Each Yuracaré woman kept a number of Amazon parrots which she looked after carefully and refused to sell, even at a good price. Upon asking the reason for this I was told that they reared them for the sake of the tail-feathers, which are in great demand by the Aymarás. Each parrot will grow three “crops” of feathers a year, each of which is worth fifty _centavos_. The Aymarás from the vicinity of La Paz send down agents at regular intervals to purchase these feathers, as they use them in making ornaments worn during their annual festivals.
In the branches of one of the tall trees near the village a neat little hut had been built of bamboo and leaves, reminding one a great deal of a Philippine tree-dwelling. Indians armed with bows and arrows would conceal themselves in this house, forty feet above the ground, and shoot many of the birds which came to feed on the fruit covering the tree; other Indians, hidden about the base of the tree, watched where the birds fell, gathered them up and skinned or plucked them. In this way quite a number could be shot without alarming a feeding flock.
The forest around Todos Santos abounds in wild life. Squirrel-monkeys (_Saimiri_) are very numerous and travel in troops of from twenty to fifty individuals; we saw them daily, playing about in the trees, and feeding on fruits, buds, and insects. They are delightful little pets, and one that we owned spent the greater part of the day catching the mosquitoes which infested our habitation. It searched every nook and crevice for insects, and one of its chief pastimes was to look through a pack of cards in the hopes of finding mosquitoes between them. Harpy eagles also are very plentiful, and feed on the squirrel-monkeys to a great extent, as they are easy to catch. However, monkeys are not the only animals which suffer; we one day found the remains of a sloth which had been dropped by an eagle, the entire fore part of which had been eaten away.
There were numerous trees covered with vivid-scarlet blossoms, scattered throughout the forest, and forming gaudy little islands of color, which stood out very conspicuously amid the green tree-tops. These trees are known as _madres de cacao_, because they are frequently planted in cacao-groves to shield the young plants from the sun. The flowers contain so much nectar that numbers of birds feed upon them, including parrots, macaws, and orioles; when the brilliant blooms fall into the river they are greedily snapped up by fish.