We were now in the land of the bloodsucking bats, the vampire bats that suck the blood of living creatures, clinging to or hovering against the shoulder of a horse or cow, or the hand or foot of a sleeping man, and making a wound from which the blood continues to flow long after the bat’s thirst has been satiated.  At Tapirapoan there were milch cattle; and one of the calves turned up one morning weak from loss of blood, which was still trickling from a wound, forward of the shoulder, made by a bat.  But the bats do little damage in this neighborhood compared to what they do in some other places, where not only the mules and cattle but the chickens have to be housed behind bat-proof protection at night or their lives may pay the penalty.  The chief and habitual offenders are various species of rather small bats; but it is said that other kinds of Brazilian bats seem to have become, at least sporadically and locally, affected by the evil example and occasionally vary their customary diet by draughts of living blood.  One of the Brazilian members of our party, Hoehne, the botanist, was a zoologist also.  He informed me that he had known even the big fruit-eating bats to take to bloodsucking.  They did not, according to his observations, themselves make the original wound; but after it had been made by one of the true vampires they would lap the flowing blood and enlarge the wound.  South America makes up for its lack, relatively to Africa and India, of large man-eating carnivores by the extraordinary ferocity or bloodthirstiness of certain small creatures of which the kinsfolk elsewhere are harmless.  It is only here that fish no bigger than trout kill swimmers, and bats the size of the ordinary “flittermice” of the northern hemisphere drain the life-blood of big beasts and of man himself.

There was not much large mammalian life in the neighborhood.  Kermit hunted industriously and brought in an occasional armadillo, coati, or agouti for the naturalists.  Miller trapped rats and a queer opossum new to the collection.  Cherrie got many birds.  Cherrie and Miller skinned their specimens in a little open hut or shed.  Moses, the small pet owl, sat on a cross-bar overhead, an interested spectator, and chuckled whenever he was petted.  Two wrens, who bred just outside the hut, were much excited by the presence of Moses, and paid him visits of noisy unfriendliness.  The little white-throated sparrows came familiarly about the palm cabins and whitewashed houses and trilled on the rooftrees.  It was a simple song, with just a hint of our northern white-throat’s sweet and plaintive melody, and of the opening bars of our song-sparrow’s pleasant, homely lay.  It brought back dear memories of glorious April mornings on Long Island, when through the singing of robin and song-sparrow comes the piercing cadence of the meadowlark; and of the far northland woods in June, fragrant with the breath of pine and balsam-fir, where sweetheart sparrows sing from wet spruce thickets and rapid brooks rush under the drenched and swaying alder-boughs.