34 NATURE AND SPORT IN SOUTH AFRICA 



fliglit-sliooting as they approacli the water. Their 

 flight is marvellously rapid; they swerve and turn 

 with incredible rapidity, and, in the swiftly-fading 

 dusk of African evening, they require very straight 

 powder to bring them down. Of course, when 

 actually collected at the water, a man may make a 

 great bag by shooting into the brown of these strong 

 battalions — forty or fifty are sometimes secured 

 with a right and left; but this, after all, is but a 

 miserable form of butchery, which, as the birds are 

 comparatively worthless for food purposes, cannot 

 be too strongly reprobated. In the Kalahari, that 

 vast tract of country still much of it unknown, 

 which, although devoid of surface water, is by no 

 means the desert it has been so long called, these 

 tw.o kinds of sand-grouse are recruited by two other 

 remarkable species, the variegated and the yellow- 

 throated sand-grouse. All four are to be found 

 also in the more desert portions of Bechuanaland, 

 Matabeleland, Mashonaland, and the Transvaal. In 

 Damaraland and Ovampoland the Namaqua, double- 

 banded, and variegated sand-grouse are well known, 

 but the yellow-throated species seems never to have 

 been discovered, even by so keen-eyed an ornitho- 

 logist as the late C. J. Andersson. Asa general rule the 

 variegated and yellow-throated sand-grouse are to be 

 more plentifully found in the dry wastes of the North 

 Kalahari than any other region. The yellow-throated 



