"The natives hunt through the forest till they find a tree where the birds assemble. They go there in the evening and build a screen of leaves over the fork of the tree, and just before daylight they climb up there ready for business. They keep perfectly still till the birds are busily engaged in their dance, and then they shoot with blunt-pointed arrows. The bird is stunned and falls to the ground, and before he recovers he is seized by a boy who is waiting for him; the bird's neck is broken without injuring the skin, and thus the prize is secured without staining the feathers with blood."
Fred asked if, when one bird was shot, the rest did not fly away.
"Not by any means," was the answer. "They are so busy with displaying their feathers to each other, that they do not take notice of the disappearance of one of their number until they are greatly reduced. The morning I went out to see the business, I was stationed in a little bower about a hundred yards from the tree where the birds were, so that I could see all that went on. There were twenty-one birds there, all beautiful males, and they made the prettiest sight of the kind that ever came before my eyes. The natives shot fifteen of them, and finally one of the birds was not hit hard enough to prevent his screaming as he fell. The others then took the alarm, and in two minutes they were all out of sight."
A NATIVE ANCHOR.