158 BULLETIN 2 08, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



honey-giiide and not of the young barbet struggling against eviction.) 

 Unfortunately from our standpoint, the barbets were of more interest 

 than the honey-guide to Neuby-Varty and he replaced the three 

 nestlings and removed and killed the young parasite. 



This most interesting case does, at least, prove that honey-guide 

 chicks will eject their nest mates if they can, and that this takes place 

 within a week after hatching. (Unfortunately, as Neuby-Varty was 

 away when the eggs hatched, the exact age of the birds at the time of 

 ejection is not known, though they must have been not less than five 

 or more than six days old at the time.) In conversation about this 

 observation Neuby-Varty informed me that he thinks that ejection is 

 usually not done, or needed, as in his experience the laying honey- 

 guide usually pecks the hosts' eggs, which then do not hatch. As 

 shown in our discussion of the egg-laying habits, this pecking is by 

 no means universal, being, in fact, quite uncommon or even unknown 

 in the experience of some observers. Therefore, it may well be that the 

 occasion, or at least the stimulus for ejecting, occurs not infrequently. 

 In many nests it would seem physically impossible for the young 

 honey-guide to oust its nest mates. In this connection it may be 

 recalled that in one of the parasitized nests of an African hoopoe, 

 Upupa africana, discussed under that species, there was a shrivelled 

 dead nestling hoopoe together with a newly hatched, stUl naked, young 

 honey-guide. In another nest more suitable for ejection the nestling 

 hoopoe might well have been evicted. 



Young of the greater honey-guide, when hatched, have a pair of 

 sharp, almost needlelike hooks on the bill. It has been assumed by 

 several writers that these are used by the chick as "weapons" with 

 which to destroy the other young or eggs in the nest, but it must be 

 stated that no one has yet seen the young of the greater honey-guide 

 use them, although the nestling lesser honey-guide certainly does, and 

 that in the case of the young crested barbets the ejected birds revealed 

 no marks that might be attributed to these very sharp hooks. We 

 need further direct observational data. It is quite possible, for 

 example, that in the case described above they may have been used 

 not on the body of a nest mate about to be ejected but to grip the 

 nest wall to give the young ejector a firm hold while pushing out its 

 unwanted companion. 



Haagner (1911) describes the hooks on a young greater honey-guide 

 "fully fledged and ready to fly"(!). He put this bird in a cage where 

 its foster parents fed it through the wire mesh. After a few days the 

 chick lost one of the hooks (the lower, or mandibular one) and Haagner 

 then killed it to preserve it as a museum specimen while it still had at 

 least one of the hooks attached. He surmised that these hooks 



