The hooked bill of the parrot is as inconvenient in nest-making as the great beak of the toucan; the philosophical bird accepts the situation, and rears its young in a hollow tree, like its huge-billed friend. Parrots are more numerous than toucans and also more noisy; probably for these reasons they are seen quite frequently, while the discovery of a toucan is not easily made. The Doctor said a traveller might make the descent of the Amazon without seeing one of the latter birds, while he would encounter the parrot very often. Consequently Frank might feel proud of what he had seen the day before, and but for the accident of stumbling upon the locality of the nest he would not have been thus favored. Occasionally parrots and toucans are found together; both are gregarious, and the same may be said of most of the birds of South America.
To the parrot family belong the true parrots, paroquets, and macaws. Paroquets go in flocks, while the parrots always fly in pairs, though they flock together in large numbers on the trees. A few Indian tribes consider the macaw sacred, and it is called by some of them "the bird of the sun."
It was near evening when they reached their destination, a village of perhaps fifty huts, on the tongue of land forming the junction between the Beni and the river they had descended. Half the payment for the boats and boatmen had been made before starting; the balance was now due, but by common consent the settlement was postponed till morning. All the huts were so intolerably dirty that the travellers refused to occupy one of them; the little tent was spread near the cleanest of the huts, the baggage being piled in the latter, in charge of Manuel, while the Doctor and his young companions slept under canvas.
The boatmen were paid off in the morning, and started at once on their homeward journey. The prospects for an immediate departure down the Beni were not brilliant, as most of the Indians were away, and nobody could say when they would return. They were absent on a turtle-hunting expedition along the Beni; they might be back in a day or not for a week. _Quien sabe?_
"Never mind," said the Doctor; "what can't be cured must be endured. We will build a hut for ourselves, and study the Beni and anything else that comes in our way. We can make excursions into the forest and learn something of the country. The time will not be wasted, by any means."