Page:Papers presented to the Worlds Congress on Ornithology.djvu/200

African Finch, merrily join. The male of this bird (Cheraprocne) adorns itself during the breeding season with a velvet-black coat, scarlet epaulettes, and an elongated tail, over a foot long, though the body of the bird is only about as large as that of a Thrush; the female being dressed in a darker and lighter shaded brown, the same color the male assumes during the winter, denoting its sex by the faded epaulettes only, which mark so brightly the black festive summer coat. All the noise made by these Passeres conirostres in unison with the whistling and the songs of real Oscines (Salicaria, Sylvia, Pratincola and others), and interrupted by the shrieks and squabbles, more or less loud and shrill, of the Grallæ and Natatores, offers a natural concert of a peculiar kind, hardly to be reproduced by the human tongue or by the most skilful pen. For moments only, when the rapacious Milvus ægyptiacus throws a shadow from his large wings upon the waters, the cries of love and enmity cease, to be renewed with the same vigor as soon as the rapacious bird of prey has disappeared. From all sides, from near and far, one by one, in pairs, in whole families, and in long lines or wedge-shaped arrays, Stanley Cranes (Tetrapteryx stanley anus), the beautiful Kafir or Crested Cranes (Balearica regulorum), and many species of Herons, the small and large white, the gray, the purple, the black-necked, and the Goliath, (Ardea garzetta, A. egretta, A. cinerea, A. purpurea, A. atricapilla and A. goliath), also white and black Storks (C. alba and C. nigra), are returning to their sleeping-place. Wild Geese and Ducks, Plovers (Chettusia coronata, Hoplopterus speriosus and others), even a pair of Hammerkopfs (Scopus umbretta), which all kept the whole or a part of the day in the vicinity of the marsh, are now coming along, walking slowly and still grazing like the geese and ducks, or running and playing (like Chettusia coronata), or taking short flights, all claiming a place in the waters of the pool. In other parts of South Africa, where no marshes are to be found, but large and very shallow salt