90



Mr. J. b . Bonhote,



built right in the water it would never harden and consequently

would gradually be worn away by the action of the water ; on

the other hand, if it were built on dry land, the mud is too hard

to be scooped up, and to transport fifty or sixty pounds of mud

from the water to the shore would be an undertaking beyond the

power of any bird. Consequently I believe that, in the Bahamas

at any rate, the birds wait for the first rains in May to soften the

mud some feet or even yards away from the water. They have

then no difficulty in getting plenty of soft mud and, being

beyond the reach of all except the highest tides, the sun is able

to bake the nests hard as they are being built. I have come to

these conclusions, as ail the colonies I visited with one exception

were situated on mud so hard that it would have been impossible

for the birds to gather it up as had obviously been done when

the nests were built. At the colony where nesting operations

had begun, the nests were placed as near as possible to the dry

land in about an inch of water, but there were, at the most, only

forty nests, whereas the number of birds I had seen there only a

fortnight before must have been well over a thousand, so that

the majority of the birds were either not breeding or had

removed to a more suitable locality.


I fear I have transgressed at some length on these birds,

but so much still remains to be found out about their habits that

any information, however scanty, forms another stepping-stone

by which we may eventually hope to thoroughly understand

them, and the more one knows of these birds the more

one is able to realize how perfectly their curious modi¬

fications are adapted for the life they lead. One more

point before I leave them ; these immense flocks are all

supposed to be under a leadership, fh'ing and feeding in regular

order, and always leaving one of their number on the watch.

This rule did not appear to us to be by any means an invariable

one; but some vague idea of their beauty and formations may, I

think, be gained from the following quotation from my notebook,

written a few hours after seeing them.


I had been watching at a distance an immense flock of 700

or 1,000 feeding, preening, and wading about, and, desiring a



