SUN-BITTERNS. 115 



long flights that the great bustard does, and never fluttering and skylarking in the air 

 as do the little ones. Generally, however, if the time be between ten and four, 

 and the day bright and warm, as your spiral diminishes, the birds disappear suddenly. 

 They have squatted. Still you go on round and round, closing in, in each lap, and 

 straining your eyes, usually in vain, to discover their whereabouts ; suddenly, perhaps 

 from under the very feet of the camel, up flutters one of the birds, and, after a few 

 strides, rises, to fall dead a few yards further on, as they are easy to hit and easy to 

 kill. At the first shot all the houbara that are at all close usually rise; but after 

 shooting a brace right and left, and having them picked up and slung, I have known a 

 third to blunder up from within a few yards. The way they will squat at times on an 

 absolutely bare patch of sand is astonishing; their plumage harmonizes perfectly with 

 the soil, and you will have a bird rise suddenly, apparently out of the earth, within 

 five yards of you, from a spot where there is not a blade of cover, and on which your 

 eyes have perhaps been fixed for some seconds. This is especially the case about 

 mid-day, when the sun is nearly vertical, and no shadow is thrown by the squatting 

 bird. Sometimes they try another plan: they get behind a single bush, and as you 

 circle round they do the same, always keeping the bush between themselves and 

 the sportsman. Here, xinless the sun be quite vertical, their shadow projected on the 

 ground, apart from that of the bush, is sure, at certain positions in the circle, to betray 

 them, and a shot through the bush brings them to bag." 



Like most of the erratic and isolated types of birds, the members constituting the 

 super-family EURYPYGOIDE^E have been hunted round the ornithological system 

 from order to order, until, of late, anatomical researches have proved their mutual 

 relationship and their remoteness from the forms with which they were more or less 

 commonly associated. As long as external characters alone were relied upon, the sun- 

 bitterns were considered rails by some, herons by others; while the curious Mesites 

 was in turn one of the Passeres and a Gallinaceous bird. When the anatomists finally 

 decided their relationship and united with them the kagu, placing them all near the 

 Scolopacoid birds, more nearly related inter se than to any other group, the verdict 

 had to be, and to a great extent has been, accepted by ornithologists at large. 



In the first place these birds are schizorhinal, and furthermore they lack occipital 

 foramina, basipterygoid processes, and supraorbital impressions. To these important 

 characters of the skull, besides important ones from other parts of the body, for 

 instance, the comparatively low insertion of the hind toe, may be added the presence 

 of powder-down patches among the feathers, a feature elsewhere only met with in the 

 herons, some parrots, goatsuckers, hawks, and a few others. 



Three families compose the super-family, each of which are represented by a single 

 genus only, the genera again being nearly monotypieal. The sun-bitterns are South 

 American, Ehynochetos is from the island of New Caledonia in the Polynesian Archi- 

 pelago, and Mesites is peculiar to Madagascar. This distribution is considerably 

 disconnected, and seems at first glance to oppose the view of the relationship of these 

 birds, but we need only refer to what has been said on a previous page, under 

 Rostratula, in order to show that the peculiar geographical distribution of these forms, 

 the antiquity of which cannot be doubted, is rather in favor of the present arrange- 

 ment, and they can only be regarded as the last survivors of a group which, simulta- 

 neously with others of similarly old-fashioned aspect, once populated continents now 

 sunk, or inhabited by forms of a more modern type. Just how the ancestors of the 

 recent Limicolae, on one hand, and the cranes and rails, on the other, branched off 



