Habits of Pigeons. 83 



to a considerable height in the air and then, arriving 

 above their intended roosting place, they suddenly closed 

 their wings and hurled themselves down like stones. 

 Just before the tree-tops were reached they checked 

 their headlong plunge with outstretched wings, and 

 circling round once or twice, alighted noisily in the 

 acacias. In fact this downward plunge to the roosting 

 trees was performed by these African pigeons in much 

 the same way as it is by our wood pigeons at home. 



One evening, from the same spot, I fired some twenty 

 shots at pigeons as they were plunging down, and I 

 noticed in a tree thirty yards away from me a little 

 bittern,! I which sat motionless stretched upwards as stiff 

 as a ramrod during the whole cannonade. We saw many 

 little bitterns in the trees in the Soudan, and they 

 generally adopted this stiff and attenuated attitude, 

 which is undoubtedly assumed for purposes of conceal- 

 ment. I have seen the bird in the same attitude 

 amongst green reeds in Spain, but there, as in the 

 acacias in the Soudan, the bird benefited nothing by 

 its strange posture. The little bittern is a cream- 

 coloured bird with a velvety black back and head, and 

 I think it could never be taken for a stick or reed 



|[ Ardetta minvta (Linn.), 



