I stayed there, measur-
ing at regular intervals the amount of light that
sifted through the palm leaves, and keeping per-
fectly still between times to see what would come
my way.

Before the drowsy quiet of mid-afternoon
nothing but mosquitoes, wood ticks, ants, spiders,
and beetles had come along, with an occasional
humming bird venturing inquisitively close to my
face.

About half -past three a hoglike animal twelve
inches high, light brown, slab-sided, with cropped
ears, and almost tailless, came trotting actively
along my ridge. This was my first sight of the
wild pig, or peccary, whose wallow I had found
along the creek bed the week before. About
twenty feet away it saw or smiclled me, stopped,
grunted, and made off slowly down the ravine,
where I could hear others rooting about among
the dry leaves. Peccaries are hunted and are
considered good eating.

FURRY ANIMALS

167

The peccary was scarcely out of sight when a
coati appeared about two rods down the hill
nosing into roots of trees. This one was quite
alone. He sauntered on toward my camp without
knowing I was about.

It was time to make another light-measure-
ment. I was sitting working on a low box when

After Alston

Fig. 72. Yaguarundi

out of the corner of one eye I saw something
coming up from camp directly behind me. Turn-
ing my head as slowly as possible, I found myself
looking into the eyes of a coal-black animal like
a big cat (Fig. 72). His broad, blunt-nosed head
was set on a stout body and his tail was long
and fluffy like the coati 's.

He came on until he was no more than twelve
feet away before he saw me. Then he stopped,

^12

i68 JUNGLE ISLAND

crouched, and hissed Hke any startled pussy cat.
We looked at each other without moving. My
machete was six feet away leaning against a
tree. My little revolver, which sometimes fired
and sometimes did not, was in the bag at my
feet. Suddenly the black cat sprang back twice
its distance, hissed again, watching me closely,
and then circled around me down the hill and up
again to the ridge, as if it were returning to a
path I had blocked.

How big was the cat? I cannot be sure, but
I think that its furry tail was nearly two feet
long and the head and body a little longer. San-
tiago saw it later and insisted that it was six
feet long. The natives to whom I told the story,
called it a ''chicken cat." The real name is a
tongue twister, "yaguarundi," and chicken cat
fits well enough its habit of eating big ground
birds. I later found chicken-cat tracks around
a heap of feathers that was all that was left of
a ''paradise bird.'' Santiago was very plainly
afraid of it, but I do not believe it would show
fight against a man unless it were first attacked.
More than one night a big cat prowled around
my shack without ever attempting to push
through the musHn-curtained doorway behind
which I was sleeping.

That afternoon and the evening before there
had been a sound in the near-by trees as if some
animal were crashing recklessly about, though

FURRY ANIMALS

169

there was not the creaking of branches that the
weighty iguana would have made. I found,
sitting there, that all the racket had been made
by a big, bright, red-tailed squirrel. While I
watched him from thirty feet away he hung from
the side of a tree, head down, eating a nut which
he held in his forepaws.

Moving about before I went down the hill to
the shack, I almost ran over a tall, odd animal,
that looked as if he had been put together by
sticking a rabbit's head on a pig's body. The

Aftei Alston

Fig. 73. Nequi

natives call these nequis (Fig. 73), and find them
good eating. I thought the meat tasted rather
like squirrel. This particular nequi seemed to
live in a hole near my camp, and we found other
nequi holes as we went about the island. The

I70 JUNGLE ISLAND

nequi is one of the large South American rodents
that are found only in the rainy tropics.

Conejos (pronounced ko-na'hos) lived in holes
too. They are also rodents, and look somewhat
like large guinea pigs. Indeed, they are related
to guinea pigs, which grow wild in South America.
The natives hunt and eat these as we hunt rabbits.

In the late dusk of the evening bats came out
and flew about the camp clearing, chasing insects
and making a little squeaking noise as they flew.
In the daytime we often looked for bats in old
hollow tree trunks and in the rolled leaves of
the heliconia, which is a plant that reminds one
of a huge canna. The only bats we actually
captured, however, were found in the long-
deserted, dark guardrooms of old Fort San
Lorenzo at the mouth of the Chagres River, where
they were seldom disturbed by visitors.

This day was a very good beginning, and I
looked forward happily to many days of watch-
ing large animals. But it was well that I was
interested in smaller beasts, too. I worked
quietly, walked through the jungle as cautiously
as the dead leaf carpet would allow, and paused
often to stand still or squat on my heels. I sat
for hours at a time astride a big limb ninety feet
up my spiked tree, but I never again saw many
big animals in my zoo.

The small laboratory was built soon, and,
though the workmen went away every night, the

FURRY ANIMALS

171

noise and confusion through the daytime must
have driven the more nervous animals as far
away as the island would let them go.

We found in our wanderings about the island
three different groups of black howling monkeys.

After Alston

Fig. 74. Black Jiowling monkey

A male and four females came through the tree
tops one morning to watch Santiago driving
spikes up the sand-box tree. Another day, when
there were visitors from Boston on the island, we
followed the howling of a monkey until we found
him with two females in the top of a tall tree, well
hung with lianas.

172 JUNGLE ISLAND

His excitement and his howling increased as
we came closer. He climbed to the top of the
tree and tried to drive us off with filth. Then
he swung down a stout liana and climbed up
again, howling all the way, until the tree seemed
full of noise.

The howler families did not appear to move
far. I usually heard their bellowing from the
same places. They often set up their dismal
howls near noon, or when one of the airplanes
stationed at the Canal Zone hummed by over-
head, or just at the beginning of one of the rare
showers of the dry season.

A sleek black howler (Fig. 74) was the pet of
a family in Ancon. I saw it come out of the
house with its mistress and down the walk to a
waiting automobile. The mistress took the driv-
er's seat. The monkey, which had ambled quietly
on four feet by her side, swung like a flash up the
tree under which the car stood, down a branch,
and dropped neatly into his place on the rear
seat, from which he peeped out as any other
•well-behaved passenger might as the car drove
away.

The night monkey, smaller than either the
howler or the capuchin, I sometimes found around
the camp clearing or down my newly cut trail, but
all that I saw of him there was his bright eyes,
reflecting the light I wore at night in my hat
band. In the open basement under John English's

FURRY ANIMALS 173

house, where his family, his friends, his chickens,
dogs, and pets spent a great deal of the day, I saw
one of these monkeys in a cage. Its large owl's
eyes and face looked out of place on a body like
a cat 's. A negro had caught it and was keeping

After photograph by Shiras

Fig. 75. Marmoset

it there until the United States fleet went through
the Canal in April, when he expected to find some
battleship crew that would buy it at a handsome
price for a mascot.

The tame and handsome little marmosets
(Fig. 75) I saw only on the streets of Colon, where
they were being peddled to tourists. They are
about the size of squirrels and look much like
them. One thing that marks them as monkeys
is that the first toe on each foot has a thumb
nail, instead of the squirrel claws that grow from
the other toes. This monkey hand is better at
picking up things than the ordinary paw.

174

JUNGLE ISLAND

The marmosets are orange-colored, as gay as
any jungle bird. In the forest they travel sociably
in groups of about half a dozen. They can leap
several feet from one tree to another.

We never found any deer, although we saw
their tracks on the island and I heard stories of

Fig. 76. A fawn

their having been hunted there. My men brought
me some venison from a deer they had killed on
the mainland. In an animal store in Colon we

FURRY ANIMALS I75

made the acquaintance of a fawn (Fig. 76),
probably a different kind of deer, which was so
tame that it licked my hand for the salt on it.

After Alston

Fig. 77. Tapir

My greatest disappointment was in not finding
a tapir. We found tracks on different parts of the
island, but never did we see one. The natives
were afraid of these big animals, w^hich they called
"mountain cows," and I should not be surprised
to find they had led me astray once when we
thought, from fresh tracks, that one must be near.

The tapirs (Fig. 77) are relatives of horses and
rhinoceroses. They are found in Central and
South America and across the world on the Malay
Peninsula. They are supposed to have lived first
in Asia and to have made their way across Siberia
into Alaska and down into America, in the days
when all the world was much warmer and it was
comfortable traveling where now are ice and

176 JUNGLE ISLAND

snow. We find their bones still buried in northern
Asia and North America, but no tapir lives now
outside the tropics.

They like shady forests close to water, where
they can bathe when hot and hide when hunted.
They grow to be about four feet high and weigh
nearly a ton, which is as much as a heavy draft
horse weighs. Although they are shy and inoffen-
sive, they can make a truly terrifying noise crash-
ing through the jungle in a bee line of escape. My
Canal Zone policeman friend with whom I hunted
for them assured me that they went like an
express train and that they would certainly knock
down a man who stood still in their path. This
seems to be the only cause the natives have to
fear them, and it must be said that the natives
fear most things in the bush, whether real, like
tapirs, or imaginary, like pink scorpions. '

I was somewhat consoled for my failure to find
a tapir by learning that many others before me
had looked for them in vain, including Thomas
Belt, who did not see one in all his four years in
Nicaragua.

Neither did I see a live sloth in his native bush,
but I did examine with curiosity and amusement
the sloth caught by two Frijoles negroes. Of all
the animals that my unfamiliar eyes met in the
tropics this is surely the strangest.

His body looks like a dirty, shaggy doormat
(Fig. 78). His head and face are those of an

FURRY ANIMALS

177

idiot monkey. The most useful parts of his body-
are his four stout legs armed with strong claws
with which he slings himself like a hammock to
the limbs of trees. When he is put down on the

Photograph by Richter

Fig. 78. Sloth

ground these legs become as useless as if the
joints had been dislocated. He hooks himself
along to the nearest bush by hisi^lbows and knees.
Once hung to a limb like a great wad of dr\^
moss, the sloth stays as still as its name would
indicate. Sometimes small green plants, called
algae, grow among its hair undisturbed, and then

12

178 JUNGLE ISLAND

it looks even more like a mossback and is hard
to see. This one that we saw had a darker
pattern on its back, like a dead leaf, which would
camouflage it very well from below. The sloth
bestirs itself occasionally to eat green leaves, and
sometimes it is found asleep, curled up like a
bird's nest, in the top of a tall tree.

Although the sloth seems like a collection of
misfits, he is suited well enough to the simple
life he leads, which would be stupid for a more
active animal. He possesses also the valuable
quality of being almost impossible to injure fatally
by ordinary methods. He does not have to move
out of the way of poisonous snakes, for snake
bites do not poison him. And for ordinary wounds
of any kind he cares as little as the lizard minds
losing his tail.

The large animals found on Barro Colorado
are of the kinds found all through the American
rainy tropics. The northern line of this part of
the world is shown on the first map in the book,
running up into Mexico. A much greater share
of the warm rainy countries is in South America.
The Isthmus has served for a land bridge between
Central America and South America. The Canal
with its constant traffic will cut this bridge apart,
though it is too early to tell what effect this
will have on the large animals living on either
side. We shall have to wait and see if it makes
any difference.

THE CONQUEST OF THE MOSQUITOES

When the first Spanish soldiers were brought
over to the Isthmus to guard the coast from
pirates and the pack trains from robbers, forts
were built to lodge them safely. Fort San Lorenzo
was built at the mouth of the Chagres River to
protect shipping, and though the fort was once
destroyed by the pirate Morgan it was rebuilt
again even more strongly, and a great deal of
the old masonry may still be seen, overgrown
with jungle.

ThCvSe early Spaniards, like everyone else of
that time, thought that there was something
dangerous in night air. As we have said, one of
the diseases from which they suffered most on
the isthmus was called ''mal-aria," which means
"bad air." Yellow fever was a new disease to
Europeans, who seem to have caught it first from
Mexican Indians, but they soon decided that it
was spread by night air, too. They believed that
they could keep well by shutting out all the out-
side air at night.

The only openings in the big squadrooms where
the soldiers slept at San Lorenzo were the doors
like that in Figure 79. When the door was shut
tightly at night, the room must have been very
hot and stuffy indeed.

179

:,Aj^C

V59C-* ,

;. ^««^^

--^■.-.'y^.

Fig. 79.

Photograph by Zetek

Where soldiers and mosquitoes lived together
in old Fort San Lorenzo

THE CONQUEST OF THE MOSQUITOES i8i

With all their care to keep out the "bad air,"
men went on dying of yellow fever and malaria,
but nobody could think of any other cause for
so much illness. Panama earned and kept a
reputation for being the most unhealthful spot in
America. More than three hundred years later,
in the time of the French canal diggers, many
people still thought that their only chance of
preventing these two diseases was to keep their
windows closed tight after sunset. And still
they died.

It had been learned that great doses of a bitter
medicine called quinine, made from the bark of a
South American tree, would help to cure malaria.
Yellow fever was a different matter. The only
treatment for that was to run away from yellow-
fever patients as fast as possible, or to take the
disease intentionally, hoping to have a mild case
and get it over with.

A person who has had yellow fever and recovered
from it never has it again. The same thing is
sometimes true of malaria. Such persons are
called immune. Most of the natives of Panama
were immune, else they would all have died off
long ago.

Those who came in from othqr countries were
not immune. You will remember that the French
could not keep enough workmen well to dig the
Canal. A third of the men died from yellow
fever alone. The governor of Jamaica, where

i82 JUNGLE ISLAND

many of the best workmen had been hired, refused
to let any more men leave the island for the
Canal. He said that the government of Jamaica
could not afford to take care of these men when
so m^any came home ill, nor to take care of the
families they left when they died.

When the United States tried to hire Jamaicans
later, it was hard to persuade the governor to
let them go. Finally he agreed to do so if the
United States would deposit twenty-five dollars
with the governor for every man who left the
island. The money was to be used to pay for
the care of men who came back too ill to work.

The Americans were more hopeful than the
governor of Jamaica. They had just finished
driving yeUow fever out of Havana, where there
had been yellow fever month in and month out
for more than a hundred and fifty years. They
had done it in such an unexpected way that most
people were still saying, *'It can't be true."

First the Americans had thought that yellow
fever was a disease caused by dirt, and they had
cleaned Havana until it was the cleanest city in
the world. That made no difference with the
yellow fever — it grew worse.

Then they hstened at last to Dr. Findlay, who
had had for twenty years a queer idea about
yellow fever, which he could never get any one
else to believe. He thought that mosquitoes
carried it from one person to another. What

THE CONQUEST OF THE MOSQUITOES 183

was more, he thought that only one kind of mos-
quito was guihy of carr^^ing it. This was a Httle
gray mosquito that we call Aedes.

Three doctors set to work to try out Dr. Find-
lay's idea. They tried it on themselves, since
they did not want to ask any one else to volunteer
for so dangerous an experiment. Dr. Carroll let
himself be bitten by an Aedes mosquito that had
first been allowed to bite a yellow-fever patient.
He came down with a severe case of yellow fever
from which he recovered. Dr. Lazear was also
bitten in the same way. He took yellow fever
and died the death of a brave man.

All that year the doctors studied yellow fever
and mosquitoes and at the end of the year they
were.vSure of these facts:

1. Yellow fever is carried by an Aedes mos-
quito that has bitten a yellow fever patient.

2. It cannot be carried in any other way.

In order to make Havana safe the Americans
had two things to do. They had to screen yellow
fever patients so that no mosquitoes could bite
them and carry the disease to other people, and
they had to kill off mosquitoes as fast as they
could. When these two things were done, there
was no more yellow fever in Havana, and by
watching the ships that sailed in from yellow
fever ports it was kept out.

It happened that two years earlier an English-
man in India had found that malaria is also carried

1 84 JUNGLE ISLAND

by a mosquito, and that this is the only way
that malaria can spread. The malaria mosquito
is called Anopheles. I regret to say that neither
Aedes nor Anopheles has any short pet name.

The problem in Panama was just the same that
it had been in Havana, and the same man,
Colonel Gorgas, was placed in charge of it, as
well as of the other medical work there. It was
very important that the work be done by some
one who had learned the ways of malaria and
yellow fever mosquitoes, who lead short but
interesting lives.

Aedes likes clean, quiet water for her eggs. She
prefers to lay them in cisterns of rain water or
uncovered jars of drinking water, such as people
have around their homes. There the eggs hatch
into little wrigglers that live in the water but
come to the surface for air. In about ten days
after the egg is laid the wriggler changes to a full-
grown mosquito and flies away. Only the mother
mosquito bites. vShe lives about two weeks.

Anopheles, the malaria mosquito, likes clean,
quiet country water for her eggs. She lays them
in pools or in the grassy edges of streams where
little fishes cannot easily push in to reach the
eggs and wrigglers. Like Aedes, she does not
usually lay her eggs until she has first bitten
some animal and had a drink of blood.

Both Aedes and Anopheles may lay their eggs
in any bit of quiet water. The moist hollow of

THE CONQUEST OF THE MOSQUITOES 185

a leaf or even damp mud will serve for the egg
until it hatches a few hours or a few days later,
and in Panama, where it rains many days of the
year, there may be water standing anywhere out
of doors that will do for egg hatcheries.

Mosquitoes do not travel far. If they are
killed and the eggs kept from hatching close to
towns and encampments, they do not trouble
very much. Around the Canal Zone towns the
brush was cut down, not only on account of the
moisture in the leaves, but because it often hid
old pots and cans that held water. Where water
and wrigglers could not be emptied or drained
away it was sprayed with oil. When the little
mosquito wrigglers came to the surface for air,
they got the oil in their breathing tubes and choked
to death.

The uneven streets of the towns were given new
smooth pavement that would not hold puddles of
water (Fig. 80) . The drains and sewers were kept
running freely and treated with mosquito poison
every few days.

The buildings were just as carefully inspected.
Since the French had not known that mosquitoes
were dangerous, they had not been afraid of them.
Their big hospital in Ancon had to be cleaned
and screened and all the grounds around it
cleared to the sunlight. .

The French nuns who had nursed in the hospital
had been very proud of the beautiful tropical

13a

i86 JUNGLE ISLAND

garden that they planted on the hospital grounds.
And, indeed, it did flourish much better than
their patients did. A great pest in this garden
was the Attas, the gardening ants, who would
strip a whole orange tree of its leaves in a night,
to make beds for their own mushrooms. To
protect the trees and shrubs from the ants, the
nuns had their gardeners put an earthenware ring
full of water around the roots of each plant. The
water kept the ants away perfectly, because they
do not like to swim, but it also made the best of
nurseries for yellow fever mosquitoes, so that
there were always numbers of them around the
hospital. The workmen dreaded to come to the
hospital, unless they were already immune,
because they were sure to catch yellow fever
before they were discharged.

The Americans destroyed thousands of these
water rings. Since they wanted to save some of
the plants, too, they set to work to kill off the
gardening ants. At last both hospital patients
and orange trees were safe.

All the houses where Canal Zone employees
lived were screened, and the larger buildings
were smoked out with insect powder every
two weeks, to kill any mosquitoes that might
have crept in through cracks and open doors.
Colonel Gorgas used that first year all the
insect powder he could buy in the United
States. None was left on the market.

Fig. 8o. Clean paved street in Panama

1 88 JUNGLE ISLAND

The natives were careless, but the Americans
knew that they must make the whole Canal Zone
safe. They cleaned the rain barrel of the poorest
negro as energetically as the cistern of the Bishop
of Panama. In the thickly built-up city of
Panama, men inspected all houses and yards at
least every six days, as fast as a new crop of
mosquitoes could come on, and whenever mosquito
wrigglers were found they were killed and the
water that held them emptied.

With such hard and thorough work it was not
many months before the Canal Zone saw the last
of yellow fever. Aedes mosquitoes could still be
found back in the country, although very few of
any kind in the towns, but there were no longer
yellow fever patients for them to bite, and so
there was no yellow fever to carry.

The men in the sanitary division did not grow
careless on that account, because they knew that
some one suffering from yellow fever might come
into port on a ship at any time and start a fresh
epidemic. Nowadays they go ahead ditching
ponds and swamps so that stagnant water can
run off (Fig. 8i). They see that screens are
mended and that water is not left standing in
open containers. Many American cities have
more mosquitoes than the Canal Zone towns.

Malaria has been much harder to wipe out,
and the task is not yet done. Many of the natives
have malaria in so light a form that it does not

i'aototraph by Luta

Fig. 8i. Drain making hy the American Sanitary Service

I go JUNGLE ISLAND

really trouble them. They are not careful about
keeping their doors closed and avoiding mosquito
bites. You can vsee that it is difficult to keep
mosquitoes from carrying malaria from these
natives to other people who may be made very
ill by it.

However, there is much less malaria and it is
not usually of such a violent kind as it used to
be. Americans who live in the Canal Zone towns
do not often have it, if they are reasonably careful.
The old Spaniards used to take pains to shut out
the air at night. The Americans have plenty of
air, but they are even more careful to keep the
screen doors closed against mosquitoes.

Americans who work in the jungle are supposed
to take enough quinine to prevent malaria, even ,
if they are mosquito-bitten.

After I had been going out into the bush for
about six weeks, the physician at the Ancon
hospital dispensary advised me to begin taking
quinine, on the chance that I might have been
infected by a malarial mosquito by that time.
He gave me the advice and the quinine free, just
as he would have done for any Canal Zone
employee.

The quinine was a liquid, and it was not only
the bitterest medicine I have tried, but its taste
was the most lasting. The doctor would not give
it to me in the nice tasteless capsules that pow-
dered quinine comes in. He said it would not

THE CONQUEST OF THE MOSQUITOES 191

do me so much good. I do not approve of chewing
gum, but rather than keep the taste of that
quinine in my mouth I chewed a whole package
of gum after every dose.

Fig. ^2. Grassy shore of Gatun Lake
where mosquitoes breed

I met one American who had come to the
hospital to be treated for malaria with which he
had become infected in the swamps outside the
Canal Zone. At the time I saw him, he felt
quite well enough to go on about his business, but
the hospital was not yet ready to let him go
outside the mosquito-free town of Ancon. They
intended to keep him there until they were quite
certain he had no malaria left in his blood for

192

JUNGLE ISLAND

hungry mosquitoes to carry to other people. And
they did keep him, though he grew very tired of
waiting.

After photograph by Heims

Fig. 83. Mosquitoes poised to bite. Left, malarial
mosquito — Anopheles; right, common mosquito

Gatun Lake has not been a troublesome place
for the hatching of mosquito eggs, as some people
thought it would be. The high winds, coming

After photograph by Herma

Fig. 84. Mosquitoes hanging to water surface. Right,

malarial mosquito larva — Anopheles; left, common

mosquito larva (enlarged)

every day, break the surface of the lake into waves
and drown the. little wrigglers, which, for all that
they live in water, must have air.

THE CONQUEST OF THE MOSQUITOES 193

But around the edge of Barro Colorado Island
the tall grass has begun to grow out into the water
from the shore. This breaks the force of the
waves and protects mosquito eggs and wrigglers
(Fig. 82). They could hatch in the more quiet

After Howard and Herms

Fig. 85. Egg, larva, pupa, and adult of
yellow fever mosquito — Aedes

pools of the little island streams, and I found
them in the cups of water held at the base of the
thick leaves of some plants.

Among the swarms appearing in the early morn-
ing and evening, I found both Aedes and Anophe-
les, as well as the more harmless mosquitoes that
are let alone because they do not carry either
disease.

13

194 JUNGLE ISLAND

These two are easy to tell from the others.
Look at the picture of Anopheles (Fig. 83) and see
her long hind legs, tilting her up when she puts her
beak down to bite so that she looks as if she were
standing on her head. Our ordinary mosquito
stands with its back almost level when it bites.

Aedes is a dark mosquito with the fore part of
her body beautifully marked with a silver design
like a lyre (Fig. 85). At a little distance she
looks gray.

I worked in Panama with several Americans of
long experience in the jungle. The large animals
interested them but did not ^larm them. They
were not afraid of jaguars nor of boa constrictors
and they spent little thought on poisonous snakes.
They feared drinking unclean water, but that
they could guard against. What they really
dreaded was a bite from an infected little Aedes
or Anopheles, with yellow fever or a long, hard
case of malaria to follow.

The big and wonderful work of building the
Canal could never have been accompHshed if
Colonel Gorgas and his men had not first learned
how to conquer the mosquitoes. Some day, not
far off, we hope to be able to say that there is
no more yellow fever anywhere in the world.
When that old fear and danger is past, and we
can go safe from it into any part of the rich
tropics, it will be an even more important happen-
ing than the building of the Panama Canal.

MORE BOOKS

The little clearing around our camp only nicked
the edge of the jungle. This little book only
peeps over into the lives of the animals we saw
there. I cannot think of anything for you to do
that would be more fun than to grow up and
some day sail down there to the Canal to find
out for yourself more about the island. Waiting
for you on Barro Colorado are all kinds of inter-
esting things that no one has seen or heard or
understood.

And while you are growing up, you may like
to be reading more about the jungle and its plants
and animals. Here is a list of books written by
people who have been in the jungle and really
know what they are telling about.

One book is Ants, written by William Morton
Wheeler. It is a thick book with many pictures
and it tells all about ants all over the world. It
is the kind of book you will read a few pages at
a time, pausing between readings to think about
what you have read.

Reptiles of the World, by R. X. Ditmars, has
stories and pictures of snakes and lizards and the
like. It is a rather new book.

I do not know any writings that give you the
feeling of the jungle so well as Jungle Peace and

195

196 JUNGLE ISLAND

The Edge of the Jungle, written by William Beebe
about South American jungle.

The oldest and best known book on Central
American jungle is The Naturalist in Nicaragua,
written years ago by an English mining engineer,
Thomas Belt. It is both interesting and truthful,
and nothing better can be said of a book. Most
naturalists still quote from it, as I have done.

If you like pirates as well as jungle life, you will
never find a more exciting pirate tale than that
of Morgan and his raids across the Isthmus after
Spanish gold, and the stories of Sir Francis Drake
are almost as thrilling.

Pirates of Panama was written by John Esque-
meling, who was with Morgan himself. Two
other books that are a little easier to read are
The Boy's Book of Buccaneers, by Eric Wood, and
The Real Story of the Pirate, by A. Hyatt Verrill.
All three are well illustrated, as they deserve to be.

SUGGESTIONS TO TEACHERS

GROUP DISCUSSION

Informational value of silent reading. In preparing
this account of life in the rainy tropics we have been
animated by a firm belief in the informational value
of silent reading and the necessity for acquiring, while
still in school, the habit of reading informational
matter. We remember the information and pleasure
received from such reading in our own grade-school
days and regret that we were never allowed time to
talk over what we had read and so fix impressions or
correct wrong ideas. We suggest supervised group
discussion where the teacher may be sure that the
children will be encouraged to talk over the material
informally together.

Exploration clubs. Such encouragement might well
result from dividing the class into exploration clubs
each one of which is asked to discuss informally and
decide which of the experiences recorded in Jungle
Island they would most like or dislike to meet with;
which of the animals they would most desire to see;
which they would fear most ; which they think would
prove most useful to a person alone on a jungle
island. Each club should then -^ report through a
chosen leader to the entire group. Once he is away
from the Canal Zone towns, a man's supplies are
limited. What things do the children think necessary
for a week's stay on Jungle Island?

197

1 98 JUNGLE ISLAND

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY

Building of the Panama CanaL In the future we
of the temperate regions of the earth shall turn more
and more to the tropics for food, lumber, fuel, and
other necessities. It is well for school children to come
to have a correct attitude toward and understanding of
tropical life and of the conditions under which work
can successfully be carried on there. In this connec-
tion, and with the background furnished by reading
Jungle Island, classes might study the building of
the Panama Canal as an example of successful work
in the tropics.

Most children of the junior-high-school age already
know something about the Panama Canal and its
building. Nearly all such information can be worked
into this theme. Those who have no personal con-
nection with the Americans in the Canal Zone will find
the old files of the National Geographic Magazine
through the ten years the Canal was being built —
1904-1914 — well supplied with interesting illustrated
articles.

Map work and sand modeling. We believe it would
be well for the children to make either a rough sketch
map of the continents with the Canal located, or a
sand model of the Canal itself. Some children w^ill
take great interest in making fairly accurate profile
maps or models of the Canal, with its two sea-level,
seven-mile entry ways and its middle section of fresh
water eighty-five feet higher, reached from the Atlantic
side by the three pairs of locks at Gatun and on the
Pacific side b}^ the two pairs at Miraflores which con-
nect that sea-level stretch with Miraflores Lake fifty-

SUGGESTIONS TO TEACHERS 199

five feet higher. A mile farther are the Pedro Miguel
Locks, which consist of a single pair, with a Hft of
thirty feet.

The Pacific half of the mid-section should be shown
as a narrow cut through hills, which extends nine miles
to Gatun Lake. The highest of these hills stand approx-
imately one thousand feet above sea level, although the
pass through which the Canal was dug was only three
hundred feet above sea level. The relation of the
Canal to Gatun Lake and to Barro Colorado (Jungle)
Island as well as to these other features may be seen
on the map on page 11. A generalized profile is given
as an aid in the supervision of such efforts (page 15).

Insect-borne diseases. When the engineering diffi-
culties of digging the Panama Canal have been firmly
fixed, the teacher should make a point of the greater
obstacles involved in the insect-borne diseases as out-
lined in the last chapter. The story of Colonel Gorgas
himself (Sanitation in Panama, 19 15) may be read
and told in as much detail as time permits. •

Study of climate. Almost all the differences between
tropical and temperate climates may be truthfully
brought out in such a story. Some of these differences
are illustrated in the table on page 200, taken from
a report by Mr. R. Z. Kirkpatrick, chief of the Division
of Hydrography and Meteorology of the Canal Zone.

Rainy season. In parts of the rainy tropics there
is no cessation of the rainy season, but in much of
this region, the world over, the rains are interrupted
for a longer or shorter dry season. Thus in Panama
during January, February, or March there is about
the same quantity of rain that we have in Chicago in

200

JUNGLE ISLAND

a month; but during the remainder of the year there
is much more, and November alone averages a greater
number of inches of rainfall there than Denver has
in a whole year. Rains yielding as much as six inches
of water are rare, but occasionally eight inches of rain
or more may fall in a single day.

Difference between Tropical and Temperate Climates

Stations

Record Temperatures

Average

July
Temp.

Mobile

Denver

Washington

Key West

Chicago

New York

New Orleans ....

St. Louis

Boston

San Francisco . . .

Oklahoma

Charlestown, S.C

Galveston

Norfolk

Colon, R.P

80
72

77
84

72

74
81

79

71

57
80

81

83
78
80

Any Month

Highest Lowest

102

105
104
100
103
100
102
107
104
lOI
108
104

99
102

93

— I

-29

-15

41

-23

-13

7

— 22

-14
29

-17

7

8

2

66

Average

Annual

Relative

Humidity

79

52
72
78

74
72
78
70
72
80
70

78
81

84

Average

Annual

Rainfall

62 .0
14.0
43-5
38.7
33-3
44.6

57-4
37-2

43-4
22.3

317
52.1

47-1

49-5
127.8

Humidity. Even during the driest times of the year
the humidity is so high that one must keep an electric
light bulb burning continually in each closet to dry
out and keep from mold the clothes and shoes stored
there. A cloudless day is rare in the dry season,
and in the rainy season the sky is overcast more than
half the time.

Variety of climate in Canal Zone. However, one
must not conclude that there is only one tropical

SUGGESTIONS TO TEACHERS 201

climate. There are almost as many varieties as there
are localities. For instance, the north entry of the
Canal is much more rainy than the south end less than
fifty miles away, because the intervening hills help
to precipitate the rain from the moist winds off the
Caribbean Sea. Not nearly all the tropics are as rainy
as the country we describe here, but the most fertile
tropics are the most humid and they are also the most
troubled by insect pests.

Commercial geography. We suggest also that the
Canal be considered as a commercial trade route, and
that the children search the markets for fruits, such
as bananas, avocado pears, or coconuts, that might
have come from its general region. Such exercises
could be admirably illustrated from the folders of
steamship companies plying to the Canal and the
shores of countries bordering the Caribbean Sea. These
are advertised in almost any good magazine.

NATURAL HISTORY

Importance of insects. xAfter the dramatic story
of the contest between man and mosquito for the
mastery of the tropics has been discussed, the student
niay proceed more easily to the importance of other
insect families like the ants and the termites. It is
of course true that in the temperate zone as well as
in the tropics, insects are in the ascendancy among
animals. One has onl}^ to recall the growing list of
fruit and grain pests, not to mention flies and our own
malaria-bearing Anopheles mosquito. The children
should be able to make a list of familiar harmful insects
which we do not have under control ; and they may well

202 JUNGLE ISLAND

draw their own conclusions about their eradication,
using the story of the wiping out of yellow fever as an
inspiration as to possibilities.

Visiting museums. Where a museum is available,
the children should go to see for themselves specimens
of the larger birds and of animals mentioned and
bring back full descriptions.

Our great interest throughout is that the child shall
come to regard the whole world as his own, and feel
himself at home in the tropics, as in the temperate
regions.

GLOSSARY

Pronunciation of the following words is taken largely from
Webster's Dictionary, from which the key to pronouncing
symbols is also derived.

a as in ale o as in old

a as in senate 6 as in 6bey

a as in care 6 as in 6rb

S, as in am 6 as in odd

a as in arm
a as in ash ii as in ase

u as in unite
e as in eve ^ as in urn

fe as in fevent u as in up

§ as in end
e as in maker oi as in oil

ou as in pound
i as in ice
\ as in ni

A

acetylene (a-set'i-len). A gas used to make a Hght in our

head-lantern.
Aedes (e'dez). The mosquito that carries yellow fever,

formerly called Stegomya (steg-6-ml'ya).
Ancon (an'con). Ancon and Balboa house the workers at

the Pacific end of the Panama Canal. Ancon also

adjoins the town of Panama.
Anolis (a-no'lis). A small lizard with changeable skin colors

and a throat that can be puffed out into the shape of a

half-dollar.
Anopheles (a-nof'fe-lez). The mosquito that carries malaria.

14 203

204 GLOSSARY

antennae (an-ten'e). The feelers on the head of an insect.
They usually look like stiff hairs.

armadillo (ar-ma-dil'o). A four-footed warm-blooded animal
with a hard shell.

Atta (at'a). The gardening ant.

Azteca (az'tek-a). The paper- making ant.

B

Balboa (bal-bo'a). The town where American employees
live at the Pacific end of the Canal.

Barro Colorado (bar'o ko-lo-ra'do). The jungle island formed
by the rising of the waters of Gatun Lake. These com-
pletely surrounded a high hill and made an island of it.

basilisk (bas'i-lisk). The water- walking lizard.

buoy (boi). A float marking safe channel for ships.

C

caiman (ka'man). A kind of tropical alligator.

camouflage (ka'mdo-flazh). To disguise.

capuchin (kap'u-chin). A monkey with black on the head

like the dark hood of a monk.
Caribbean (kar-ib-be'an). The sea between the West Indies

and Central and §outh America.
casa grande (ka'sa grand'a). Spanish, meaning a large house.
cayuca (ka-yu'ka). Panamanian name for a canoe hollowed

out of a log.
Chagres (cha'gres). The Panamanian river whose waters

fill Gatun Lake and make the greater part of the Canal.
coati (ko-a'tfe). A tropical raccoon-like animal, but with a

larger tail and a long and very flexible snout.
Colon (ko-lon')- The city at the Atlantic end of the Panama

Canal. The name was formerly Aspinwall.

GLOSSARY 205

conejo (k6-na'ho). A relative of the guinea-pig in the rainy
tropics that lives in holes during the day and comes out
for food at night.

cormorant (k6r'm6-rant). A large swimming and diving
bird called in Panama a fish duck.

corozo (ko-ro'so). A kind of palm tree.

Culebra (koo-la'bra). The name of the cut made through
the hills between Gatun Lake and the Pacific Ocean.
The town near by has the same name.

cvirassow (ku'ra-so). A large bird, which is related to our
domestic fowls.

dinosaur (di'no-sor). A gigantic lizard-like animal that once
lived on the earth but is no longer found.

E

Eciton (Ss'i-ton). The army ant.

entomologist (en-t6-mor6-jist). A person who studies in-
sects.

F

fer-de-lance (far-de-lans). A poisonous snake.

fertilize (fur'tl-llz). To make rich, as soil for plant growth.

formalin (for'ma-lin). A preserving liquid.

Frijoles (fre-ho'les). A small town on Gatun Lake noted for

its fine bananas. One embarks there for Barro Colorado

Island.
Frijolita (fre-ho-le'ta). A little river whose bed is now largely

covered by Gatun Lake.
fumigate (fu'mi-gat). To smoke out bacteria, insects, or

larger animals. Sulphur is often burnt to make the

smoke.

2o6 GLOSSARY

G

Gamboa (gam-bo'a). The town where the Chagres River

empties into Gatun Lake.
Gatun (ga-toon'). Gatun Lake, made by the Chagres

River waters, joins the two sea-level entries of the

Panama Canal.'
Gorgas (gdr'gas). Colonel Gorgas directed the campaigns

that freed Cuba and Panama from yellow fever.
gotosola (go-to-so'la). A raccoon-like, four-footed animal.

See coati.
guanaco (gwa-na'ko). The largest wild llama, a distant

relative of the camel.
guayacan (gwa-ya-kan'). A yellow- flowering hardwood tree

found in Central America.

heliconia (hel-i-ko'nl-a). A long-leafed plant, much hke a
very large canna.

I

iguana (i-gwa'na). A large lizard living in the warm parts
of America. It grows to be five feet or more long. It
is very often eaten by the natives.

J

jacana (jak'a-na). Birds with long legs and particularly

long toes which make it possible for them to run along

the lily pads floating on the water.
jaguar (jag- war'; ja-gwar')- The largest and most dangerous

wild cat in America, mostly limited to forested tropical

regions.
Jamaica (ja-ma'ka). An island in the West Indies which

belongs to Great Britain. It is located ninety miles

south of the eastern part of Cuba.

GLOSSARY 207

liana (16-a'na; li-an'a). A general name for the climbing and

twining plants in tropical forests.
Lorita (16-re'ta). Spanish, meaning ''little parrot."

M

macaw (ma-k6'). A large, especially gaudy parrot with the
face partly bare of feathers.

machete (ma-cha'ta). A long heavy knife used in Spanish-
American countries as a tool and a weapon.

manakin (man'a-kin). A small thickset bird with brilliant
plumage. It is native to the hottest parts of America.

marmoset (mar'mo-zet). A small squirrel-Hke monkey,
ranging from a few inches to a foot long. It lives in the
forests of tropical America and feeds on insects. It
makes an amusing pet.

Miraflores (me-ra-flo'ras). The name of the two pairs of
locks nearest the Pacific side of the Panama Canal, and
of the mile-long lake above them.

Molino (mo-le'no). The name of a young Panamanian natu-
ralist who helped us.

mosquito (mos-ke'to). One of the many different kinds of
gnats and midges. The female bites animals and draws
blood. Some kinds carry disease germs, such as yellow
fever and malaria.

motmot (mot'mot). A tropical bird that trims its two
longest tail feathers, leaving an end the shape of a tennis
racket.

mucho malo (moo'cho ma'lo). Spaj^iish for "very bad."

N

nequi (ne'ke). A relative of the guinea pig. It lives in
burrows and on the jungle floor in warm parts of America.

2o8 GLOSSARY

O

ocelot (o'sfe-lot). The leopard cat of America. It is from
three to four feet long. About one foot of this length
is tail. The color is grayish marked with dark spots.
It is found as far north as Texas and south into South
America.

opossum (o-pos'um). Tree-dwelling animals varying in size
from the bulk of a large cat to that of a rat. They have
a well-known trick of playing dead— " playing possum"
— when caught. On the under side of her body the
female has a pocket like the pouch of a kangaroo in
which she carries her babies.

P

Panama (pa-na-ma')- A Central American republic covering

the Isthmus of Panama; once a part of the RepubUc of

Colombia.
papaya (pa-pa'ya). A small tree with fruit like a melon.
parrakeet (par'a-ket). A small bird belonging to the parrot

family.
patois (pa-twa')- A dialect.
peccary (pek'a-ri). The wild pig common in Central and

South America. They extend north into Texas.

Pedro Miguel (pa'dro me-gel')- The locks at the Pacific
end of Gatun lake.

pelican (pel'i-kan). A large water-bird with a great skinny
pouch under its bill.

peripatus (pe-rip'a-tus). A curious wormlike animal that is
■ half worm and half insect.

porcupine (por'ku-pin). A four-legged animal bristling with
spines.

Porto Bello (por'to bel'o). An old Spanish town on the Carib-
bean coast of Panama. A great fair and market was
held here every year.

GLOSSARY 209

potassium permanganate (p6-tas'l-um per-mang'ga-nat). A
chemical used to wash wounds made by snake bite.

protozoa (pro-to-zo'a). The most simple form of animal,
with only one body cell.

R

rhinoceros (ri-nos'er-os). A thick-skinned, four-legged ani-
mal, usually with a horn or two on its blunt nose. It
lives in tropical Africa.

rodent (ro'dent). A furry animal, whose teeth are especially
well fitted for gnawing. Rodents are of many sizes and
kinds and live in nearly all countries and climates.
Rats and mice are rodents.

S

San Lorenzo (san 16-ren'tho). An old Spanish fort on the

Caribbean coast of Panama, at the mouth of the Chagres

River.
scorpion (skor'pi-un). A relative of the spiders, with a long

jointed body bearing a poisonous sting at the end. See

Figure 40 on p. 91.

T

tamales (ta-ma'les). Cakes made of cornmeal and meat
seasoned with red peppers.

tapir (ta'per). A hoofed animal somewhat like a giant hog.
Those in Panama grow to weigh almost a ton.

tarantula (ta-ran'tu-la). Any one of the great hairy spiders
of the warmer parts of America.

termite (tur'mit). So-called "white ants," which are not
ants at all though they live in similar colonies. They
usually eat wood and are especially destructive on account
of their habit of eating out the centers of solid timber
and furniture, leaving only a crumbling shell.

tigre (te'gra). A native name for any large catlike animal.
14

2IO » GLOSSARY

tinamou (tin'a-moo). A bird much like a partridge.

toucan (too-kan'; too'kan). A large, strikingly marked bird
with a much oversized bill.

vacuum (vak'u-um). A place with no air. Many animals
have pads on their feet which they can make into par-
tial vacuums and so cling to trees or walls just as a
vacuum cleaner clings to a rug and lifts it up.

Y

yaguarundi (ya-gwa-run'di). A large wild cat.

zoological (zo-6-16j'i-kal). About animals. For instance, a
zoological park is a park with animals in it.

THE INDEX

Aedes, yellow fever mosquito,
182, 184
at Barro Colorado, 193
description of, 194
how driven from Canal Zone,

185 ff.
Aeroid plants, 49, 50
Alligators, 118
American restaurant in Ancon,

23
Americans :

malaria driven from Canal

Zone by, 9, 188 flf.
yellow fever driven from
Canal Zone by, 9, 185 ff.
yellow fever driven from
Havana by, 182, 183
Ancon, 20

American restaurant in, 23
hospital, 185 f.
temperature in, 20
Animals :

furry, 159 ff. See also vari-
ous animals
migration of, caused by
making of Gatun Lake, 16
Anolis, 126 ff.

color change of, 128, 130
relatives of, 136
Anopheles, malarial mosquito,
184
at Barro Colorado, 193
description of, 194
Anteaters, 81
Ants, 54 ff .

army, or Ecitons, 65 ff .

Attas, 56 ff .

Azteca, 63 f .

black, 62

Congo, 62

Ecitons, 65 ff .

in termite nests, 85 ff .

spinning, 64

stinging, 61

white. See Termites
Ants, by William Morton

Wheeler, 195
Armadillo, 164 ff.
Attas, 56 ff.

care of young, 60 f .

food of, 56

gardening of, 58 ff.

in Ancon hospital garden,
186

kinds of, 58

nests, 57 ff.
Azteca ants, 63 f.

nests of, 63

Balboa, discoveries of, i

Balboa, town, 26

Bananas, importance of, 27

Barro Colorado Inlet, 34 ff.

Barro Colorado Island:
a forest preserve, 17
making of, 17
trees on, 38 •

Basilisk lizards, 132 ff.

Bats, 170

Beebe, William, 155, 195, 196

Bell bird, 154

Belt, Thomas, 147, 156, 160,
163, 176, 196

Birds, 137 ff. See also vari-
ous birds

Black snake, iii, 112

Blunt -headed snake, 113 f.

Boa constrictor, 108

Boy'-^s Book of Buccaneers, by
Eric Wood, 196

Bushmaster, no

Caimans, 118, 120 f.
food of, 122

211

212

THE INDEX

Camel family, extinction of,

in North America, 13
Canal. See Panama Canal
Canal Zone:

climate of, 199 ff.

engineers in, 11, 12, 14

geology of, 12 ff.
Capuchin monkey, 162 ff.
Carroll, Dr., 183
Casa grande, 30
Catfishes, 13
Cattle, 27

attacked by ticks, 102
Cayuca, 29
Chagres River:

at flood time, 26

bed of Gatun Lake, 10, 16

important to travel, 2, 5
Chameleon, 136
Chicken cat, or yaguarundi,

167 f.
Climate of Canal Zone, 199 ff.
Coati, 160 f.

hunting iguanas, 160 f.
Colon, Canal begun at, 10
Columbus, landing at Isthmus

of Panama, i
Commercial geography, 201
Conejo, 170
Congo ants, 62
Coral snakes, 112
Cormorants, 142
Crocodile eggs, 20, 118
Crocodiles, 117 ff.

home of, 118
Culebra Cut, 26
Curassow, 150

Deer, 174

scarcity of in South America,

Dinosaur, 124, 132
Diseases, insect-borne, 199
Ditmars, R. L., 128, 195

Eciton ants, 65 ff.
food of, 66
nests of, 66 f.

Edge of the Jungle, by William

Beebe, 196
Empire, 26
Engineers in Canal Zone, 10,

12, 14
Esquemeling, John, 196
Exploration clubs, 197

Fawn, 174

Fer-de-lance, no

Fern vines, 44

Findlay, Dr., 182, 183

Fish ducks, or cormorants, 142

Fort San Lorenzo, 170, 179

Frijoles, 27, 30

old village of, 34
Frijolita River, 34

Gamboa, 26

Gatun Dam, 14, 16

Gatun Lake:

Barro Colorado result of, 17
crocodiles in, 117, 118
forest destroyed by, 30
making of, 10, 16
migration of animals caused
by, 16

Gatun Locks, 10

Geology of Canal Zone, 11 ff.

Glossary, 203

Goat sucker, 144 f.

Gold:

discovered in California, 8
taken by Spanish explorers
in Central America, i , 7

Gorgas, Colonel, 184, 186, 194,

Gotosola, or coati, 160 f.
Crackles, 141
Granddaddy-long-legs, or har-

vestman, 96 ff.
Guanaco, 13
Guayacan trees, 50

Hangbird, 145 f.
Harvestman spider, 96 ff.
Havana, yellow fever driven
from, 182

THE INDEX

213

Hawks, 141, 142
Heliconia, 170
Heron :

blue, 143

green, 143 f.
History and geography work,

198
Howlers, 171 f.

Humidity of Canal Zone, 200
Humming birds, 155 f.

tongue of, 156

Iguanas, 134 f.
as a food, 135

hunted by coatis, 160 f.
Indians on Isthmus of Panama,

I, 3, 7
Insects, importance of, 201
Isthmus of Panama:
climate, 3
early roads of Spaniards

across, 2 f.
location, i, 2
of gold hunters in 1849

across, 8
under water thousands of

years ago, 13

Jacanas, 141

Jaguar, 164

Jamaica, canal workers from,

182
Jungle:

plant growth in, 44

temperature in, 52
Jungle Peace, by William

Beebe, 195
Jungle roof, 43, 50, 52

Kingfishers, 142
King's highways, 2, 8
Kirkpatrick, Z. R., cited, 199

Ladder made of spikes, 38 ff .
Lazear, Dr., 183
Lianas, 39, 47, 48

Lizards, 123 ff.

ancestors of, 123 f.

Anolis, 126 ff.

basilisk, 132 ff.

descendants of, 124

loss of tail, 130 ff.
Llama, 13

Logging in the jungle, 51
Long-headed tree snake, 115
Lorita, 148 f.

Macaw, 147
Machete, 39
Mahogany trees, 51
Malaria, 179 ff.

how combated in Canal
Zone, 188 ff.

in days of Spanish explorers,

5
in India, 183

successfully treated by the
Americans, 9
Manakins, 137, 154
Map work, 198
Marmosets, 173 f.
Marty, Captain, 164
Miraflores Locks, 10, 26
Milk in Canal Zone, 102
Milkweed, 44
Monkeys, 162 ff.

black howlers, 1 7 1 f .

capuchin, 162 ff.

marmosets, 173 f.

night, 172 f.
Morgan, Henry, raids of, 6 £.,

179
Mosquitoes:

conquest of, 179 ff.

eggs laid in water, 184, 193

how driven from Canal
Zone by Americans, 185 ff,
Motmot, 137, 153 f.
"Mountain cows." 5^^ Tapirs
Mushrooms of Attas, 58 ff.

Natural history, 201
Naturalist in Nicaragua, by
Thomas Belt, 196

214

THE INDEX

Nequi, 169 f.

Night monkey, 172 f.

Ocelot, 164
Orchids, 50
Orioles, 145

Pacific Ocean, discovered by

Balboa, i
Palms, 44 f .
Palm sail, 32
Panama Canal:

building of, 198

completed by United States,
9ff.

French plan for, 8, 10

geological conditions to be
overcome in digging of,
I iff.

highway, a, 34

Spaniards, plans for, 5
Panama City:

eflfect of modern sanitation
on, 185 fT.

unhealthful, 181

Morgan's raid on, 7
Panama, Isthmus of. See

Isthmus of Panama
Panama railway, route of, 25 f.
Papaya melon, 23
Paper-making ants, 63 f.
Paradise bird, or tinamou, 144
Parrakeets, 149
Parrots, 147 ff.
Passion vine, 44
Peccary, or wild pig, 164, 166 f.
Pedro Miguel Locks, 26
PeUcans, 139
Peripatus, 103 ff.
Peru, gold from, i
Pirates, English, 6, 7
Pirates of Panama, by John

Esquemeling, 196
Poor-me-one, 144 f.
Porto Bello, importance of, 6
Protozoa, 77

Quinine, as cure for malaria,
181, 190

Railway, Panama, 25 f.

Rainy season, 199 f.

Real Story of the Pirate, The,

by A. Hyatt Verrill, 196
Red bugs, 99, loi
Reptiles of the World, by

R. L. Ditmars, 195
Roads :

early, across Isthmus of
Panama, 2 f.

machete-cut trail, 152

of gold hunters in 1849, 8
Rodents:

bats, 170

conejos, 170

in North America and South
America, 13

nequis, 169 f.

Sand-box tree, 39
Sand modeling, 198
Sanitation in Panama, by

Colonel Gorgas, 199
Scorpions, 89 flf.

sting of, 92
Seed ticks, 100
Sentinel tree, 51
Silent reading, value of, 197
Sloth, 176 ff.
Snake bite, 107

cure for, no
Snakes, 107 ff. See also vari-
ous snakes

danger from, 117

enemies of, 116

home of, 116

poisonous, 21, 107, 108, no,

115, 117

temperature of, 115 f.

Snow-hooded bell bird, 154
Spaniards :

at Isthmus of Panama, i

plans for Canal, 5

road building by, 2 f.
Spanish bayonet palm, 37
Spiders:

bird-eating, or tarantula,
92 ff.

bite of, 96

THE INDEX

215

harvestman, 96 ff.

scorpions, 89 flf.
Spike ladder, 38 ff.
Spinning ants, 64
Squirrel, 169
Stilt palm, 45, 68

Tapirs, 162, 164, 175 f.

attacked by ticks, loi
Tarantulas, 92 ff .

nest of, 93

bite of, 96
Tarantula hawk, 93 ff.
Teachers, suggestions to, 205ff.
Temperature :

in Ancon, 20

in the jungle, 52
Termites, 68 fif .

ant enemies of, 85 ff.

destructive habits of, 78 ff.

enemies of, 75, 81, 85

food of, 76 ff .

injuries done by, 78 ff.

kinds, 74, 83, 85

mound nests of , 83

nests of, 68, 70, 83

runways or road building,
70 f.

soldiers, 73

useful work of, 81, 83

wood- digesters, or Protozoa,

77
works, 73

Ticks, 5. 99 ff-

removal of, 100
"Tigre," 164

Tinamou, 144

"Torkeys," 150

Toucans, 156 ff.

Tree viper, 108 ff.

Trees, size of, 38

Turkeys, 150

Turtle attacked by ticks, loi

Verrill, A. Hyatt, 196
Viper, 108 ff.
Vultures, 138 f., 142 f.

Wasp. See Tarantula hawk

Water, necessity for boiling, 29

Water vine, 48

Wheeler, William Morton, 195

Whippoorwill, 144 f.

White ants. See Termites.

Wild fig, 47 f .

Wild pig, or peccary, 164, i66f.

Wood, destroyed by termites,

78 ff.
Wood, Eric, 196
Woodpecker, 142
Worms, early form of, 103

Yaguarundi, i67f.

Yellow fever:

how driven from Canal

Zone, 185 ff.
in Canal Zone, I79 ff-
in days of Spanish explorers,

5

in Havana, 182, 183
successfully treated by
Americans, 9

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