The Whale-headed Stork 



39 



bill has been seen in Europe. The range of this peculiar 

 bird must be very limited, as it has not been procured in 

 any other of the marshy districts of Africa. 



The first mention of this extraordinary bird occurs in 

 the writing of the German traveller Werner, who visited 

 the White Nile districts in 1840-41, when he states that 

 he saw a bird on the so-called No Lake, which was " as 

 large as a young camel, with a bill like a Pelican, but with- 

 out the pouch." Eight years later an Italian slave-dealer, 

 named Nicola Ulivi, brought two skins to Khartoum, which 

 were ultimately bought by an English traveller, Mr. Mans- 

 field Parkyns, in Cairo, and sent to London, where they 

 were described and figured by Gould in 1851. The English 

 Consul Petherick had several living examples at Khartoum, 

 and in 1860 he managed to bring two of them alive to 

 England, where they lived for some time in the Zoological 

 Gardens. He observes " The Balceniceps, though found 

 only in or near water, is but rarely seen on the banks of 

 the Nile, and then only during a short period of the year, 

 when the interior is dried up, in the summer, during the 

 short hot season preceding the rains. It prefers the natural 

 banks and morasses of the interior, where the shallowness 

 of the water, distributed over a large surface, affords it 

 greater facilities for wading than the banks of the Nile. 

 These frequently shelve off into deep water more or less 

 abruptly, and thus furnish but comparatively few spots 

 favourable to the support and habits of the bird. 



" For this reason, at about 100 miles west of the Nile, in 

 from 5 to 8 N. Lat, at Gaba Shambyl, where I have a 

 station of elephant-hunters, these interesting birds exist in 

 greater numbers than on the Nile or the comparatively 

 deeper waters of the Bahr-el-Gazal. At Gaba Shambyl, 

 striking off directly west from the Nile, the country for the 

 first thirty miles rises wfth an almost imperceptible slope, 

 when it again decreases in elevation for a distance of from 



