HOUW HOEK AND STANFORD 1 03 



on a rock which was marked in a very distinctive way 

 with a sort of red moss, or lichen, these creatures pro- 

 duced a precisely similar pattern on their bodies. They 

 had a habit of raising and depressing the head and 

 shoulders by means of their front legs, and would some- 

 times do this several times, looking round at the intruder 

 the while, and if alarmed scuttling into a crevice in the 

 rocks. My friend obtained a much better photograph 

 of it than I did, in which the peculiar pattern before 

 alluded to is plainly visible. The Kaffirs call these 

 lizard-like reptiles by the name of Klipsemanner. They 

 are really a species of the genus Agama^ of which there 

 are several different kinds in Africa. 



I mentioned our having seen the Red Bishop-bird 

 when we were down at the Bot River Vley ; there is also 

 the Yellow Bishop-bird, or to use the name by which 

 it generally goes in these parts, the Kaffir Fink. This 

 bird was a very familiar object in nearly every part of 

 the Colony that we passed through, the male bird as 

 it scurried past in a straight line of flight, showing to 

 advantage the intense black and brilliant yellow of its 

 plumage. The females of both the Red and Yellow 

 Bishop-birds are of a brown colour striped with darker 

 markings, and not at all like the males ; the bird shown 

 in the illustration is a female of the latter species. 

 These birds would sometimes weave their nests into the 

 foliage of a shrub, and at others place them there ; 

 when woven into the shrubs they were generally of a 

 substantial nature with a rather large aperture at one 

 side. We noticed that they continued adding to their 

 nests even after the young were hatched. With birds 

 so much akin to each other as these two kinds of Bishop- 



