172 NATURAL HISTORY OF BIRDS. 



numerous peculiarities besides, which warrant us in regarding it as the type of a 

 separate family. 



The first feature to attract our attention in this singular bird, of which an excellent 

 illustration faces this page, is the enormous bill, broad and swollen, justifying the 

 expression of Prof. Parker that the JBalceniceps has " in its strange countenance an 

 artistic, if not a family likeness to the crocodile." Most interesting is the groove 

 along the culmen, and the hooked nail at the end, showing a near approach to similar 

 features in the umbrette. The tarsi are reticulate, the anterior toes are entirely 

 deprived of basal membranes, and the middle claw is not pectinate. In the pterylosis it 

 agrees with the herons in possessing powder-down tracts, of which, however, it 

 only has one pair. The skull has been considerably modified in consequence of 

 the exaggerated development of the bill. Otherwise the shoe-bill, in its skeleton, 

 shows many near affinities to the herons, but the sternal apparatus is rather stork -like, 

 with some very remarkable peculiarities of its own, as shown by the following, which 

 is selected from Prof. Parker's monograph : In Bal&niceps we encounter a host of 

 difficulties, both in the breast-bone and also in the furculum, although its general 

 shape and proportions agree well with that of the gigantic storks. The costal pro- 

 cesses are exactly like those of the adjutant, but the episternal process, which is dis- 

 tinct in the adjutant and long in the typical herons, is not differentiated in Balceni- 

 ceps. In parrots, woodpeckers, and horn-bills, that emargination is absent which 

 separates the episternum in most birds from the tip of the sternal keel. The same 

 thing occurs in the Balceniceps ; so that in this wader, as well as in those arboreal 

 birds, the keel of the sternum projects some distance in front of the coracoid grooves. 

 In most of the larger herons and in the storks, the end of the furculum has a gliding, 

 synovial joint with the tip of the keel of the breast-bone ; and this appears to be 

 persistent even in very old birds. The same thing occurs in gannets and in cormo- 

 rants. In several other birds the joint becomes obliterated in full age ; for instance, 

 in the cranes. But in the young JBalceniceps not only is all trace of a joint gone, but 

 the amount of ossification and the actual strength of this part are very strong ; 

 indeed, it is a seven-times-strengthened anchylosis. In some of the storks there are 

 very small rudiments of a pair of sub-mesial emarginations besides the large lateral 

 ones. In JZalceniceps, however, these notches are nearly half an inch broad, while the 

 outer notch is nine lines across. 



In 1860 Mr. J. Petherick, then English consul for the Sudan, brought to the Zoo- 

 logical Gardens in London two shoe-bills, at which occasion he gave the following 

 account of these birds, which at the time caused an intense interest in ornithological 

 circles : 



"The birds here are seen in clusters of from a pair to perhaps one hundred 

 together, mostly in the water, and, when disturbed, will fly low over its surface, and 

 settle at no great distance ; but if frightened or fired at, they rise in a flock high in the 

 air, and, after hovering and wheeling around, will settle on the highest trees, and as 

 long as their disturbers are near will not return to the water. Their food principally 

 is fish and water-snakes, which they have been seen by my men to catch and devour. 

 They will also feed on the intestines of dead animals, the carcases of which they easily 

 rip open with the strong hook of the upper bill. The breeding-time of the Balaz- 

 niceps is the rainy season, during the months of July and August, and the spot chosen 

 is in the reeds or high grass immediately on the water's edge, or on some small ele- 

 vated and dry spots entirely surrounded by water." He continues to tell how he 



