4 CHAEADEIID.^. 



think I should have done so, had it not been that they wanted almost ceaseless 

 attention, and I could not spare the time. They ate flies, small snails, and 

 cochineal-bugs, also small pieces of lizard. They ran at a great rate, holding 

 themselves very upright, vnth their wings stretched out wide. I, greatly 

 against my inclination, converted them into skins. I think they were about five 

 days' old 



"The eggs of both Courser and Bustard vary greatly in size and colour; the 

 Courser seems never to lay more than two." 



In his " List of Birds observed in the Canary Islands," Mr. Meade-Waldo 

 further writes*: — "The Courser is common and resident in Fuerteventura and 

 Lanzarote, and occasionally met with in Gran Canaria. About 1000 eggs of this 

 poor bird were taken in the spring of 1891 in the island of Fuerteventura and 

 sent to Europe, by far the greater number to England. Of course nearly double 

 the number were destroyed, as the eggs that were incubated would all be thrown 

 aAvay. It is sincerely to be hoped that the market has now been glutted, and 

 that the eggs will have so fallen in value as not to be worth taking again. At 

 the price of two and even three pesetas apiece, that was offered for them out 

 there, nearly the whole population (including, I have been assured, some of the 

 priests) turned out egging, and probably pretty well cleared the whole of the nests 

 for that season. It is possible there may have been an extra number of birds in 

 1891, but in the three breeding-seasons that I spent in the island, though there 

 were numbers of birds, not nearly aU were breeding. Possibly after the very wet 

 winter of 1890-91 there was a greater abundance of food, and so a larger number 

 of pairs nested. It is not always the birds of the previous year that do not breed, 

 as a cock of a breeding-pair that was shot was in half-immature plumage." 



* ' Ibis,' 1893, p. 203. 



