42 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



can afford them, and their keenest desire is for its 

 repetition. It is to taste this feeling that thousands 

 of persons, some with the pretext of bird-study or 

 photography, annually visit these teeming stations 

 within the kingdom, whilst others who are able to go 

 further afield seek out the great bird haunts in other 

 countries. 



But the feeling is incommunicable, and is a treasured 

 memory and secret, a joy for ever in the heart. Those 

 who do not know it — who have had no opportunity 

 of finding out for themselves — cannot imagine it. 

 To these it may seem strange that any man should 

 turn his back on the comforts of civilised life to spend 

 long laborious days in dreary desert regions, scorched 

 by tropical suns, devoured by mosquitoes, wading in 

 pestilential swamps ; not for sport, the fascination of 

 which is universally known, but just for the sake of 

 seeing a populous rookery or congregation of big birds 

 in their breeding haunts. Those who do know will 

 bear these discomforts, and even greater ones, for the 

 sake of that glorious gladness which the sight will 

 produce in them. This rather than the notes and 

 bundle of photographs which they bring back is what 

 they have gone out to seek. 



