THE NUMBERS OF ANIMALS 103 



replied after a little hesitation " a hundred," while the other 

 said " twenty." Actually there were probably over ten 

 thousand. An exactly similar result is obtained with classes 

 of zoological students who are taken out on field work ; and it 

 is simply due to the fact that it requires a good deal of practice 

 to find animals, most of which are hard to see or live in hidden 

 places. It is well known that specialising in one particular 

 group of animals enables a man to spot animals which any one 

 else would miss. It is therefore necessary to allow an 

 enormous margin on this account, when one is trying to get 

 an idea of the actual numbers of animals in the countryside. 



3. Living as we do in a world which has been largely 

 denuded of all the large and interesting wild animals, we are 

 usually denied the chance of seeing very big animals in very 

 big numbers. If we think of zebras at all, we think of them as 

 " the zebra " (in a zoo) and not as twenty thousand zebras 

 moving along in a vast herd over the savannahs of Africa. 

 To correct this picture of the numbers of big animals, which 

 were so much greater everywhere in the past, to accustom the 

 mind to dealing with large numbers, and to help in forming 

 some conception of the colossal abundance which is reached 

 everywhere still by the smaller animals, we shall describe 

 some of the places where animals of a convincing and satis- 

 factory size may still be seen in enormous and even stagger- 

 ing numbers. These places are mostly rather out of the 

 way and owe the persistence of their rich fauna either to the 

 existence of natural barriers such as an unhealthy climate 

 or an unproductive soil, or to the sensible game-preserving 

 methods of the natives. 



4. In the lower reaches of the White Nile, between the 

 vast swamp of the Sudd and Khartoum, there exist countless 

 numbers of water-fowl, many of them large birds as big as a 

 man. For days it is possible to sail past multitudes of storks, 

 herons, spoonbills, cranes, pelicans, darters, cormorants, 

 ibises, gulls, terns, ducks, geese, and all manner of wading 

 birds like godv/its and curlews. Abel Chapman ^^^ describes 

 the scene as follows : " The lower White Nile, as just stated, 

 is immensely broad and its stream intercepted by low islands 



