26 SOiME BIRDS OF THE CANARY ISLANDS 



a short distance, the nearly black colour of the primary 

 feathers showing very distinctly as it was in the air. 

 In flight it much resembled our Peewit, and after it had 

 alicfhted on the ground it ran alongf with its win^s half 

 spread out. Although I saw many Coursers later on, 

 1 think this was the only bird that I noticed on the 

 wing ; during the nesting season, at any rate, they 

 seemed to prefer to keep to the ground, where they were 

 very inconspicuous. During our wanderings that day 

 we met a small boy whom we questioned with a view 

 of finding out whether he could show us nests of either 

 these birds or the Houbara Bustard, which is also to 

 be frequently met with in Fuerteventura ; he told us, 

 through the medium of Lorenzo, who generally consti- 

 tuted himself spokesman, that only a few days previously 

 he had seen two Engafias eggs, but that he had put 

 his foot on them and broken them. Lorenzo was very 

 much enraged at this and took the unfortunate boy 

 by the shoulders, shaking him and calling him Malo 

 muchacho, interspersed with sundry mutterings which 

 were unintelligible to me. The breaking of every egg 

 they find is a habit of the boys both in Tenerife and 

 Fuerteventura ; they couldn't tell you why, but they 

 always do it. You may offer them a reward consequent 

 on the eggs being intact on the following day, but it is 

 rarely you find them so. 



About the middle of the day one of the boys shouted 

 to us, telling us that he had found a Houbara Bustard's 

 nest on the summit of a low hill. There was only one 

 egg, which was of an olive-green colour, marked with 

 rather faint blotches of greenish -brown ; this had been 

 laid on the bare ground, the earth having been hollowed 



