A Liberian Journey

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Wed Sept 22^nd. This morning Dr. Allen and I went collecting and were at last victorious. There is a small bird which is quite common but is very hard to get as it lives in the thick grasses around the rice fields. We have shot several of them but have not been able to find them and today we each got one – I a male. Dr. Allen the female – and brought them into camp – victorious. I also shot a francolin upon which Dr. Bequaert found a Francol  hippoboscid – an External parasite. Then just to practice on a big bird I skinned the francolin taking plenty of time but doing a first class if not positively elegant job on him. All in all I was most pleased and felt like taking a picture of him.

            I have 2 lemur babies which I am raising on canned milk fed with a medicine dropper. They certainly are fascinating little animals like small kittens but with tremendous eyes for and monkey like hands and feet. They also can hop in a surprising manner, being they have both learned to feed out of the dropper with a vengeance altho one cannot handle it as fast as the other. Today as I was feeding one as he sat on my fingers the other climbed from my lap up my shirt front out the arm with the dropper and down the dropper and pushed the other one away. They are only about 2” long with a tail a little longer and are covered with a very thick and soft yellow brown down.

            About 300 a messenger came from a man in Zeanshue who said he was going to Monrovia and would be glad to take mail for us so at 400 I sat down to write a long letter home. I wrote till supper and then developed 100 ft of movies and returned to write again. In the meantime Dr. Strong Shattuck and Theiler had a filarial hunt Dr. Shattuck pricking ears and making slides – Dr. Strong and Theiler examining them. And so we worked till 1130 until when I went for a walk with Dr. Allen in the moonlight. I am beginning to realize how much I will miss Dr. Allen when we split our outfit. We talked over the trip and decided we would have to make one to S. Am. In the next few years he to work on small mammals, I to work on birds. We walked through the sleeping village bathed in moonlight and bottomless shadows; beneath the giant trees which stretched up and up to disappear and merge with the sky. But we must return. When we got back the filarial hunt was over and the hunters had gone to bed. The silent line of blacks with the had gone and only Hal was up – writing beside a lantern. 

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