Excursion to the Victoria Falls. 107 



Although since this discovery a number of travellers have 

 visited the Falls, such as Chapman, Baines, Baldwin, Selous, 

 Holub, Oates, and Mohr, very few have done any zoological 

 Collecting in the neighbourhood. Indeed, with the excep- 

 tion of Dr. Bradshaw, who resided in the neighbourhood 

 for several years, no one seems to have collected system- 

 atically on the Upper Zambesi at all *. The collections 

 of Sir John Kirk, who accompanied Livingstone on his 

 second journey in 1862-3, and of Captain Alexander, 

 who ascended the river from its mouth as far as its 

 continence with the Kafuc, were made chiefly along the 

 lower reaches. Unfortunately Dr. Bradshaw's collection 

 was dispersed at the time of his death, and no complete 

 account of it has ever been published. My own excursion 

 was far too short to obtain anything but a general view of 

 the bird-life of the Upper Zambesi, but I think that a few 

 notes of what I saw and a list of the birds that I brought 

 back may be of interest to my fellow-members of the 

 B. O. Tj/ 



Accompanied by my wife and the taxidermist of the S. A. 

 Museum, I left Cape Town on Wednesday morning the 31st 

 of August, and reached Bulawayo in the early morning of 

 the 3rd of September. Leaving again in the evening, we 

 arrived in time for dinner at the Victoria Falls Hotel on the 

 4th of September, the whole journey occupying five and a 

 half days. Little bird-life was seen on the way up ; but a 

 pair of Lanners (Falco biarmicus) was observed perched on 

 the telegraph-wire near Touws River on the first day. Near 

 Gaberones, in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, where the 

 country becomes more interesting and picturesque, with 

 kopjes and forest of a thin and shadeless character, several 

 birds could be distinguished from the carriage-windows. 

 Perched on the branches of the thorns {Acacia), which were 

 just beginning to get green, were seen examples of two 

 species of Rollers (Coracias caudatus and C. mossambicus) , 

 while small parties of Yellow-billed Hornbills (Lop/wceros 



* "Victoria Falls" is one of the localities mentioned in Dr. Sharpe's 

 Appendix to Oates 's ' Matabeleland,' but very few specimens seem to 

 have been obtained there. 



