ZOOLOGY 403 



-three inches, so that the bird when flying appears to be almost without 

 a tail. The bateleur eagle is solely confined in its distribution to those 

 parts of the African continent which lie within the tropics and outside 

 the forest regions of West Africa. This eagle was probably first made 

 known to science from Senegal, and its name—" bateleur "—appears to 

 be a Fi-ench version of a Senegalese name. In the classification of the 

 eagles it is usually placed with the sea eagle group, the members of which 

 often exhibit bright contrasts of colour in their plumage. The bateleur 

 eagle lives chiefly on small mammals. It hangs almost motionless in the 

 air with widely expanded wings, or swoops in a series of circles, its large 

 eyes being fixed intently on the earth beneath in search of some creature 

 on which it may make its fatal descent. When it strikes its prey on the 

 ground it almost invariably opens the wings and brings them round 

 in a semi-circle, ready to shield its body from a counter-attack or possibh- 

 to protect its prey from any counter-swoop by a hungry rival. This eagle 

 is never met with in thickly wooded country, but is usually characteristic 

 of the drier portions of Africa, or at any rate of the grass-lands. 



The sacred and iridescent ibises are met with very frequently — the 

 former wherever it is open and marshy, and the latter rather more 

 amongst forested regions. Beautiful white egrets of several species and 

 different sizes rejoice the eye with their graceful forms and effects of 

 absolute snow-white. The smaller kinds follow the cattle about to relieve 

 them of insects. The larger birds fish in all the creeks and pools. 

 When I was residing at Entebbe large flocks of the smaller egrets would 

 ai)pear from time to time on my lawn, hunt busily there for grasshoppers, 

 and then disappear, being so conscious of their usefulness as to betray 

 little or no fear of man. 



Amongst storks I have already alluded to the frequently-met-with 

 marabou. The beautiful saddle-billed stork is fortunately still common, 

 and I ventured to place it on the protected list in order to preserve it 

 from needless attack. This, perhaps, is the handsomest of all the storks. 

 Its long beak is crimson-scarlet with a black band, and witli a saddle or 

 excrescence of bright yellow. The neck is glossy bluish-black, the wings 

 and tail are iridescent copper, bottle-green and blue-black, the rest of the 

 plumage being snowy white. Another handsome stork is the tantalus, with 

 a long curved beak of lemon-yellow touched with crimson, black wings, 

 and white body, and the shoulder feathers tijjped with the most exquisite 

 rose-pink. 



The whale-headed stork is perhaps the most remarkable bird in Uganda. 

 In its range and distribution it seems to be very nearly limited to the 

 area of the Uganda Protectorate, though it extends north-west down the 

 Nile as far as the vicinitv of Fashoda, and into the Eahr-al-Ghazal 



