176 Lieut. -Col. Tickell on the Hornbills 



a long shot. The first bird I fired at fell from his perch (on a 

 vast tree) into a thicket. Its companions did not fly away ; and 

 my second barrel brought down another^ which hitched in the 

 tree, to all appearance desperately wounded. I, of course, con- 

 gratulated myself on having secured two of this very rare spe- 

 cies ; but, to my intense chagrin, when my people had come up 

 to search for and secure the prizes, the second bird flew away as 

 if unscathed, and the first was not to be found ! The Karens 

 declared they had seen it fly away ! And, in truth, the voices of 

 all three were presently afterwards heard from the interior of 

 the jungle. The heavy morning dew made any diversion from 

 the path equivalent to a plunge in the rivei"; so I sent a Burman 

 follower, whom I had taught the use of a gun, after the fugitives, 

 and he succeeded in fairly bagging two of them. They proved 

 to be males, not diff'ering perceptibly in plumage from the female 

 here figured. 



This last is now, I have to add, in the museum of the Asiatic 

 Society in Calcutta. 



Without taking up the pages of ' The Ibis ' by descriptions 

 of birds already known to science, I am desirous of adding such 

 details as appear to have escaped other ornithologists, or to be 

 unknown to them, of a class of birds which, by their great 

 size and grotesque forms, constitute so striking a feature in the 

 forests of India. 



2. BUCEROS (HOMRAIUS) CAVATUS, HodgSOU. 



Of this Hornbill Hodgson has left little to say. I have 

 kept several specimens alive, and have been an eye-witness 

 of the singular mode of incubation of the bird. The young 

 have the casque no more developed than in the subgenus 

 Toccus of Lesson. At the commencement of the second year 

 the anterior extremity begins to separate from the culmen, and 

 during the third year assumes the transverse crescent shape, 

 sending the two edges or cornua outwards and upwards, while the 

 whole anterior portion gets broader, till it is equal to the hinder 

 part. But the casque is not fully developed till the fifth year. 

 Nevertheless the brittle and quasi-osseous edging to the bill is 

 perfected in the second year, becoming quickly eroded by wear 



