CHAPTER XVII. 

 THE GAME BIRDS OF CAPE COLONY. 



M 



OST people have some vague and shadowy 

 idea of the wealth of South Africa in the 

 matter of the larger game ; few in this 

 country probably have any conception of the vast store 

 of the smaller mammals and birds to be found, even 

 at the present day, within the comparatively accessible 

 regions of the Cape Colony. Since the days of 

 Cornwallis Harris and Gordon Cumming, " big 

 game " has been a sort of traditional attribute of 

 the country ; but the big game are year by year 

 retreating to the dim and distant regions of the far 

 interior with much more rapidity, probably, than the 

 general public are at all aware of. I have endeavoured 

 to point out in previous chapters that many of the 

 smaller antelopes, in which the Cape Colony yet 

 abounds, are but little known to Europeans, and, for 

 various reasons, unrepresented in any of the zoological 

 collections in England or the Continent. I fear 

 that the game birds, with which the Old Colony is 

 so plentifully endowed, languish in a still more 

 melancholy obscurity. And yet this group of birds, 

 numbering at the lowest computation some nineteen 

 or twenty different species not counting wild duck, 

 wild geese, rails, and others can boast of some of 

 the noblest and most striking looking feathered fowl 

 to be found in any country of the world. Within the 

 broad territories bounded by the Orange and the Kei 



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