Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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We Measured The Way By Means Of A Cord; And We
Went On About Four Hundred And Thirty Feet Without Being Obliged To
Light Our Torches.
Daylight penetrates far into this region,
because the grotto forms but one single channel, keeping the same
direction, from south-east to north-west.
Where the light began to
fail, we heard from afar the hoarse sounds of the nocturnal birds;
sounds which the natives think belong exclusively to those
subterraneous places.
The guacharo is of the size of our fowls. It has the mouth of the
goat-suckers and procnias, and the port of those vultures whose
crooked beaks are surrounded with stiff silky hairs. Suppressing,
with M. Cuvier, the order of picae, we must refer this
extraordinary bird to the passeres, the genera of which are
connected with each other by almost imperceptible transitions. It
forms a new genus, very different from the goatsucker, in the
loudness of its voice, in the vast strength of its beak (containing
a double tooth), and in its feet without the membranes which unite
the anterior phalanges of the claws. It is the first example of a
nocturnal bird among the Passeres dentirostrati. Its habits present
analogies both with those of the goatsuckers and of the alpine
crow.* (* Corvus Pyrrhocorax.) The plumage of the guacharo is of a
dark bluish grey, mixed with small streaks and specks of black.
Large white spots of the form of a heart, and bordered with black,
mark the head, wings, and tail.
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