PDF - Wallace Online

in ANIMAL LIFE IN THE TROPICAL FORESTS 301undoubtedly tend to concealment; but we have also thestrange phenomenon of white forest birds in the tropics, acolour only found elsewhere among the aquatic tribes and inthe arctic regions. Thus, we have the bell-bird of SouthAmerica, the white pigeons and cockatoos of the East, witha few starlings, woodpeckers, kingfishers, and goatsuckers,which are either very light - coloured or in great part purewhite.But besides these strange and new and beautiful formsof bird life, which we have attempted to indicate as characterisingthe tropical regions, the traveller will soon find thatthere are hosts of dull and dingy birds, not one whit different,so far as colour is concerned, from the sparrows, warblers,and thrushes of our northern climes. He will, however, ifobservant, soon note that most of these dull colours are protective;the groups to which they belong frequenting lowthickets, or the ground, or the trunks of trees. He will findgroups of birds specially adapted to certain modes of tropicallife. Some live on ants upon the ground, others pick minuteinsects from the bark of trees ;one group will devour beesand wasps, others prefer caterpillars ;while a host of smallbirds seek for insects in the corollas of flowers. The air, theearth, the undergrowth, the tree-trunks, the flowers, and thefruits, all support their specially adapted tribes of birds.Each speciesfills a place in nature, and can only continue toexist so long as that place is open to it and each has become;what it is in every detail of form, size, structure, and even ofcolour, because it has inherited through countless ancestralforms all those variations which have best adapted it amongits fellows to fill that place, and to leave behind it equallywell adapted successors.REPTILES AND AMPHIBIANext to the birds, or perhaps to the less observant eyeeven before them, the abundance and variety of reptiles formthe chief characteristic of tropical nature and the;threegroups lizards, snakes, and frogs comprise all that, fromour present point of view, need be noticed.