IBIS 455 
mediate districts, in a way not unknown elsewhere among migratory 
birds. In Lower Egypt it bears the name of Abou-mengel, or 
“Father of the Sickle,’ from the form of its bill, but it does not 
stay long in that country, disappearing by all accounts when the 
inundation has subsided. Hence doubtless arises the fact that 
almost all European travellers have failed to meet with it there,’ 
since their acquaintance with the birds of Egypt is mostly limited 
to those which frequent the country in winter, and consequently 
writers have not been wanting to deny to this species a place in its 
modern fauna (cf. Shelley, B. ELyypt, p. 261); but, in December 
1864, Von Heuglin (Journ. fiir Orn. 1865, p. 100) saw a young 
bird which had been shot at Gata in the delta, and subsequently 
Mr. E. C. Taylor (Ibis, 1878, p. 372) saw an adult which had been 
killed near Lake Menzaleh in November 1877. ‘The old story 
told to Herodotus of its destroying snakes is, according to Savigny, 
devoid of truth,? and that naturalist found, from dissection of the 
examples he obtained, that its usual food was fresh-water univalve 
mollusks; but Cuvier asserts that he discovered partly-digested 
remains of a snake in the stomach of a mummied Ibis which he 
examined, and there can be little doubt that insects and crustaceans, 
to say nothing of other living creatures, enter on occasion into the 
bird’s diet. 
The Ibis is somewhat larger than a Curlew, Numenius arquata, 
which bird it in appearance calls to mind, with a much stouter bill 
and stouter legs. The head and greater part of the neck are bare 
and black. The plumage is white, except the primaries which are 
black, and a black plume, richly glossed with bronze, blue and 
green, which curves gracefully over the hind-quarters. The bill 
and feet are also black. The young lack the ornamental plume, 
and in them the head and neck are clothed with short black 
feathers, while the bill is yellow. The nest is placed in bushes or 
high trees, the bird generally building in companies, and in the 
middle of August Von Heuglin (Orn. Nordost-Afrika’s, p. 1138) 
found that it had from two to four young or much incubated eggs. 
These are of a dingy white, splashed, spotted, and speckled with 
reddish-brown. 
Congeneric with the typical Ibis are two or three other species, 
1 Mr. E. C. Taylor remarked some years ago (Jbis, 1859, p. 51), that the 
Buff-backed Heron, Ardea bubuleus, was made by the tourists’ dragomans to do 
duty for the ‘‘ Sacred Ibis,” and this seems to be no novel practice, since by it, 
or something like it, Hasselqvist was misled, and through him Linnzus. 
2 The suggestion that the ‘flying serpents” whose remains were seen by 
Herodotus (Hut. 75) were locusts is perhaps plausible, but there is considerable 
difficulty in accepting it. 
3 The Ibis has more than once nested in the gardens of the Zoological Society, 
and even reared its young there (Ibis, 1878, pp. 449-451, pl. xii.) 
