702 PEEP PELICAN 



PEEP, used chiefly in North America for any of the STINTS or 

 small SANDPIPERS from their cry. 



PEGGY, a common name of the WHITETHROAT. 



PELAEGOMOEPH^E, Prof. Huxley's name (Proc. Zool Soc. 

 1867, p. 461) for that group of DESMOGNATH^E which contains the 

 Storks, Herons, Ibises and Spoonbills. 



PELICAN (Fr. Pelican, Lat. Pelecanus or Pelicanus), a large fish- 

 eating water-fowl, remarkable for the enormous pouch formed by 

 the extensible skin between the lower jaws of its long, and ap- 

 parently formidable but in reality very weak, bill. The ordinary 

 Pelican, the Onocrotalus of the ancients, to whom it was well known, 

 and the Pelecanus onocrotalus of ornithologists, is a very abundant 

 bird in some districts of South-eastern Europe, South-western Asia, 

 and North-eastern Africa, occasionally straying, it is believed, into 

 the northern parts of Germany and France ; but the possibility of 

 such wanderers having escaped from confinement is always to be 

 regarded, 1 since few zoological gardens are without examples which 

 are often in the finest condition. Its usual haunts are the shallow 

 margins of the larger lakes and rivers, where fishes are plentiful, 

 since it requires for its sustenance a vast supply of them, pursuing 

 them under water, and rising to the surface to swallow those that 

 it has captured in its capacious pouch. The nest is formed among 

 the reeds that border the waters it frequents, placed on the ground 

 and lined with grass. Therein two eggs, with white, chalky shells, 

 are commonly laid. The young during the first twelvemonth are 

 of a greyish-brown, but this dress is slowly superseded by the growth 

 of white feathers, until when mature almost the whole plumage, 

 except the black primaries, is white, deeply suffused by a rich blush 

 of rose or salmon-colour, passing into yellow on the crest and lower 

 part of the neck in front. A second and somewhat larger species, 

 P. crispus, also inhabits Europe, but in smaller numbers. This, 

 when adult, is readily distinguishable from the ordinary bird by the 

 absence of the blush from its plumage, and by the curled feathers 

 that project from and overhang each side of the head, which with 

 some differences of coloration of the bill, pouch, bare skin round the 

 eyes, and irides give it a wholly distinct expression. 2 Two speci- 

 mens of the humerus of as many Pelicans have been found in the 

 English fens (Ibis, 1868, p. 363; Proc. Zool Soc. 1871, p. 702), 



1 This caution was not neglected by the prudent, even so long ago as Sir 

 Thomas Browne's days ; for he, recording the occurrence of a Pelican in Norfolk, 

 was careful to notice that about the same time one of the Pelicans kept by the 

 king (Charles II.) in St. James's Park had been lost. Charleton says (OTiomast. 

 p. 94) they came from the Czar. 



2 It is also said to have twenty-two rectrices, while the ordinary species has 

 only eighteen. 



