CRANES LIMPKINS. 



275 



as there is a large Indian bustard (Eupodotis edwardsi), which has its nearest 

 ally (E. australis) in Australia. As a rule, however, the cranes are Northern 

 birds, five species nesting in the Palrearctic region. In many of them the 

 trachea is convoluted, and enters a cavity in the fore-part of the sternum. 



The common crane (Grus grus) is now only an occasional visitor to Great 

 Britain, but there is no doubt that it formerly bred in England, before the 

 drainage of the meres deprived it of its favourite 

 breeding haunts, and the discovery of fossil re- 

 mains in Ireland shows that it was once still more 

 widely distributed in the British Islands. The 

 nesting-home of the crane is at present in the 

 forest morasses of North and Central Europe, 

 and in the marshes of Southern Spain. It is 

 a summer visitor to Europe, and sometimes 

 large numbers of cranes are observed on migra- 

 tion, flying in a V or Y formation, and trumpet- 

 ing loudly. Colonel Irby records that he must 

 on one occasion have seen, at least, four thousand 

 pass overhead near Gibraltar. The food of the 

 crane consists of corn and seeds of all kinds, as 

 well as lizards and frogs, and in India the cranes, 

 which arrive from the North to winter, do great 

 damage to the water-melons. The eggs are two 

 in number, brown, with a few spots or smudges of 

 darker brown and underlying spots of grey. The 

 nest is often a large structure, as much as five 

 feet across, and is built among sedge and rushes, 

 sufficiently short to enable the bird when standing up to catch sight of any 

 intruder. 



The limpkins are long-billed birds, having the appearance of large rails, of 

 a brown colour, spotted with white. In osteological characters, however, they 

 most resemble the cranes, and, like the latter birds, they 

 have no notches in the hinder margin of the sternum. The The Limpkins. 

 wings are rounded, and the secondaries are as long as the Sub-order 

 primaries, the first of the latter quills being sickle-shaped, Arami. 

 narrowed and incised for the basal two-thirds, with the tip 

 spatulate. Two species of the genus Aramus are known, the Florida limpkin 

 (A. picbus) extending from Southern Florida to Central America and the 

 West Indian Islands, while the South American limpkin (A, scolopaceiis) is 

 found from Paraguay to Guiana and Venezuela. Mr. W. H. Hudson, the 

 chronicler of bird-life in Argentina, says that the limpkins, or caraus, as 

 they are called in that country, are more nocturnal than the rails, and take 

 wing more readily, as they have greater powers of flight. In their gestures 

 and motions on the ground they resemble rails, but differ strikingly from all 

 Ilalline birds in their habit of flying, when disturbed, to some open place, 

 where they walk about conspicuously, watching the intruder. "By day," 

 writes Mr. Hudson, " the carau is a dull bird, concealing itself in dense reed- 

 beds in streams and marshes. When driven up he rises laboriously, the legs 

 dangling down, and mounts vertically to a considerable height. He flies 

 high, the wings curved upwards and violently flapped at irregular intervals ; 

 descending, he drops suddenly to the earth, the wings motionless, pointed 

 up, and the body swaying from side to side, so that the 'bird presents the 



Fig. 36. THE COMMON CRANE 

 (Grus grus). 



