i 9 2 EASTERN ETHIOPIA xv 



in a museum, or alive in a menagerie-paddock, might 

 imagine them easy to shoot. All wild animals are 

 watchful, quick to take alarm, and antelopes especially 

 can move from place to place with great rapidity. 

 When feeding on grassy plains they are extremely 

 difficult to approach nearer than 200 or 250 

 yards. Alert animals of this kind, surrounded 

 as they are by predacious beasts and hunters, soon 

 appreciate danger. Every event around them they 

 appreciate with quickness : even the noises and 

 movement of birds are to them warning sounds and 

 notes of alarm. We realised this when hunting, for 

 whilst carefully stalking antelopes and slowly creeping 

 through the grass, taking advantage of any slight rise 

 or hillock, a hare would get up and run away, making, 

 every few yards, curious bounds or jumps, or a noisy 

 bird, especially the black- winged plover, would fly and 

 shriek ; then every head in the herd is raised, and the 

 animals would be off. Schillings, in reference to the 

 harsh cries of black-winged plovers alarming game, 

 calls them " the police of the wilderness in feathered 

 uniforms." 



On one occasion, when carefully creeping into a 

 thicket to get a careful and favourable shot at a herd 

 of zebra, I heard a tremendous cackling and saw around 

 me about fifty guinea-fowl, flapping their wings and 

 screaming with their tails up, like turkeys in a farm- 

 yard. It amused me very much, but alarmed the 

 zebras and they were soon out of sight over a ridge. 



The oxpecker, or "tick-bird," is useful to the rhinoceros 

 and the buffalo. All the mammals are infested with 

 ticks, which crowd on the bare spaces of their bodies. It 

 is not uncommon to see ten or twenty of these birds on 

 a rhinoceros, kudu, or buffalo, busily engaged in pick- 

 ing parasites : on the approach of the hunter they 

 quickly give a note of alarm. The oxpecker is closely 

 allied to the starling, which performs the same useful 

 purpose for cattle and sheep in the British Isles. 



