So I said, “Okay.” And I went down and collecting the bird was a fascinating experience. It took me more than a week of watching constantly the tree tops where the birds were calling to even see them. It’s a pigeon sized bird and it would disappear in the leaves and it had this enormous voice. You could hear it a mile away, this (William imitating a bearded bell bird drumming) or sort of a (imitating a bearded bell bird squaking) very, very loud. When you finally located the sound, you could lie there in the grass and worry about the chiggers later and eventually spot them. I finally spotted a bird up in the top of the mora tree, very tall tree in the very dense forest in the Eastern part of the Northern rainforest of Trinidad. Not far from Simla, the Wildlife Conservation Society’s William Beebe Tropical Research Station. I hired a local person appropriately named Armstrong because we had to do a lot of climbing, continued to watch the birds until I found one and was able to trace its behavior over a period of several days, finding that it would call vigorously each morning for a while, and then disappear for half an hour or so and go off for breakfast.
