But the Andean views can always claim a superiority over all northern scenes of a similar character, in the marvelous setting afforded by the ever-verdant and exuberant vegetation of the tropics. How often did we not wish, during this memorable trip, that we could command the brush of a Turner or a Poussin or a Claude Lorrain, in order to bring home with us copies of some of those wonderful pictures that Nature exhibited to our admiring gaze in her great art gallery of the Oriental Cordilleras!
The higher we ascended above the lowlands the less dense became the forests and the less luxuriant the vegetation. At times there were extended reaches of land that were quite treeless; at others the surface of the soil was covered with scrubby growths that were in marked contrast with the splendid sylvan exhibitions to which we had been so long accustomed. But although the giants of the forest were no longer visible, there was little diminution of the splendor of the floral display along our path. In one place, particularly, we were surprised beyond measure to find the whole side of a mountain spur covered with a glorious mantle of immaculately white lilies. The scene was not unlike one of the large lily fields of Bermuda, that supply our Easter altars with their choicest decorations.
We were greatly delighted to find in the tropics representatives of the feathered tribe that we were familiar with in the far North. Large flocks of them annually leave North America and Europe to spend the winter season in South America and as regularly return to their northern homes the following summer. Some of them come from far-off Alaska and extend their flight as far south as Tierra del Fuego. Others spend the summer in southeast Siberia and then, on the approach of winter, migrate by way of North America to South Brazil. Among the most numerous of these marvelous birds of passage are certain species of sandpipers, plovers and lapwings. The bobolink, known along the Chesapeake as the reedbird, and dreaded as the ricebird in the rice fields of the South, extends its migrations as far into South America as southeastern Brazil. Many of our familiar warblers and sparrows are to be seen during the winter months in Venezuela and Colombia, while certain cliff and barn swallows penetrate as far south as Paraguay. On the Orinoco and the Meta, we recognized many species of ducks that were familiar to us in the United States, among which were the pin-tail, bald-pate, golden-eye and blue-winged teal.
“The plovers, sandpipers and kindred species,” writes Knowlton, “take migratory journeys often of extraordinary length. Thus the American golden plover, Charadrius dominicus, breeds in arctic America, some venturing a thousand miles north of the Arctic Circle, and migrates through the entire length of North and South America to its winter home in Patagonia, and, curiously, its spring and fall routes are different. After feasting on the crowberry in Labrador, they seek the coast of Nova Scotia, where they strike out to sea, taking a direct course for the easternmost islands of the West Indies, and thence to the northeastern coast of South America. In spring not one returns by this route, but in March they appear in Guatemala and Texas. April finds their long lines trailing the prairies of the Mississippi Valley; the first of May sees them crossing our northern boundary, and by the first week in June they appear in their breeding grounds in the frozen north. The little sanderling, just mentioned, is almost cosmopolitan in distribution, breeding in the arctic and sub-arctic regions and migrating in the New World to Chile and Patagonia, a distance of eight thousand miles, and in the Old World along the shore of Europe, Asia and Africa. The Bartramian sandpiper, Bartramia longicauda, nests from eastern North America to Nova Scotia and Alaska, and goes south in winter to southern South America. The solitary sandpiper, Totanus solitarius, breeds mainly to the north of the United States, and winters as far south as Brazil and Peru. The buff-breasted sandpiper, Tryngites subruficollis, rears its young in the Yukon district of Alaska and from the interior of British Colombia to the Arctic coast, and journeys in winter well into South America. The turnstone, Arenaria interpres, a little shore bird, about the size of the song thrush of Europe, is also cosmopolitan, breeding in high northern latitudes and at other times of the year found along the coasts of Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America to the Straits of Magellan, Australia and the Atlantic and Pacific islands. It is one of the species mentioned as making the wonderful flight from the islands in Bering Sea to the Hawaiian Islands.”[7]
By what miraculous instinct are they guided in these semi-annual migrations across half the globe? Who bids them, asks Pope,
“Columbus-like, explore
Heavens not their own, and worlds unknown before?
Who calls the council, states the certain day.
Who forms the phalanx, and who points the way?”
Have they a special “sense of direction,” or is their “homing” faculty or power of orientation, something that is tantamount to a sixth sense?