SUN-BITTERNS. 115 



long fliglits that the great bustard does, and never fluttering and skylarking in the air 

 as do the little ones, (lenerally, liowever, if tlie time be between ten and four, 

 and tlie day bright and wariii, as your spiral diminishes, the birds disapjiear suddenly. 

 They have squatted. Still you go on round and round, closing in, in each la|i, and 

 straining your eyes, usually in vain, to discover their whereabouts; suddenly, perhaj)s 

 from under the very feet of the camel, up flutters one of the birds, and, after a few 

 strides, rises, to fall dead a few yards further on, as they are easy to hit and easy to 

 kill. At the first shot all the houbara that are at all close usually rise ; but after 

 shooting a brace right and left, and having them picked u[) and slung, I have known a 

 third to blunder up from within a few yards. The way they will squat at times on an 

 .absolutely bare patch of sand is astonishing; their jilum.age harmonizes perfectly with 

 the soil, and you will have a bird rise suddenly, apjiarently out of the earth, within 

 five yards of you, from a spot -where there is not a blade of cover, and on which your 

 eyes have perhaps been fixed for some seconds. This is especially the case about 

 nrnl-day, when the sun is nearly vertical, and no shadow is thrown by the squatting 

 bird. Sometimes they try another plan : they get behind a single bush, and as you 

 circle round they do the same, always keeping the bush between themselves and 

 the s]iortsman. Here, unless the sun be quite vertical, their shadow projected on the 

 ground, ajiart from that of the bush, is sure, .it certain positions in the circle, to betray 

 them, and a shot through the bush brings them to b.ag." 



Like most of the erratic and isolated types of birds, the members constituting the 

 sui>er-faiuily EUKYPYGOIDE^^ liave been hunted round the ornithological system 

 from order to order, until, of kite, aniitomical researches have proved their mutual 

 relationsiiip and their remoteness from the forms with which they were inoi'c or less 

 commonly associated. As long as external characters alone were relied upon, the snn- 

 bitterns were considered rails by some, herons by others; while the curious J/vsites 

 w.as in turn one of the Passeres and a Gallinaceous bird. When the anatomists finally 

 decided their relationship and united with them the kagu, placing them all near the 

 Scolopacoid birds, more neiu'ly related into- se than to any other group, the verdict 

 had to be, and to a great extent has been, accepted by ornithologists at large. 



In the first place these birds are schizorhinal, and furthermore they lack occipital 

 foramina, basij)terygoid processes, and supraorbital impi-essions. To these important 

 characters of the skull, besides imjiortant ones from other parts of the body, — for 

 instance, the comparatively low insertion of the hind toe, — m.ay be .added the presence 

 of powder-do\vn patches among the feathers, a feature elsewhere only met with in the 

 herons, some parrots, goatsuckers, hawks, and a few othere. 



Three families compose the super-family, each of which are represented by a single 

 genus only, the genera again being nearly moiiotypical. The sun-bitterns are Soutii 

 American, li/ii/noc/ttlos is from tlie island of New Caledonia in the Polynesian Archi- 

 pelago, and Mesites is jieculiar to Madagascar. This distribution is considerably 

 disconnected, and seems at first glance to opjiose the view of the relationship of these 

 birds, but we need only refer to what has been said on a i)revious pa-'e, under 

 Jiostratula, in order to show that the ]ieculiar geographical distribution of these forms, 

 the antiquity of which cannot be doubted, is rather in favor of the present arrange- 

 ment, and they can only be regarded as the last survivors of a group wliich, simulta- 

 neously with others of similarly old-fashioned asi)ect, once poi>id.iled continents now 

 sunk, or inhabited by forms of a more modern tyj)e. Just how the ancestors of the 

 recent Limicolse, on one hand, and the cranes and rails, on the other, branched off 



