THE HONEY-GUIDES 27 



are led to the bees' nest by the song and flight of a certain little bird 

 that is very fond of honey." 



Peter Kolben (1731, pp. 154-155) gives a much garbled account of 

 a bird referred to as the "gnat-snapper," which is evidently a com- 

 pounded mixture of a honey-guide and a bee-eater. The fact that he 

 writes that the bird guides the Hottentots to bees' nests shows that 

 the gnat-snapper is based partly on Indicator, while the description — 

 long red bill, blue feathers on the breast — suggests Alerops. His 

 crude black and white figure also suggests Merops. It has been re- 

 produced by Seyffert (1930, p. 24) and by Bodenheimer (1951, 

 p. 171). 



Andrew Sparrman's account of the honey-guide, published in 1785 

 (vol. 2, pp. 186-193), is generally referred to as the starting point of 

 our knowledge of the guiding habit, although he specifically makes 

 reference to Father Lobo's account of some 57 years earlier. Sparr- 

 man is the first writer to inform us that not only does the honey-guide 

 lead natives to bees' nests but that it does the same with ratels or 

 honey-badgers. His account of the association of the bird with the 

 ratel gives us no reason to assume that he had actually witnessed 

 such cooperative action, and probably rests on tales reported to him 

 by native informants. 



Since Sparrman's time there have been published innumerable 

 short notes and records of specimens, many of considerable interest, 

 brief accounts of guiding experiences (usually devoid of any details 

 which would have made them much more informative), incomplete 

 compilations of existing data, and many accounts of the honey-guide 

 and ratel story, all apparently based on earlier stories of other writers 

 or on hearsay evidence only. While a considerable corpus of data 

 could be gleaned from the total literature as recently as 1947, it was 

 still very uneven and provided little as a basis for understanding and 

 possible interpretation. At that time I prepared a fau'ly detailed list 

 of questions for circulation among bird observers in Africa. This 

 questionnaire yielded a good number of new observations of value 

 and had as its most notable result a paper by C. J. Skead (1951) in 

 which for the first time details of individual guiding experiences are 

 set doAvn with accuracj'". The same author had published one earlier 

 report (1946) giving detailed evidence on the circuitous route of one 

 guiding experience that clearly demonstrated for the first time what 

 has since been found to be generally characteristic of guiding. 



Earlier explanations 



As might be expected because of its unusual features, the guiding 

 habit has elicited several explanations by various authors. While 

 none of them are wholly satisfactory they deserve mention because of 



