THE HONEY-GUIDES 57 



of guiding, and that in most cases they may be dismissed quite easily 

 as distracting incidents on the guiding trip that cause the guide 

 and, more certainly, the follower to "forget" the original "goal." 

 Such cases are much more frequent in the literature than in reality, as 

 they make exciting traveler's tales, but they do happen. Many years 

 ago David Livingstone tried to ascertain the truth of such tales and 

 actually asked 114 of his natives if they had ever been guided by a 

 honey-guide to anything but a bees' nest. Only one out of the 114 

 could recall that he had had such an experience although all had been 

 guided on a great many occasions. Percival (1924, pp. 347-348) 

 reports essentially the same on the basis of his natives' experience. 

 Blancou (1933, p. 317) considers it purely a matter of chance or acci- 

 dent if the bird happens to appear to "lead" to a large animal. 



A little over a century ago the French naturalist Delegorgue felt, 

 from his observations in South Africa, that when a honey-guide led to 

 a dead animal it seemed to be interested in feeding on the flies and 

 maggots on it. More recently, in Portuguese East Africa, Vasse 

 corroborated this in the case of a dead buffalo to which he had been 

 led by a honey-guide.^^ 



Major Haydock, in Northern Rhodesia, was told by his native 

 collectors that when a honey-guide led them to a leopard or a lion it 

 was always a sleeping beast, and that the bird seemed to mistake the 

 flies hovering about it for bees (this is the natives' own, unaided con- 

 clusion) . It seems very probable that the real explanation is that the 

 flies hovering about may have a similar effect on the honey-guide as 

 would a flight of bees. In some of these instances the observers made 

 particular search to see if there might have been a bees' nest near the 

 animal; if so, the animal's presence coidd not be looked upon as more 

 than a coincidence, but in a number of cases there was no sign of a hive. 



It might be mentioned, parenthetically, that there are some who 

 think that the actions of the bird may be slightly different when com- 

 ing to a large animal than when arriving at a bees' nest. So few 

 detailed data are available that it is not possible to say what the exact 

 points of difference are, but the following incident suggests that to the 

 eyes of observant natives there may be some subtle revealing variations 

 in the behavior of the honey-guide. Mr. John Sim, game warden at 

 Kapenguria, western Kenya Colony, informs me (in Htt.) that once he 

 was hunting in thick bush in the Suk district when a honey-guide 

 appeared, fluttered around, and then descended several yards away 



" It may be mentioned that this suggestion has been amplified in an unwar- 

 ranted fashion by Gromier (1949, pp. 168-169), who attempted to explain his being 

 led by a honey-guide to a buffalo by suggesting that the bird knows the hunter 

 will kill the buffalo and then carrion flies will lay their eggs in the carcass and 

 later the eggs will hatch into maggots, on which the bird likes to feedl 

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