Ornithological and Other Oddities 



age again, moping on shore in hungry misery. 



Their body feathers come off very freely, and 



the scaly-looking plumage of their flippers — it 



seems almost using a misnomer to call them 



wings — sloughs off in patches like the skin of 



a reptile. The female hornbill, also, immured 



for the breeding season in a hole in a tree, in 



some cases, at all events, takes the opportunity 



of changing her dress, and loses her quills and 



tail, thus breaking the general rule that birds 



do not moult till they have finished breeding ; 



she can afford to do so, as her mate has to do 



the catering for her as well as for her young 



during her imprisonment. 



One would expect that the great running birds, 



which cannot fly in any case, would undergo a 



wholesale moult of the wing feathers, but, as far 



as can be observed, this is not the case ; so that 



in some cases, at all events, the opportunity of 



dispensing with a number of large feathers at 



once has not been taken advantage of by nature. 



The flightless rails of New Zealand, the wekas 



(Ocydromus), do, however, moult in this way, 



and so does our landrail ; and this, again, makes 



us wonder why such a moult does not occur in 



the game-birds, which usually depend so much 



more on their legs than on their wings. One 



would think that the partridge could do without 



flying for a few weeks as well as its neighbour 



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