GOLD COAST 213 
One of the greatest problems in the Northern Territory was 
getting a daily supply of flesh for my hawks, owls, and king- 
fishers. In Prang the natives killed a beast only once or twice a 
week for local consumption, and in that climate meat would not 
remain fresh for twenty-four hours, so in between times I had to 
purchase the skinny native fowls. It took several of these bony 
creatures to satisfy our carnivorous birds for one day, and as often 
as not even fowls were not procurable. On many occasions my 
houseboy spent hours cycling round to native villages trying to 
purchase domestic pigeons for bird food. When his efforts were 
unsuccessful I had to get busy trying to catch common birds with 
my nets. Even the feeding of our insectivorous birds was a bit of 
a worry for, although we had plenty of dried flies, ants’ eggs, and 
biscuit meal, it was very difficult to get a constant supply of eggs, 
the latter when hard-boiled being, of course, a very necessary in- 
gredient. As there were no Europeans living in the district there 
was no demand for new-laid eggs, and those that were brought to 
the local market were usually from outlying villages where they 
might have been accumulating for any period up to a month be- 
fore being deemed sufficient to merit the long journey to market to 
sell them. On an average nine eggs out of every dozen were rotten 
and this even applied to the eggs presented to us by the local Chief. 
For our fruit-eating birds, bananas had to be brought from the 
forest zone about a hundred miles away. In spite of these and 
many other difficulties we got together a fine collection, including 
tinker-birds, barbets, robin-chats, Golden Orioles, sunbirds, star- 
lings, flycatchers, Oriole Babblers, kingfishers, eagle-owls, owlets, 
hawks, touracos, etc., and a number of small mammals. 
In the Northern Territory I had to do all my own trapping and 
making of traveling cages, while Delys did most of the feeding, 
and as the collection grew and grew our duties became increas- 
ingly strenuous. Weakened by a recurrence of a very bad dose of 
malaria that I had at Mampong in the forest zone, I felt that I had 
reached the limit of endurance when the time came for us to 
leave on the 120-mile journey to Kumasi. My niece, who had with- 
stood the effects of roughing it in a hot, humid, enervating climate 
with indifferent food and too much hard work, had the misfor- 
tune to develop an attack of malaria on the day that we were leav- 
