APPENDIX C 487 



saw two and sometimes three and four standing so close together that it was 

 surprising that the spread of the shot did not kill more than one. One evening 

 Dr. Mearns and I started out about nine o'clock and returned about midnight. 

 Most of the hunting was done on an elevated brushy plateau within short dis- 

 tance of a native village where the occupants were singing, dancing, and play- 

 ing their crude stringed instruments. We ran into a bunch of five of these 

 foxes and got four of them, none of which was the young of the year. After 

 shooting one, we would search about in the dark until the light picked up an- 

 other pair of eyes, and in this way we kept circling about close to the village. 

 One fox was killed within two hundred yards of the railroad station, and at 

 dusk one evening I saw a fox emerge from a burrow close to a group of natives 

 and scamper across the flat. The stomachs of several were examined and found 

 to contain about a quart of termites and other insects. 



Giant Shrew (Crocidura nyansa). Giant shrews were common at Lake Naivasha, 

 where most of them were caught in the thick reeds and rank grass bordering 

 the lake. One was taken at Nyeri and another on Mount Kenia at an altitude 

 of 10,700 feet. They seemed to be as much diurnal as nocturnal and were 

 captured in traps baited with rolled oats, dried apple, and raw meat. They 

 inhabited the dense parts of the thickets where the foliage had to be parted 

 and a clearing made for the traps. These localities were the home of a large 

 rat, and many of the rats captured were decapitated or partly eaten by 

 animals that probably were giant shrews. A shrew captured alive was very 

 ferocious and would seize upon anything that came within its reach. When 

 fully excited and lifted into the air by its tail, it would emit a loud shrill chirp- 

 ing note. 



Short-Tailed Shrew (Surdisorex norai). Collected between altitudes of 10,000 and 

 12,100 feet on Mount Kenia. With the exception of those collected at 10,000 

 feet, where they were trapped in open grassy and brushy parks in the bamboo, 

 most of them were taken in runways of Otomys, and all of those taken at 12,100 

 were caught in such runways in tall marsh grass. 



Elephant Shrew (Elephantttlus pulcher). Both diurnal and nocturnal. While riding 

 over the country I frequently saw them darting through the runways from 

 one thicket to another. Nearly every clump of bushes and patch of rank 

 vegetation in the Sotik and Naivasha districts was traversed with well-worn 

 trails used by different species of Mus and shrews. The elephant shrews were 

 most common on the dry flats where clumps of fibre plants grew, and their trails 

 usually led into some thorny thicket and finally entered the ground. 



Yellow-Winged Tree Bat (Lavia jrons). These large semi-diurnal bats lived 

 in the thorn-tree groves and thick bush along the Athi, South Guaso Nyero, 

 and Nile rivers where we found them more or less common, and at the latter 

 place abundant. At the first two named places they were almost always found 

 in pairs hanging from the thorn-trees by their feet, their wings folded before 

 their faces. When disturbed they fly a short distance and alight, but when we 

 returned to the spot a few minutes later they would often be found in the same 

 tree from which they had been started. On the Nile at Rhino Camp, and in 

 suitable places all along the trail between Kampala and Butiaba, it was not 

 unusual to find three and four in a single thorn-tree. On dark days, and once 

 in the bright sunlight, I saw these bats flying about and feeding. At evening 

 they always appeared an hour or so before the sun went down. Their method 





