148 Mr. C. F. Tyrwhitt Drake on the Birds of Morocco. 



Arabs on account of some heavy and destructive floods which 

 occurred a year or two ago ; and in consequence the lake is very 

 shallow, with large tracts of mud flats and swamp surrounding 

 it. These are the resort of countless Snipe, Dotterel et hoc 

 genus omne, while the shallow waters form feeding-grounds for 

 large flocks of waders and Flamingos, which last at rest appear 

 almost pure white, but at the sound of a gun rise in clouds, 

 showing the black and delicate rose-colour of their wings; and 

 this with the sunlight gleaming: upon it has a wonderfully 

 pretty effect. 



Near this place I came upon a colony of Asio capensis, which 

 had taken up their abode in a patch of mallows, about half an 

 acre in extent, by the side of a stream. There were some twenty 

 or thirty of them sitting solemnly blinking at me till I was' 

 within a few yards of them, when they lazily flapped away. 

 This is the only time I ever saw them in the open country ; in 

 the wooded hills to the east they are common *. 



A short distance further west, about halfway between Laraiche 

 and Rabat is the Lake of Ras-dowra or Behara, which, with the 

 marshes, or, rather, series of small lakes and pools, at its south- 

 western extremity, cannot be less than thirty or five-and- thirty 

 miles long, while in parts it is five or six wide ; it is, however, 

 so intersected with promontories and studded with islands that 

 it is difficult to realize its extent. 



The Arabs on the shores of this lake, which is only separated 

 from the sea by a low range of hills, are mostly fishermen : 

 they use canoes made of bundles of bullrushes tied together to 

 form the bottom ; gunwales are made in the same way ; one end 

 is then cut square, and the other is gradually fined off into a 

 point which rises some two feet above the water. These canoes 

 are punted along with a pole shod with horn, as the water is 

 generally not more than from four to six feet in depth, but so 

 choked with weeds that a paddle would be useless : a net would 

 be equally so; the fishing-implements, then, in use are cane 



* [Other observers, we believe, have noticed that this species generally 

 affects the open country. The late M. Favier informed Mr. Giu-ney that 

 near Tangier it bred with A. brachyotus, and that the hybrids had a 

 narrow yellow ring round the iris. — Ed.] 



